You might remember the meaning of the character 老 with this easy mnemonic:
When I was ten (十) years old, I had one (一) job, which was to dig up dirty earth (土) and slash (丿) away vines so that we could find spoons (匕) and other old (老) artifacts in the ground.
Using mnemonics to remember the meaning of Chinese characters like has a huge impact on how long to learn Mandarin it takes.