You don't need to know IPA off by heart for it to be useful, I certainly don't, I only recognise a few characters, or whatever they're called.

'Gee' isn't terrible in combination with the name itself ('ji') since it eliminates options.

Better IMO if you want to avoid IPA is giving an example like 'the first syllable in 'genius'', but that's not so good (or at least much harder) for polysyllabic names of things.