The word "捣烂" is formed by combining the character "捣", meaning to pound or smash, which is a phono-semantic character composed of the hand radical "扌" indicating manual action and the phonetic component "岛" for pronunciation, with the character "烂", meaning soft or mushy, which is similarly composed of the fire radical "火" suggesting a process like cooking and the phonetic component "兰" for sound; together they create a compound where "捣" denotes the action and "烂" denotes the result, thus meaning to pound something into a soft, mashed state.