It may make sense to someone, but "ttaditiin" as a mnemonic for 磁 is not helpful to me.

If you want to make cryptic mnemonics, there is a little tick box so you don't have to share them with anyone else.

Rachael.

I find many mnemonics are not useful for me personally, or that I don't understand them, but I just ignore them and move on, or create my own.

I have also learned a great many new tricks and ideas from reading other people's mnemonics.

There are so many different learning styles and strategies out there I don't think we can judge what is helpful or useful from one persons reaction to it.

Yeah I was very shocked at first to see the mnemonics with long stories about dwarves and giants and so on but then later I learned that they had to do with a system for memorizing tones.

Hopefully the voting system will take care of this sort of problem... mnemonics that are highly specialized won't be popular enough to show up by default.

James

yep second that, i was put of by those elaborate mnenonics at first but i can understand the system behind it. My only question is, people that use this system for easy characters, doesn't it make your workload worse in stead of lightening it? I learning these mnemonics for easy characters like 土, what's up with that?

everybody has their own system, but......

anyway, like said, everybody has their own system so go for it, but it keeps amazing me how farfetched some people make mnemonics.

I guess the voting system and more people making mnemonics will sort out all of this...

cheers

I haven't come across any of ttaditiin's mnemonics (not as far as I know anyway) so I can't comment on them directly, however I do find it slightly annoying to come across a mnemonic with the character itself or the radicals shown. To me this defeats the whole idea of a mnemomic as a reminder to help me as opposed to simply looking up the character and copying it.

I can accept that one persons mnemonic is an others mystery, but it's easy enough to ignore anything you don't understand. It's a bit hard to ignore it, however, when the answer is written in plain view.

"ttaditiin" isn't a person, that is actually what was given as a mnemonic. I don't know who wrote it, and I wouldn't put the name up on forum if I did know!

Rachael.

"I don't know who wrote it,"

I wrote it. You're a jerk.









I actually didn't write it but I have similar far fetched mnemonics that I use.

So I guess of there is an annoying one you have to go and vote for a less annoying one? Perhaps if there is an annoying one we could make a menumonic with just one character like a full stop, and vote for it (:

@icecream Are you joking? I don't think anything Rachael wrote was anywhere near "jerk" level.

James

I think icecream is joking, yeah. Anyway, I'm bumping the default popularity threshold from 3 to 5, which should make the mnemonics that do get through by default those that have mass appeal. I don't think there will be a problem with having too many in the list to choose from, so cryptic mnemnics that are part of some system that someone could use are okay.

That said, I don't know what "ttaditiin" could refer to--some encoding for the strokes in the character? Or just a happy typo.

It does seem like people don't like to have the radicals included themselves in the mnemonics, so that's one helpful guideline to follow when making shared ones--leave them below in the decomps. (Easier to make, that way, too.)

I like radicals in mnemonics. I think we should not make any rules about mnemonics. The voting system should work fine on weeding out the bad ones.

@skritterjohan to me putting radicals in the characters is one step away from putting the character itself into the mnemonic, i.e. not at all useful. I am not going to tell you not to do it, but I personally will not use such mnemonics.

James

I think it is distracting to see other people´s mnemonics by default. I would have liked to have them as it is now for characters with less than five mnemonics - that the only thing that is shown by default is the number of available mnemonics. In this way the user can choose to show mnemonics only for the characters where it is needed for that person.

I guess that this has already been discussed here though. But am I the only one to find all this new information distracting? The result is that I try not to look at this information at all. In this way I miss even my own mnemonics...

I was looking for a way to disable the default mnemonics. It would be nice to have the option of accessing them, but I would rather keep the default screen as uncluttered as possible.

Wow, ever since turning the popularity threshold down, we've just gotten a lot more votes on mnemonics, so many more are showing up by default again. I think this means two things:
1) it's not going to be very possible to keep from distracting people by setting a vote threshold, and
2) showing some by default just prevents us from getting more useful votes.

So I'll try turning them all off by default.

I think it is obvious that unless you really found a good an clear mnemonic, you should not share it. Maybe the default should be to have an unticked box. I am sure that many people now share their cryptic stuff without really intending too.

I think mnemonics could be useful but sometimes they just aren't. We all know that for most characters there is just not a good explanation. BTW, that is what I don't like about this Heisig book (bought it, consider putting in on ebay). There are many characters that I remember by using this insight into the phonetic part. Examples? 搬 (move)= "it is something that you do with your hands and it sounds like 般 " or 蜘 (spider) = "it is a bug (虫) and pronounced like 知", etc That is how i learn and it seems to stick for most characters. I am against mnemonics that explain the whole character. I find they distract me from what I really should remember.

Marc