Associating some characters with certain radicals, pictograms or phono-semantic compounds can help significantly. It does not necessarily matter whether this represents the "true" meaning or is simply used as a memorization technique.

Personally, I am intrigued by the wealth of explanations that are provided by the software Wenlin. However, I am sure there are other resources as well. Unfortunately, I do not own a Wenlin license for my current computer. Besides, having similar explanations right on Skritter would make things a lot easier and more efficient.

I think this feature would be a natural expansion of Skritter, it certainly is a great addition to its core functionality. It already works well on your demo for the character 男: "The character for "man" is made up of a "field" radical (田) and a "power" radical (力). That's right, men: get to work!"
That's exactly the kind of explanation I'd like to have for other characters as well.

If no easy way of licensing a set of explanations can be found, maybe something like a wiki feature could be considered (similar to Google SearchWiki). Users could add their ideas and knowledge on different characters.
I'd be happy to contribute!

Hi Muer,

I think that something like this (character decomposition) is on the planned list of features. I think it will just be taking the radicals that exist (which are just simplified versions of characters) and linking them to the appropriate character and definition. A wiki is a great idea and one that the developers are thinking of - user-contributions are how definitions for new words are added (and likely how definitions in other languages work) and expanding them to custom definitions is under consideration I believe.

Yup, those things are all in the cards. We have several sources for character decompositions, and the mnemonics using them will be shared by users (or you can make private notes).

These two features will be totally sweet!

Hi there,
have you found the character decompositions on MDBG ?
They are not always meaningful, and not all characters have them yet, but at least they are free.
Some of them are really helpful. If MDBG fails, I try the nciku.
Rachael.

We share a source, yes. A Skritter user has also sent us a few databases full of them.