I find the following two components super confusing because the meaning should be the othey way around as in real life sundials have a bit sticking out upwards to create a shadow
午 - sundial
牛 - cow
And it is even more confusing that “年 - year” component’s mnemonic says it uses the “牛 - cow” component but in reality it uses the “午 - sundial” as there is nothing sticking out of the “年 - year” , and the sundial as an indicator of time works more logically with a “year”.
I know mnemonics are just to start off the memorising process, but it is actually making it worse for me.
Sadly it’s not HH writing weird mnemonics that can be easily changed, the mnemonics are just based off what the characters actually mean. Look those two things up in a Chinese dictionary:
You could argue sundial isn’t perfect for noon, but it’s pretty close and clearly not something plucked from thin air. Cow on the other hand is just what it means so no changing that.
The 年 using cow as a component is interesting though - I never noticed that (I already knew a bunch of characters before starting HH so ignored their mnemonics). This might be a HH special because from memory the main radical in 年 is actually 干 … sooo not sure what’s up with that lol.
I have the same problem with the [见] walking eye and [贝] shellfish components.
Also [牛] cow and [午] sundial are being confused with [生] alien. And there are [丰] beanstalk and [王] scepter.
In my opinion all these similar components should have notes attached with advice what are the differences between them and how to avoid the confusion.
The walking eye comes from traditional Chinese where that character is literally an eye with legs: 目 + ㄦ = 見. With shellfish, that is the actual meaning of the character.