Hi guys, I’ve recently returned after a long absence. I have a ton of reviews to do and working through them has made me realize that I wish there was a feature where I could change the names of things that would be read out in the mneumonics. I like that you can add synonyms but that doesn’t feel like enough to me. For example, if I have never seen one of the TV shows that one of the characters is from, it would be nice to swap it out for a name I will remember better. I just feel like it would be easier for the mneumonics to stick if you were able to customize them a little more. For example if I don’t agree with the description of a particular component, I could change it to something else that I can see easier. Another example is that for me I feel like the tone locations work better as 1=Roof, 2=Front, 3=Basement, 4=Backyard/Behind, 5=Middle/Inside. Every time I see Roof I always think of the solid like diacritic ā, and I feel like it would be easier if I could just change them personally. Or perhaps we could also be given a list of components sounds and locations when learning a character and then we would have the option to use the one provided or make our own; that way we could also include stuff from our personal life to make them really stick. I mostly just wish there was a way to change the text that appears in the descriptions. Let me know what you guys think!
There are a few other threads about this - the main problem is that it’s not really possible to do. You often can’t just replace the mnemonic text and have it make sense. If you could change 4 from bathroom to backyard, then suddenly the mnemonic is always talking about the toilet mirror in the backyard, or backyard filling with steam etc. Same thing is true for the people - you swap Gandalf for Gandhi say and they’re all the mnemonic’s keep talking about Gandhi’s magic fireworks? It just doesn’t work. Once you change thing’s you basically need to re-write the whole mnemonic around the new setup.
Because of that, what a lot of people do (myself included) is if you want a custom mnemonic, just write it into the Notes section. Then just ignore the original HH mnemonic, and read your notes instead. The fact the HH one still exists doesn’t really matter - just collapse that section. Instead of trying to change the HH at a system level (which isn’t really possible) just ignore the base stuff you don’t like. You can skip all the places/people cards you don’t like so they don’t show up for review, and write your own pneumonitic for everything that used them, keeping anything you don’t mind as it was.