I noticed that “zuo4” for “to sit” and “seat” both have their own stories, based on the core components (zuess, bathroom, soil, congaline).
Is there a reason why more complex characters are not based on already learned smaller characters. i.e. “to sit” is the base of “seat” and you have to somehow work in the “shack” into the unique story.
for example “zuo4” = seat → Zeuss wants to sit in the bathroom but there is no “seat” available, so instead he uses the “shack” to sit on.
This approach would leverage already learned stories, and expand on it.
I have thought about it, and indeed it would be FAR better, but it has one disadvantage. It requires learning characters in a certain order.
Of course it could be resolved by requiring to learn some characters, before learning a new one. Just like you need to learn components first.
I’ve thought about this at times. The main reason we haven’t is that it adds another order of complexity to the system: now that a characters can be based on other characters, the user needs to keep this in mind when trying to recall the mnemonic.
There is also the matter of programmatic and conceptual complexity.
A related issue is that there are some cases where there are simply too many components in some characters (especially for the traditional course), which could be improved by extracting common groups into a single component with the many different parts as sub-components.
However, both also have the issue of creating more “levels” of dependencies, making learning characters in an organic manner through prioritization more burdensome. One would need to learn the related character (or large-component) and its components (or sub-components) before learning the character at hand.