I wrote a comparison blog post on the differences between Hanzi Hero and the mandarin blueprint. Not sure if posting links is against guidelines but I think it can be useful as its exactly what I was looking for when initially reading about Hanzi Hero.
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Hey, thanks for the write up! 
It seems like the biggest key difference is that in Mandarin Blueprint you have to create all the mnemonics yourself 
– that sounds like it’d take a lot of time, though I guess if you commit to that you’d be able to make mnemonics more tailored to you, as you said in your review 
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Yeah, they do give suggestions for the components or suggestions for actors (the initials), and sometimes also examples of what locations they use and such. But it is mostly a suggestion and the learner is expected to start fully composing their own movies. It is more work but also more memorable, since in HH i do find my self sometimes glossing over the script not fully engaging with the mnemonic which is impossible in their system. It would be possible for HH to incorporate personal mnemonics as an option for if people want to do that.
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In my case I started with the Hanzi movie method but soon found out that their platform and flashcard system were a little too unpractical to fully embrace.
I actually have my own actors, places and radicals and I create my own mnemonics very fast. I just like how practical the HH platform is. I have been reading the HH mnemonics and they are very good and maybe more memorable than some of my own. However I’m too attached to my own characters and places.
MB has excellent info and it would be interesting to follow their system from beginning to end if their platform was a bit more practical and prices weren`t super prohibitive for regular third world people like me.
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HH could allow for custom elements by allowing users to set their own. The default ones could be just that, default. Lets say you want Slenderman to be Ross from friends, you just change it in your settings and it’s automatically updated on all your cards. Don’t know how technically difficult that would be, it depends how the current system is coded I guess
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I do see this come up when users onboard – the desire to change the sound personality. Not sure how common it is though.
The barrier to entry is how, by changing one of the sound personalities to something different, one would likely have to rewrite the mnemonic 
I would say one of the main value propositions of HH is to not have to write the mnemonic – but I also see the argument for being able to make your own mnemonic if some aren’t sticking as much as one would like
Some of the avatars, like Slenderman, fit into a very specific pop culture time and place. If you’re not in that generation, they might be hard to grab onto. I think I’m a few years older than you guys, because I completely missed yu-gi-oh as a kid. Pretty sure my generation could do the entire thing using only the original 151 Pokemon.
This is not a HH problem though. Heizig was the same, there are references in there that I didn’t get until years later when I was reading things completely unrelated to Chinese.
Maybe the way to allow customization is to say, we use this avatar, he has this personality and these traits. Think of a fictional character or celebrity you know well that has similar traits.
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Yeah that i mentioned as a critique too. Can clearly tell the founders are somewhere between age 25-33 ha. Well lucky me I would say.
That said I recognize the default mnemonics are a key feature that distinguishes HH. Therefore I would like them see improve upon that, find ways to make mnemonics better. I really like I just get told what a component is supposed to be.
Only cases were it becomes a real problem for me: I don’t know the actor, I have to imagine 6 imaginary bathrooms in imaginary places. There are no memories in my brain of those to keep those places consistent. It causes me to blend mnemonics because the boundaries are not clear.
I don’t know what the right call is here, maybe HH can provide some images, videos, of the places and people they describe. That is what I do now online, but perhaps the course could include this also. I am only two months in so I don’t know what gamble I make with this learning approach long long term. So far I can manage to memorize the key things in most cases.
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Yeah Spongebob was released when I was finishing high school, so never seen an episode. Same for Yougioh which I think was even later.
It’s something that seems like it’d be important early on, but then never actually is in my opinion. As someone who did watch a lot of Seinfeld and knows exactly who George Costanza is, I can also say I don’t remember zhu words better than I remember p words despite the fact I have zero idea who Patrick Star is past a google image search. There are only ~75 sounds total so not a big deal to just straight memorise them.
I will say that I do write my own character and word mnemonics sometimes, but generally that’s just making them much more R rated and fits perfectly into the My Notes section without issue as it can still use the character+room combo.
Changing the default sound characters would mean everything changes and if you want to write your own mnemonics for everything then why use HH at all? Just get the HSK lists and go wild in Anki yourself (complete with FSRS and pictures and everything). And if you’re only interested in changing just 1 character, the value vs work required is negligible IMHO.
Definitely invest in making those places as clear and distinct as possible. You can get buy when your character count is in the low hundreds, but if they’re not clear it gets super confusing once you’re in the deep water
I believe that there’s no solution that would make being able to choose your own sound personality or places and still keep the standard mnemonics possible.
The personality of the characters inform how the mnemonic will turn out to be.
If you want to have your own characters and places, as I do, it’s just easier to do it yourself in your mind and keep going. If you feel like you need some help with the mnemonic read the suggested one and see if it fits with your chosen personalities, try do adapt it, etc…
If you feel like you need to have the mnemonic written down you can write it in the notes section.
For words I have my own phonectic mnemonics for every word that I write down on the notes section so that I can remember it if needed.
I make up all of my mnemonics, with my own characters and places, and I gladly pay for HH because of how streamlined it makes the whole process of learning without having to create flash cards.
After a while you just get very fast at creating them yourself and you don’t even have to write them down.
If there’s one thing that I would like to have had when starting HH was a smarter learning order, like the guys at Mandarin Blueprint did.
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I have only altered one of the mnemonics in my mind: [xi-] Xena. For me it’s John Cena. Partially because I’m unfamiliar with the character, and partially because there’s so many funny clips of Cena speaking Chinese.
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That’s a pretty good one!
Yeah for me some of these mnemonic personas, like Xena, I myself am actually not terribly familiar with but just looked up “popular” characters that started with a given character as part of the research. However, once I skimmed a wiki article I found it still worked for me well enough, for her I just picture a woman wearing some sort of battle armor or something.
Down the line we definitely hope to add more pictures and stuff to the sound mnemonics to make that visual familiarity easier to build up.
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The barrier to entry is how, by changing one of the sound personalities to something different, one would likely have to rewrite the mnemonic
Could a middle ground be that anytime a pre-written mnemonic contains an altered component (sub-mnemonic), the mnemonic either must be written from scratch by the user before proceeding or the user could receive a warning that they may need to rewrite the pre-written mnemonic for it to make sense?
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That could be a compromise the alternative is to just stick in the altercations and go from there 
Are you currently creating your own sound personalities?
I’m curious how common this is – I have a slight suspicion that if we provided more pictures/visuals this wouldn’t be necessary, but there is also the argument that it’s important for these sound personalities to be familiar to you as it’s more “integrated” into your memory
I’m actually not, but mostly out of laziness. There are a small handful of sound characters like Yu-Gi-Oh that I’m not familiar with and would change. I also would prefer if character components were all nouns, so I’d probably change a few like “big” and “small”. If it were easy to swap these I’d definitely do it and happily rewrite or at least be wary of mnemonics containing these items. But to your point, I can’t say this is holding me back.