Characters often have quite different meanings in different words. The accepted meanings in HanziHero generally picks one and rejects the others. Often the meaning of the most common word using this character isn’t accepted for the character.
Hence, I don’t want to practice character meaning - only sound. I’ve decided to pause practice until this feature gets added.
You can add your own meanings for characters. I often look up a character in mdbg.net or omgchinese.com to see alternative meaning and example words. I will sometimes add more common meanings or a meaning that makes more sense to me.
Echoing what @char said, I would recommend adding the meaning you want to remember as an alternate meaning.
We spend a large amount of time adding to and improving the curriculum, and we strive to select the best meaning for each character as far as possible, but even that is fraught with a multitude of complex decisions. In some cases the original etymological meaning is too far from its common usage, but in other times tending towards a slightly “older” or more “root” meaning can help a user better understand a character and how it combines with words. This is further compounded by the fact that many characters don’t have a singular meaning, just like many Chinese words don’t, and just like many English words don’t. I definitely understand and sympathize with your frustration because I also feel it when I try to tune and add items each day that fit into these variety of constraints.
Coming back to English, what is the best meaning for something like “set” if we were to explain it to someone whose native language is Chinese? A tennis “set” (a group of tennis games)? To “set” something in place (to put something in a particular position)? A “set” of teacups (a collection of things)? A “set” location (an established and fixed thing or condition)? Unfortunately any mapping from one language to another will always be somewhat lossy in nature.
But that is also what makes learning a language to a certain level of fluency so satisfying because it allows one to comprehend the language in the language itself, allowing these rougher edges of translation and mistranslation to be avoided. However, experiencing those same rough edges to “bootstrap” that initial base knowledge of the language is also the cost of entry, so to speak. 
Hope that helps.
Thanks, but I won’t add a bunch of meanings to every character. As I said, I simply won’t practice until I have the option to do sounds only.
You built a system where the question is character and the answer is a fact about that character. This makes perfect sense when the answer is the sound, since 95%+ of characters have only one answer.
I appreciate that you’ve so clearly laid out how words can have multiple senses, how chinese characters don’t map cleanly to english words, and how even a short list of possible answers doesn’t do a great job. Because of that, I’m choosing to use the other tools available to me to learn the meaning of words in context and skip the 1-to-1 mapping pushed by HanziHero.
It’s probably a little effort but overall not too hard for you to give the user the choice to practice only sounds or only meaning. Please do that 
The main features I appreciate about HanziHero are the mnemonic stories and components and I would still be happy to have access to these for learning sounds, but the meaning cards are so disruptive that I would prefer to pause for now.
I personally find the 1-to-1 mapping, while not comensurate of all the meanings, to be really useful especially when it comes to learning new words or guessing a word I see on the street’s meaning.
I think when assessing whether or not to add this feature it’s also important to recognize that as the level of customization in the application increases (turn on/off this part of the app etc) the more complex maintainance is and the harder having a coherent product vision becomes.
This seems like something that is rather core to the way HH teaches so while I understand your point of view it seems like a rather large philosophical change to the application. In addition, this change would also make the stories for learning words, which include the assigned character meanings, somewhat moot (assuming this feature were enabled).
Btw I didn’t know where to throw this in but I think the mapping makes a lot more sense for words.
S tier - defining and using components, mnemonic stories
A tier - 1 to 1 mapping for characters to sounds
B tier - 1 to 1 mapping for words to meanings
C tier - 1 to 1 mapping for characters to meanings
D tier - 1 to 1 mapping for words to sounds (very redundant)
The stories are still very useful for character sounds. For sounds only the red highlighted meaning word wouldn’t be needed but it’s also not harmful.
Out of curiosity, where do you draw the line between a word and “just” a character in this context? I get that HH splits out 2+ characters constructions as “words”, but that’s not how it actually works in terms of “what is a word?” in Chinese. A significant portion of all the HSK1 characters are considered “words” by themselves. 我, 好, 六, 叫 etc are all individual characters but also fully formed words by themselves (in the same way that a and I are fully formed English words). Do you skip these words meaning just because they’re 1 character? Or use some other metric to decipher what is/isn’t a word?
I think that you are seriously underestimating how important it is to know the meaning of the hanzi. Many of them do only have one meaning, or one most common. And it is essential to know their meanings to know the words, because of the nature of how chinese words are constructed.
You’re kind of asking them to cut off two legs of a horse because you are sure you can still ride it fine. Hanzi Hero is not just flash cards but a system that makes sense if you follow it.
You seem to be pretty sure that you have the best method for yourself to learn the hanzi. In this instance I believe that it would be more advantageous for you to make your own flash cards and mnemonics, but I am.not aware of any mnemonic system that does not pick one of the Hanzi meanings. I’m honestly curious to know how you will be able to remember all those hundreds of homophones without attaching meaning to them.
Out of curiosity, where do you draw the line between a word and “just” a character in this context?
I guess I meant multi-character words.
There are around 1,700 one-character words out of 8,000 on the TOCFL. For HSK the number is around 2,100 out of 11,000. HanziHero appears to have no one-character “words”! Interesting, I didn’t notice this before and you make a good point.
One-character words in chinese have on average more than two “senses” according to the MCD, while two-character words rarely (at most 25% of the time) have more than one sense.
HanziHero currently has 3,900 characters and 3,700 words in the traditional course, which I guess just shows that there’s an overemphasis here on one-character meaning compared to the TOCFL or HSK. It seems clear that many of the mapped “meanings” for characters are not the meaning of the one-character word but instead the meaning of a common two-character word containing this character.
I use Anki flashcards to quickly train character sound only. It just works - the brain is a magical thing.
Around 18% of characters are too slippery and get suspended when I keep failing them. I was using HanziHero as a different approach to these.
If this just works for you and all you need is more flash cards you can just make more flashcards. The whole mnemonic system is rendered useless if you don’t want to learn the meaning of the hanzi.
But I am curious, what advantage do you see in not learning the meaning of the hanzi?