Option to turn off mnemonic learning

I haven’t used this service much, I’ve been using hack chinese and migaku more, doing lookups with Dong Chinese Character Dictionary, Pleco, and Wiktionary.

This site just seems confusing, why is 艮 defined as “silver” even though it doesn’t have this meaning in Chinese at all?
It’s one of the eight trigrams. I want to learn that meaning, not some random meaning that is only useful in this application.

I like the other concepts of this though, it’s nice to be able to learn components before the character and characters before words. I have not been able to find anything like this for Chinese only Japanese.

There is a skip button at each component. If it appears and you don’t like it - skip it and it will never appear again

As @Cordylus points out, there is a way to skip each component as they come up if desired.

We do things this way because the aim of HanziHero is to help users achieve basic character literacy as quickly as possible. The mnemonics and the componentization that helps enable those mnemonics are all directed towards that end. In some cases, that means giving groups of strokes (components) different names to help create memorable mnemonic stories for remembering the meaning and pronunciation of characters that the component shows up in.

We try to make our components etymologically accurate if it does not impede this goal. In the case of 艮, the earliest meaning is “to look back”, and it later was adapted to be one of the eight trigrams. The majority of Chinese speakers will not know this earliest etymology at all, and a child raised in a Chinese-language environment will learn the meaning of e.g., 銀 “silver” (perhaps by seeing the word 銀行 “bank” when they walk around their local city) before they ever learn the meaning of 艮 by itself.

In this case, a mnemonic that includes “eighth trigram” is hard to remember. This is because most people don’t know what an “eighth trigram” is first and foremost, and secondarily because it is a very abstract concept doesn’t really have a physical manifestation other than the literal form of the character itself. Likewise, “to look back”, is not a great component name because this meaning is not used in any contemporary sense and an abstract action is also hard to picture. So we call it “silver” because one of the most common characters that contains it has that meaning, and because it is more memorable.

This is all for components. We don’t currently have the character 艮 in our curriculum because it is quite rate. In this frequency list it shows up at rank #4564! If we ever do add it, then the character will be taught according to its actual common everyday meaning. Which ironically may be “tough” and not either of “to look back” or “eighth trigram” as “tough” is actually its most common contemporary meaning!

In short: components are named in a way to help with memorization, and we try to make the etymologically-aligned where possible. Characters are usually taught according to their most common contemporary meaning. Sometimes there is overlap between the two, as a component may also be a character, such as how we teach 水 water as both the component “water” and the character “water”/“shui3”. In some cases the component and character will be taught differently as I outline above what we may do in this case when we add the character 艮.

Hope that helps.

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I don’t want to skip components though, I want to learn them. 艮 is used in non-silver characters, and I want to reader older literature. To me, putting silver on it will simply confuse me in the long run. I like the way jpdb locks characters behind components and words behind characters but without requiring mnemonics or putting on definitions that may be useful to the learner but are not factually accurate.

I’m not trying to say your system is bad, I just want to express I cannot use it if I can’t distinguish if the definition is a real definition or if it’s simply used just for the sake of learning. I would most rather learn “tough”. “to look back” seems to be an Oracle Bone Script meaning, I don’t think it should be used as a definition since it won’t appear even in classical literature.

Oh my it appears I accidentally made two seperate accounts. Woops

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I would support your idea generally, but you should know that for most users, mnemonics are not a long-term thing. You won’t be confused about 艮 when reading classical literature because the mnemonic for 艮 will have long left your mind before then.

艮 is used in, what, 很? There is definitely a silver mnemonic hiding in there somewhere, but I couldn’t tell you what it is, because mnemonics don’t stick around that long. I simply know it as hen3/very/quite.

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Tangentially related, I was actually thinking about how the mnemonics are really fun and work well for me as a nerdy guy in his 30s, but do people who didn’t grow up playing different iterations of smash over the years really know who toon link is? I think a cool growth goal for HanziHero would be to have different sets of mnemonics that you could pick from when you’re first starting based on your age/cultural touchpoints. Feels like something generative AI could be helpful in brainstorming. And perhaps also a mode where “purists" like you get tested on the actual chinese versions of radicals and strokes, like 三点水 instead of spray and 撇 instead of slide.

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