Hello! Thanks for the feedback.
Added review load.
I don’t think this matters much in practice. Once one gets a couple hundred characters under their belt, the percentage of component reviews is extremely low. This is further helped by the fact that a component (or sound) review item only has one question instead of the two that characters and words have. Additionally, if one finds the reviews “useless”, one can always just skip the component.
Components with different names from characters.
IIRC we have some guards against this already. For example, if one answers the “component name” for a character meaning question and they differ, we will block it with a warning.
I do agree that it is quite annoying in some cases, but there is a reasoning behind it. For components, we try to make them “nouns” where possible. This is because nouns instead of abstract verbs or adjectives are easier to picture and thus remember. It is easier to imagine a character with a syringe sticking out of their eye because of an accident, for example, than that same character in an unusually “dry” room or with a “dry” eye.
Despite this, we also try to make the component names be as close to the etymological origin where possible, so long as it does not impede our main goal of helping memorization. For this one specifically, the Outlier Etymology dictionary lists 干 as originally being some military tool of vague origin. In this sense, “syringe” could perhaps instead be “poker” or “military tool”, or “weapon”… but none of those are as memorable I think as “syringe” which is also what it looks like, and “syringe” is not too far from the etymological meaning of some sort of pointed tool.
HanziHero has to walk a fine line between being “accurate” in its componentizations while also being memorable. From a certain perspective, knowing the exact etymology of certain components has only a vague relation to actually knowing the meaning and pronunciation of the characters they show up in. This is because in many, many cases, the components have an “empty” contribution to the meaning and pronunciation of the character.
The same radical in different positions; water, spray - fire, burner - heart, soul. Why? They’re the same radical?
It is true that 氵 spray and 水 water are both variants of the same water radical. However, one criticism I had of other mnemonic componentizations (e.g., Heisig) was having different groups of strokes with the same name. For a learner with no familiarity with Chinese characters, it is confusing to have multiple different strokes have the same name, as it makes it harder to differentiate them, and thus harder to separate out mnemonics.
This differentiation becomes key when both “forms of the radical” show up in similar groups of characters. For example:
永 eternity has “drop” and “water”泳 to swim has “drop”, “water”, and “spray”.
Both are pronounced yong3.
If we have “spray” and “water” both be “water”, then this collapses into:
永 eternity has “drop” and “water”泳 to swim has “drop”, “water”, and “water (2nd form)”.
This makes it harder for a user to use a mnemonic to help differentiate the two. After all, they have the same pronunciation and very similar componentization. Explicitly giving the alternate form a different name helps enable this.
Now there is a separate argument to be made that “spray” should still accept “water” as an alternate option. That may be something we explore in the future, but it still opens up users to falling into the same “mnemonic trap” I outline above by not keeping them strictly separate.
Thanks again for the feedback!
HanziHero has over 10k items by now, and I try to keep in mind ways to improve it. Unfortunately, due to the scope of the project it will always fall short of being “perfect”: taking a minute to review each item would take me 150+ hours!
However, I do set aside time to make the biggest-impact improvements I can every month or so. We have a fairly large backlog of such tasks. When I do so, I keep in mind feedback like yours to try to figure out what I should improve next.