Anyone who has been doing mnemonic-based character/word learning I call upon you to share your experiences. I am a few months in now and I really wonder how this approach scales up into the thousands of characters. How would you reflect on using this way of learning? Especially curious to HH but also if you have done other courses those insights are welcome! Thanks 
I’m only 6 months into HH but I have 1,600 items learnt here. I’ve also used mnemonic previous outside HH. Some users here are level 60+ and might have better thoughts on HH long term though.
For me, the mnemonic’s fade fairly rapidly but then I know the thing and I don’t need the mnemonic. Of the 1,600 items I’ve been though in HH I could probably tell you the mnemonic story of maybe 30-40 of them, maybe +50 with some prompting … maybe. In any one day’s study session I’ll probably only use 10 or less of mnemonics to help me remember something (out of the ~80 or so reviews a day). The other ~70 reviews I just already know the item so ignore the mnemonic completely.
Generally you need the mnemonic at the start so whatever your learning sticks around in your memory long enough that you can build the rest of the memory web required to keep it there. The mnemonic is a crutch to kick start that web. Once an items is solidly in your long term memory the mnemonic is irrelevant and fades. So long term the number of mnemonic you know doesn’t really change, old ones out, new ones in. I don’t think I’ll ever know 1,000 (or even 100) mnemonics, but I will be able to use the system to learn thousands of characters.
The main trick to get things to stick though is to USE THEM! Be it seeing/hearing a word in a youtube video, or reading that word in a DuChinese story etc. That’s when they really start becoming automatic. As long as you’re doing that and getting enough input the mnemonics disappear without issue.
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I simply would not be able to learn ~10 new characters per day without them. And definitely not in the little time I spend on HH daily. I can’t even learn 10 new spanish words in a day and have countless failed reviews on anki to prove it!
Like Kaysik said, they don’t stick around. But they’re incredibly powerful for laying the building blocks of neural structure so you can recall the word come review time.
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