You know the drill! I talked about custom definitions in yesterday’s post, and next up is the related mnemonics system. Mnemonics are short pieces of information that are very easy to remember (because they’re weird, or surprising, or just make sense), and they help you remember tough characters which are very hard to remember. Here’s an example: the character 碧 (bì, “green jade”). It’s the second character in 雪碧 (Xuěbì, “Sprite”). I forgot this one so many times! Until I looked at the character decomposition and made a mnemonic for myself: “King Whiterock.” Never forgot it again.
If I had trouble remembering the meaning “green jade”, I could have added onto my mnemonic: “King Whiterock is actually made of green jade.” And I could add one for 雪碧, too: “King Whiterock likes drinking Sprite in the snow.” You probably don’t want to add a mnemonic for most of the things you’re studying, but a good mnemonic can melt a tough character’s heart like nothing else.
We’ve built a system where you can easily add mnemonics to characters and words as you practice, and you can also share those mnemonics with other Skritter users. So if you also have trouble with 碧, you can click the shared mnemonics list to see my King Whiterock mnemonic. We’ve currently set it so that if a shared mnemonic has been explicitly chosen by three people, it’ll be shown by default to everyone (the idea being is that it’s probably pretty good). Until the shared mnemonics are saturated, we’ll likely be tweaking this, so have patience at first if there aren’t many showing up by default. If you want to get rid of a mnemonic you’ve selected, just delete all the text out of it.
To help kickstart the mnemonics sharing, we’re running a contest until July 15th to see who can create the most winning mnemonics. Help other Skritter users (and yourself) to crack those tough characters with a clever story! There’s lots of styles for mnemonics, so put whatever’s useful to you. If you think it might be useful to others, click the “shared” checkbox on it. Crazy stuff is often more memorable!
Like custom definitions, you can use formatting in your mnemonics: stars for *bold*, underscores for _italics_, and images like this: img:http://www.example.com/images/unicorn.png — they’ll be resized to 50px tall at most. Check out Byzanti’s awesome mnemonic for 横!
