And you'd win :) The type of learning you describe differs from the types of learning most (to my knowledge pretty much all) neuro scienctists are researching, though. You describe meaningful learning, neuroscientists research the rat-in-a-maze-types (associative and instrumental learning).

They work in fundamentally different ways. You probably know that "aha" moment when you suddenly grasp a new concept. Most often, this pretty much equals meaningful learning. You mull over some content, and once your mind can make sense of it, you have "leaned" it. No need for rote learning at all.

Associative (and instrumental) learning works completely absent of meaning. It's just pattern matching between e.g. stimuli and responses. Rat pushes a button, food drops into the cage. After 20 repetitions, rat learns that a causes b.

The article describes students rembering Chinese characters without being able to read Chinese, so no meaning involved.

Once you get that 木 is a tree (which is pretty easy to see), you might figure that 林 is woods and 森 is a forest, even though 森 will look wildly complicated for someone who never really looked at chinese characters. People are learning to read chinese like this for thousands of years, and instead of remembering 12 individual brushstrokes for 森 you just need to remember that it's 3 trees.

It actually has a much more complicated and varied etymology than that of 'tree'.

http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?subm...

[1] a good intro: http://akitajet.com/wiki/Heisig_Method if you want to try the method I would suggest picking up Remembering the Kanji volume I and then utilizing http://kanji.koohii.com for the mnemonic "stories" and to practice with their spaced repetition method.

Compare:

"A snorble is a snopful that has two to three zigtugs. Many snopfuls are found in tigglesneck contexts. This will be on the test!"

vs:

"Okay, you know horses, dogs, and oxen? We classify those as snorgfuls because they have properties X Y and Z, which you may remeber if you've had [experience] with one of those. Non-snorgfuls would act differently because of having these other properties, which shows up in how ..."

Sadly, most teaching is like the first, and people don't even try to make it like the second.