> Coming up with better mnemonics, or better ways to introduce mnemonics, is a low-value activity. You can go through an entire book of mnemonics that teaches you 1,000 Chinese characters and retain none of it.
That's not my experience at all. Please see my link detailing my own experience with the Heisig method.
Did you forget to post the link?
Heisig’s approach to break down the characters into components is indeed useful, I just doubt the usefulness of the “stories” that Heisig provides.
His stories weren't really useful to me either and I made my own since that's what the method is based upon. The stories he provides are a guideline for the method, but making your own stories is the key. I've done that over a year ago and I've finished the second tome too since then (albeit with a slower pace than what I did for the first).
That's because Japanese is a popular language to learn, especially in HN-type communities, and to learn Japanese you, most of the time, have to learn Kanji
> never seen a post about learning Spanish on Hacker News
There are some https://hn.algolia.com/?q=learn+spanish. The thing is that you don't have to learn 2000 symbols to learn Spanish. I also think that many "hacker type" people consider raw memorization "boring" compared to conversation or playing around with the language.
You have to memorize words, though.
In addition, in my opinion you understate the usefulness of mnemonics to assist in learning. If we're to agree they do help with learning faster, you might still object as you wrote: "You can go through an entire book of mnemonics that teaches you 1,000 Chinese characters and retain none of it.". It's not much of a concern if one uses spaced repetition software like Anki.
Well, first of all, my teachers would take issue with “drawing” kanji. You write Chinese characters, just like you write letters in English.
Second of all, my teachers would encourage you to not rely much on mnemonic devices. There is a large body of research about how effective mnemonics are for learning.
From https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full
> On the basis of the literature reviewed above, we rate the keyword mnemonic as low utility. We cannot recommend that the keyword mnemonic be widely adopted. It does show promise for keyword-friendly materials, but it is not highly efficient (in terms of time needed for training and keyword generation), and it may not produce durable learning.
(Note that the paper specifically discusses learning foreign language vocabulary.)
The thing is… it should not take you long to learn Chinese characters. You can just put in the time to memorize it by going over it again and again, and trying to read aloud passages written in Japanese, or answering questions about the content. Really engaging with the material and using it in the same way you intend to use it in the future.
I see a lot mnemonic tricks, apps, etc. for foreign language learning. For some reason, a lot of focus on Japanese, specifically (never seen a post about learning Spanish on Hacker News). My opinion of these apps and techniques is, by and large, very low. If you want to be proficient, you should be reading and writing as much material as possible, and you can remember Chinese characters mostly with rote memorization, with maybe a little bit of mnemonics to help you get started. Only a small percentage of Chinese characters are pictograms. Once you get into the 500-1,000 character range, you’ll be making guesses at character meanings from context and radicals.
Coming up with better mnemonics, or better ways to introduce mnemonics, is a low-value activity. You can go through an entire book of mnemonics that teaches you 1,000 Chinese characters and retain none of it.
What you want is a curriculum that exposes you to kanji incrementally, with plenty of sample text that you can practice reading (and answer questions about!). The sample text should have a high percentage of characters you know from previous lessons, use a few new characters, and occasionally toss in a character (with furigana) that you have to figure out from context.