When creating new mnemonics to remember a hanzi´s definition, prononciation, tone and drawing, I often find useful to use a small shareware "le chercheur de mots" (the word search engine) http://eljuky.com/index.php, which helps you to find words containing / ending by / starting by some precise letters.
For example, you are trying to create a mnemonic for 我 wo3. You would find the word "war", etc that would help you to create a sentence.
I have found that piece of software in French based on a french dictionnary, may be some people are using something in English ?

Hmmm, I haven't used mnemonics to remember pronunciations, as I haven't found it necessary. (My retention rates for tones and readings are generally substantially higher than those for writings and definitions.)

It would be interesting to see what effect mnemonics have on retention rates and speed of learning, in terms of words learned per hour of study. My impression is that they increase the speed with which new words can be learned, but don't necessarily help as much after the initial learning period.

James

Well, from my experience, from someone with a pretty bad memory (why the h.. did I decide one day to learn Chinese ??), I find that it helps me a lot as long as long term memory is concerned. Remembering stupid / funny sentences really helps me to extract from my memory things that I would certainly not "print" strongly enough with a normal retention method.
On the other hand, the learning process is quite tedious, as I can spend a couple of hours to find new mnemonics that fit to my needs. Hopefully, I spend some time in my car (Mexico traffic...) which enables me to spend time looking for combinations.
May be the drawback of this is that it can be slower to "rebuild" the different elements from a mnemonics rather than a pure memorization process. But here the language practice helps you a lot

By the way, Nick, in case it hasn´t been done yet, wouldn´t it be interesting to make a poll to know what % of Skritter users make use of mnemonics to learn ? just to see if we are a few foolish guys...

Good poll idea. I know a ton of mnemonics have been created and chosen, but I haven't run many numbers, so I've run the poll you describe.

I found mnemonics useful for remembering how to write Chinese chars. I give a nutty name to a part of a character that is not a stand-alone character itself, if I see it appearing often. [Some authors call these "non-stand-alone stereotypes] I pretend the stereotype is a kiwi, an emu, a llama. I use Maori and Spanish words, to remind me that it's a mnenomic, not a definition. I write the partial character over and over until I can do so from memory. Then it's easier to recall the full stereotype when I need to use it, by first recalling the mnemonic. Example: 汤 I just have to remember the radical (that's easy) and my mnemonic for the rest is "emu". So it's a soup made from an emu! There's also a word for field, 场 which is the emu out in the field. Crazy or not?

I like this idea. I have sometimes spontaneously used words from various languages as mnemonics, but never in a systematic way, just because of sound similarities and using what came to mind first. Since I use Skritter with a Bamboo tablet I wonder if there is some way that I could use sketches as mnemonics.

Roko, I think it´s great as long as it helps you to memorize. The crazier, the better.
I also mix some spanish to my mnemonics, as there are sounds in Chinese that donnot exist in French, like huan4 for example, sounds like "Juan" or yu3 could be similar to LLUvia, etc. I also use... english, for sounds like zhi3, which sounds like "miDGEES" (those famous little mosquitos in Scotland that drive you crazy).
I also have a few nutty names as you do. For example, in your example, it would be water + hairy arm.
In general, I use mnemonics for everything : pronunciation, meaning, drawing and sometimes tones. That makes sometimes very weird and long sentences, but as long as it makes a short funny or personnal story, it´s ok.
What I like in creating mnemonics is that it converts the sometimes tedious learning process in an imagination and creativity challenge, which is a lot of fun.

I read a book once about a visualizing technique of memorization where you make stories of things you need to remember, for example:
the green dragon is spewing fire on to the house and the man is looking out of the windows house cursing at the dragon shooting at it with a water gun

Then you really try to visualize /hear that scene in Technicolor and Dolby Surround and it will be very easy to remember. The trick is how to make stories like that from sometimes dry material like Chinese characters.

@nicogo that's part of the reason I don't use pronunciation mnemonics, I don't want to confuse my Chinese sounds with non-Chinese sounds. I experimented with English mnemonics for Russian pronunciation some years ago and found it counter-productive for exactly this reason. I tended to remember the English sounds rather than learning the slightly-but-significantly-different Russian sounds.

In your example, yu3 in Chinese shouldn't sound anything like "LLUvia". For one thing, the "y" is silent in the standard Mandarin pronunciation of "yu" and "yi", whereas in all Spanish accents I'm aware of "ll" is pronounced. For another thing, the "u" in yu3 is an umlaut while Spanish lacks the umlaut sound.

In your other example, "miDGEEES", the vowel is roughly correct but the consonant is not. the "zh" or "dg" sound in English is palatal, not retroflex; the only retroflex sound I'm aware of in English is the American-style "r".

James

I understand what you say, James, but that´s not the way it works in the reality (in my brain at least ?).
The mnemonic is just like an anchor that helps you retrieve the right pronunciation. I agree that the spanish LLU is quite far from the chinese yu3, but when I remember LLUvia, my brain switches to the real sound that was memorized at the same time, in the mnemonics construction process.
On the other hand, I think the hanzi writing process needs to be performed together with the discussion classes with a teacher, so that we avoid to learn wrong pronunciation.

Well, I'll give it a try. Anything that speeds up acquisition...

James