Is there any reason we should refrain from sharing potentially-offensive mnemonics? I would hate to deny other users the fruit of my labors, but I suppose if someone complained it might be a problem.

James

It does not really matter what you write, there will always be someone that potentially will be offended;-) With this global application, the offence limit vary between country to country so how to tell what is offending? It is like the US view on sex VS violence. No limit to the violence on film but any naked flesh and there is a scream. In EU it is in many ways the other way around.

I love some of your mnemonics so I for one say, please go for it. I will continue to write crazy potentially offending mnemonics since they tends to stick.

I don't think that it's a good idea, unless the vocab item is itself is of an adult or otherwise potentially offensive nature. In a similar vein, when I'm reviewing definitions, many words that are in general use also have slang sexual uses, and I tend to remove or heavily edit these parts of the definition, since users that want to study those can use the custom definition feature. I do not, however, censor accurate definitions of items that are primarily used in their sexual sense.

Our community comes from many age groups and backgrounds, so even though over-the-top mnemonics are often the most effective, I think it's best to be on the cautious side.

Chris

There are a sizable number of Skritterers learning in a high school class, or even younger, so as Chris says, please try to keep them reasonable. I know the more vivid mnemonics are easier to remember! Just draw your own line and keep the ones which cross it private. We'll likely hear if someone is offended.

OK, I made it private. Too bad, it was one of my better ones. ;)

As a mom with two skrittering kids (ages 9 and 21, yeah, one is an adult), I appreciate some discretion. Your "fruits" may be outstanding in terms of memory retention but not as wonderful from a mother's point of view. Go ahead - create those juicy gems, use them yourself and, ask Nick says, keeping them private may be the best choice. I don't like being a wet blanket but it's probably best for our beloved skritter in the long run.

On this note, one distant goal might be to enable an "Adult Mode" or some such thing - in which potentially offensive definitions and mnemonics are tagged as such and only people with "Adult Mode" can see them. The lists of vulgar slang (made by Chris, maybe? I don't quite remember) are pretty much useless without a lot of custom definitions and legwork by the user, for example. (Which leads me to another - custom definitions for lists...)

+1 on Adult Mode

@FatDragon,

In the interests of dispelling rumors: the lists of vulgar slang weren't made by me :)

Chris

Apologies - I had it wrong - it was Ben, not you.

Anyway, I found when I browsed that specific list that it was basically unusable as a list of profanities because a lot of the words didn't even have the profane definitions in the system. An adult mode or a set of custom definitions tied directly to that list would make it much more useful. Yeah, I know that there are more important things to learn than profanities, but still, I'm getting tired of telling Wuhan drivers to #@%^# %@%$ in the same way every time I get my righteous ire of a bicycle-riding foreigner up (just kidding, well mostly).

I've read a few books about memory

the more vulgar a mnemonic the easier it is to remember.

vulgar imagery was often used by the ancient Greeks to make mnemonic devices more memorable

Interesting thread - when I saw the topic I thought straight away someone was complaining, but it was James saying 'Can I share an offensive mneumonic, Can I Can I Pleeease......' :-)

I think most of us would agree the weird, vivid, rude, offensive mneumonics 'stick' and so for what we are trying to achieve they are more useful for everyone! I would certainly like to be able to view these mneumonics for my personal learning!!

But, my kids use Skritter, schools use Skritter...

Even for adults though - where is the line to offensive or not? I sometimes use mneumonics that contain stereotypes. Male /female sterotypes you can seem to get away with, but racial/religious stereotypes could be taken with offence. The stereotypes 'exist' in our society, and I use them because they 'work' for me with my mneumonic - but I certainly wouldn't wish to perpetuate stereotypes, or have other users feeling offended by my mneumonic, even though the intention was purely for a story that would 'stick'!

I think most of us just wanting to remember these darn characters would realise that using sex, swearing, vulgarness, stereotypes, etc in our mneumonics were not created with an intent to offend, but I certainly wouldn't wish to offend anyone that did (get offended), and school kids...again what I accept as a parent would be different to others - and schools generally have rules :-)

You would have to set up a rude mneumonic club ...the first rule about rude mneumonic club is you don't talk about rude mneumomic club, the second rule about rude mneumonic club is, you DO NOT talk about rude mneumonic club...

I was thinking of the adult filter more to temporarily suspend commonly flagged vulgar words from review. For example, if I'm working in a primary school office and want to study there are definitely certain things I don't want to pop up on my screen. This applies to both Chinese and English.

Ha, that's a good point. I don't skritter too much at work these days - too busy - but I would be pretty embarrassed if something filthy came up just as a co-worker at our kindergarten walked by...

I've actually stopped Skritter at work in between classes, because my monitor is too visible to too many people. A logical solution would be to just delete all of the inappropriate words I've added, but on the other hand I like knowing them even if I won't often use them it's still important to know about them.

One bad word popping up on my screen could entirely change the way I'm viewed in the office, even if I explained the situation.

I guess that'll be solved when the iphone/ipod app comes out...!

I can't wait for the new Skritter button, "turn on dirty mnemonics". But will it still work if I have parental controls on? 囧。

OK, here's a perfect example (slightly censored)

秩 (zhi4) Nothing will make you get your sh*t together like lost grain (Thomas)

I think this is just about the perfect mnemonic. It follows the etymology, it's funny and vulgar, and the most memorable word gives you a hint about the pronunciation.

Also, the fact that there are already mnemonics in the system that use four-letter words shows that that particular train has already left the station. Unless the Skritter guys feel like going back and scrubbing all the mnemonics? But don't worry, unless they build an "adult mode" I will keep my best creations private. ;)

On another note, I have recently added a lot of mnemonics for country names. Some of the characters they chose to transliterate foreign names into Chinese are pretty funny. My favorite is probably 加蓬, "add fluffy" or "increase disheveled", which means Gabon. I have to admit that making mnemonics for those country names has been something of a Rorschach test; my first association for 以色列 (Israel) was something which actually offended a hard-to-offend Jewish friend of mine, for example, so I changed it. :P

James

We'll go through the trouble of scrubbing when someone complains. Please don't make our job harder in the event that happens by making a lot of vulgar mnemonics!

I would really like to avoid the complexity of adding parental controls or an adult mode. I don't even want to put that on the list. Who likes being a censor? Just keep it reasonable or private.

Would it be that difficult to implement a basic parental mode? I would think that essentially a list of flagged words could be checked against the definition, Character and mnemonic. If any piece of that fails the test then it simply skips that item until parental mode is disabled. It's not being a censor if there is an option to entirely disable it. Ha if only this was true of the good ol' great firewall.

It's something I can live without (as I realize it's a time commitment), but it definitely inhibits my ability to study freely. It's not really vulgar, but even if some of my younger students walked by and saw 性交 plastered on my screen my label would be changed from 善良的孟老师 to 大色狼.

All my best mnemonics are dirty. I wouldn't mind marking my dirty ones as dirty but it would really suck not to be able to share them.

On the off chance that somebody does go through and start categorizing mnemonics as "offensive" I hope that there would be other ways to categorize them. For starters:

etymology based (those that assume knowledge of the meaning of at least one of the components

visually based (those that have the image of the character and some other mental image superimposed or entangled in some way.

sound-alike (those that are based on a resemblance to another word, either in Chinese or another language)

I would not push for a high priority on this, but my thinking is it would be interesting to see if one type of mnemonic proves more effective, either for individual users or for Skritterers in general. If it proves to be true, then users might want the ability to filter mnemonics by type.