I just couldn't get the word 熏陶 in to my tiny brain but the other day it came up while I was peeling an orange and some juice happened to flick into my eye (which really stung) and since then I've got it every time. Maybe it's a great new way to learn vocab!?

Any one else had a similar experience?

I usually just remember weird words with revamped obscene stories, never a physical reminder. Though now I'm intrigued so I'll try splashing citric liquids into my eye as a painful reminder haha.

Often you need something for the brain to latch onto in order to memorize things, such as an experience, a mnemonic, contextual appearances, and so forth. Otherwise the connection between a word and its definition seem arbitrary.

Haha, that's great. Maybe as an extension to the upcoming leech detection feature, you could ask Skritter to surprise you with something crazy while you try to learn the word next time, and you would get a uniquely crazy thing to help associate the memory with.

Not that I think it makes business sense for us to come up with hundreds of uniquely crazy things to surprise learners with, but it would be fun.

Nick, I already did, 3500 strong uniquely crazy things --- pictures!

Still, even that isn't a strong a memory as something from real life with an emotional reaction. Eg, I've probably never forgotten how to write 流氓的氓, since on the whiteboard the teacher drew it like a 言 radical, and having never seen 亡 as a radical before I was faintly surprised when I asked him about it...

Hey Byzanti, where and how can I access your pictures?

We're thinking about making support for a full-on picture mode, where you could choose to have pictures and they'd be part of the official definitions if you had them enabled. So to add a picture, you'd submit it as a correction. For this, Skritter would pull the pictures and automatically host/resize them. We'd then start with Byzanti's awesome collection. So that would be one way--to wait for that. (He's got some great pics in there.)

I'd vote for this idea! I want to see those pics!