I'm halfway through with the HSK3 list and I currently also working on NPCR2. I understand that most HSK vocabulary are single character words which are fairly easy to remember using mnemonics.

However, I get more and more words consisting of multiple characters and that's when it starts to get a bit tricky in my opinion. How do you guys remember these? I also think that it would be helpful to be able to create mnemonics for the complete word and not just for the single characters.

I would be very glad to hear your approach on studying words, especially those that have very little in common with the original meaning and are not too easy to deconstruct.

You can create multi-char word mnemonics on the web version, but we didn't bring that into the iOS version since hardly anyone uses the word-level mnemonics and the interface isn't so simple to show two. However, if you create a full-word mnemonic on the web, it will show up on iOS.

On the web version you can add mnemonics for words. You find that on the right side just under the "Added from....". This is however not used in the app version. I think that where since very few used it on the web version. I find is much easier to remember multi character words since they usually combine known characters and often are very fun by them self. E.g. hacker = 黑客 = black guest etc. I do not write down any mnemonics for words but try to use them in context and that usually sticks well. I mostly use tatoeba or Google news to quick search them if they are not from a textbook such as NPCR. I have just finished book 2 and find that each word there are rich in context so that is enough. I do read the text, do the exercises and view/listen to the dialogues on Youtube. To lazy to use the DVD. I try to every day also squeeze in lots of Chinese movies, Chinesepod and some news reading.

I'm sure I have seen some word mneumonics in the app, this has maybe got mixed up with word mneumonics being added to the second character of a word. I think on a word level mneumonics combined with practicing the word in context is best. Especially if you know the radicals and components there is always a way to create a mneumonic even if the single characters don't relate, but usually they do. Occasionally it is difficult or impossible to create a mneumonic then I just have to drill it until I remember.

黑客 is cool, both an easy to remember mneumonic and transliteration, so common I have found.

Cheers guys, much appreciated.
Nick, do you reckon that eventually sample sentences will come into the iOS as well?

Yeah, that's the plan. Just need to get them live on the site for a while to work out any changes first.