I think Skritter is a good place to look. Users share their mnemonics and there’s also a simple voting system where you can vote for good mnemonics. There are mnemonics both for words and individual characters.

I’m working through a textbook that has 20 dialogs that get progressively longer & more complicated.
I started in January and I can now, by only looking at the English, write 14 of the dialogs to Hanzi correctly – about 400 characters. Also, doing this translation has improved my intuitive understanding of the structure of the language. More importantly, my speed for mastering a dialog has greatly increased. I’ve been using James Heisig’s books ‘remembering traditional Hanzi’ – he basically gives names to every primitive in each of 3000 characters – I’ve found his hints & approach quite useful. I also like learning characters in the context of sentences because I feel like I’m learning to communicate. In Sept 2014, I’m enrolled in a University course. They cover 500 characters per sememeter & have 8 classes – I intend to take all 8. They cover both traditional & simplified.

Below is my method for learning a dialog.
I would be very interested in hearing other people methods for learning Chinese.
1. make a 3×5 card for each character I don’t know in dialog. My 3×5 card has stroke order, names of primitives used, & ping ying, english translation & any words from dialog that use the character. Any other characters that I might confuse with this character.
2. Using 3×5 card, practice going from English to naming primitives and writing character until I can do this well
3. practice translating dialog from English to Ping ying.
4. practice writing Hanzi from ping ying
5. For any mistakes in writing Hanzi, I make a new 3×5 card that covers the phrase or sentence that I missed
6. Also maintain a spreadsheet that has all of this information that can be easily converted to anki. I’m also using the spreadsheet to keep track of which of the 3,000 Hanzi I’ve learned & which I have not. My longer term goal is to learn all 3,000 Hanzi (traditional & simplified) in his 4 books. I don’t use Anki now – I just sort my cards into 2 piles – the ones I know quickly & the ones I don’t. But I will be using Anki when studying at the Univ. to help me retain the characters I know. I’ll also continue writing at least 2 dialogs every day.
It now takes me just a few minutes to write these dialogs.
6. I have a Chinese friend who looks at my Hanzi and gives me feedback.

One other useful thing about writing dialogs without any grids is that I’m getting better at making all of my characters take up roughly the same amount of space.

Olle, Thanks again for all of your ideas – they helped me a lot.

John

There will be other challenges, probably quite soon (although perhaps not about characters since we just finished this one). Stay tuned!

I think I’m done with the testing this time around, we need to do some fixes before the next round, but stay tuned, it probably won’t be long (a couple of weeks is my guess).

Your language challenge engine sounds intriguing, drop me a line if you’re still looking for testers.

Thanks again!

My life overtook me and my challenge suffered but I thought I should post a final comment.

I met my goal of hsk4 vocabulary but stumbled on learning my list of everyday characters from living in China, perhaps because those lists are not so well defined.

I have recently put up a Hanzi Wall Chart so that is going to be my next goal list before the scary hsk 5.

Milestone #1 (April 8th): 985 total EXCEEDED! 1004
Milestone #2 (April 30th): 1100 total Learned 1073
Milestone #3 (May 31st): 1200 total Learned 1100
End of challenge (June 30th): 1300 total Learned 1100

Thanks again Olle for creating this challenge.

Warm Greetings

Georges

Very nice graphics!