I think you misunderstand the problem most students face when learning Chinese characters. Have you any experience teaching Chinese at beginner or intermediate levels? Most people neither can nor want to spend several hours a day for a decade learning how to write characters, so the native route is completely closed for very large majority of students. The goal is not to “capture the history, culture, and the evolution of Chinese thought embedded in these characters”, the goal is to be able to read and write for practical purposes. Nothing stops students from delving deeper into characters if they so wish. I would be interested in hearing what your proposed solution is for the average student of Chinese? You have maybe 5-10 hours a week and you have to cover both the spoken and written language.

Over elaborate artificial machinations don’t capture the history, culture, and the evolution of Chinese thought embedded in these characters. The Chinese don’t have the luxury of using these types of over-elaborations to record their experience. They know their own language better than anybody else, including those Western linguists that have dismissed the etymologia of Chinese characters.

Here, hoping that you will know the difference between a native Chinese and a non-native person forgetting his/her characters:
And that my friend, is why you keep forgetting what a Chinese character really is.

That’s so interesting, and helpful. Thank you, I’ll keep that all in mind as I learn.

The thing is that there are only 400+ syllables in Chinese and you will become familiar with them very soon. It’s not like learning the sounds of, say, English, where you can study for ten years and still encounter syllables or combinations of them you’ve never heard before. When you have studied Chinese for a while, you will have seen 99% of the common syllables and it’s merely a matter of choosing tone and combination of syllables. Personally, I think using mnemonics to learn pronunciation takes too much time and is too complicated. Sure, if you forget a tone, create mnemonic for that, but don’t create mnemonics for everything. I wrote more about that here.

Yes, I can associate meaning with a character, but not sound to a character. Ok, brute force. Good to know, I just need to plow through…

Do you mean that you can associate meaning with a character, but not sound to a character? Or do you mean than when you the Pinyin, you can’t recall the character? If you’re at a basic level and going through the radical list, it will take some brute force to learn the basic components. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially when it comes to the sounds.

I think character recognition and writing are too separate but obviously related skills. You can be very good at reading without being very good at handwriting, but the opposite should be very rare indeed. I don’t think turning on raw squigs make much sense if handwriting isn’t your goal!

I’m just learning single characters. So for example I can remember and know how to write “山” is mountain, but I can’t remember “shān” is mountain.

I had been working on your top 100 radicals list, but have moved into a text book I have that starts similar to your list but then expands into compounds(?). Should I be incorporating sentences into the single words I’m learning? I’m at ultra basic level, so I thought I needed to learn some vocab first…

What do you mean by “My main trouble is actually retaining the word in Chinese rather than retaining the Chinese character”? Do you have context? Sentences? Words? Single characters are really hard to learn sometimes and not very useful.