Supporting Orthographic Recall of Chinese Characters through Self-Generated Compositional Mnemonic Stories: A Mixed-Methods Pilot Study

Abstract

Mnemonic studies on Chinese characters have mostly tested provided mnemonics against writing outcomes and self-generated mnemonics against meaning recall; whether writing one's own component-based story helps learners write the character has received little attention. I present Nuome, a tool that shows a character's component decomposition next to an editor in which learners write their own story, with live checks on whether the story covers every component and the character's meaning. In a within-subjects pilot, eight L2 learners each learned four self-chosen characters with the story builder and four with a read-only panel showing the same decomposition, with identical writing practice. Descriptively, partial-credit written-recall scores favoured the story builder by 18.8 percentage points immediately (N = 8) and 17.9 points after two days (N = 7); mean study time per character was 1.69 times as long (n = 6); usability was high (SUS 88.1). Interviews yielded three themes: participants felt that composing a story made them attend to components; knowing the components is not the same as being able to write them; and characters differ in how well they suit a story.