@Brendan, @Xiao Hu, maybe I misunderstood what you guys mean by mnemonics. I thought it meant coming up with a story or a picture that includes components of a character, to remember the meaning of that character. The same technique can be used for pronunciation, but I fund it somewhat less efective (but still effective). Brendan suggests that the technique only works for a handful of characters, which is a polite way of saying that it does not work, and yet gives the example of decomposing "utmost" into "sun" and "aquire" and decomposing aquire int "ear" and "right hand". So once you have decomposed the character, how do you remember that ear+right hand=acquire? This is where mnemonicks kick in. You can imagine a cultural attache holding his right hand to his ear as he acquires intelligence from a spy, for example.

You still need to use spaced repetition, because ultimately you do not want to be going through the silly story every time you encounter the character, but the story helps while the character has not be anchored in your memory.

Also, using a good book has advantages over unguided study. For example, 部 and 陪 are composed from the same parts, as are 拿 and 拾. A good book will suggest a way of remembering one character, knowing in advance that you will have to learn the other one. So for the latter pair, you will use a story or visualization where the "hand" will be underneath something that you "join together". It is impossible for a self-learner to know in advance if the clues they found will end up being ambiguous. When non-learners open a book for learning Chinese characters, they are amazed how easy it is. The next day they are still able to remember the ten or so characters they learned, because "this one looks like a bug" and "this one looks like two sticks". Of course, such a method is counter-productive very fast and that's why Xiao Hu's method of learning the radicals is much better. I find it too hard to start by learning 200+ radicals and I also suspect that beginners need guidance in properly identifying radicals.

I never use mnemonics in the sense Xiao Hu mentioned, e.g. "累 lei4. When you're tired it makes you want to lei4 down. ". It would be more like: A farmer lay "threads" underneath (BTW note the use of "under" to distinguish from 细) the "field" and moles are "exhausted" trying to get to the crops. The dwarf (dwarf=4th tone - Tuttle book invention) uses a "laser" (lei4) to make sure the threads are in a straight line. As I said, the phonetic part is less effective than the semantic one.