many of us drilled the very basics with memrise - which sometimes can prove counterproductive
one example all courses in here keep teaching me that 朝 means dynasty… however, in the real world 朝 means also “towards”… a person from a production site was trying to explain to me why certain things have to fulfil certain technological requirements… I did not understand his email, because in my head 朝 was “dynasty”, which of course made ∅ sense…
how did you cope with such issues?
i’ve met the dynasty thing again in this remember hanzi Keisig courses, for ex of @crystal92, that is why i’m asking…
EDIT: that Ben’s first courses are ridden with mistakes from Pleco, was discussed more than enough in old forums… but after using those courses, it is still difficult for me to remember simple tjhings, such as that 或 means more often “or” (than “perhaps”). The newer “official” courses for English for Chinese speakers give 或 as “or”, not as “perhaps”…
I just wanted to say that I have had the same problem. Especially with single characters they are used as components with a certain meaning, but in 2 character words they will have a slightly different interpretation.
I know there are many of them but I am struggling to think of any off the top of my head. But, as an extremely simple example… one may believe “要” as “to want” from memrise as opposed to reality where it often means “I’m going to do something”. Same thing with “对” and “就” which have many meanings in English. I have debated making a course based on this too…but the alternate definitions often exist in the memrise courses…Sometimes the primary definitions are not the primary/most common definition in common speech. But as I read more Chinese I will start recording these and see if there are enough of them to make a sort of “reading” course.
As a person who lives in China, I am blessed by having an easy way to cope with the limits of simple definitions that only look at the character from one angle. Why? Because I am constantly able to hear and speak and read in an authentic environment.
With that thought in mind, the simple answer to coping with only seeing one side of a language is to find other ways to learn and use the language. (including using multiple apps or programs to learn at the same time, etc.)
Memrise is a GREAT help to someone who is already learning how to speak Chinese in a different environment, but wants to quickly build vocabulary and character recognition.
But if Memrise is your primary source for Chinese, then I would recommend taking courses that teach individual characters and courses that teach full words at the same time. Also, be quick to use another resource to see how the words are used in real life.
Even if you do use all available resources, many characters are used so randomly that it is difficult to find a connection between the “main” meaning of the character and the “new” meaning of a word. WHICH IS WHEN MEMRISE’S MNEMONIC SYSTEM IS SO HELPFUL.
A very famous simple example is 东西 which means ‘thing’ or ‘stuff’. The first character, 东, means east, and if you learned it as ‘stuff’ that would be completely wrong, yet when placed with 西 (meaning west) they turn into ‘stuff’…which is a completely different meaning.
I don’t think learning the basic meaning is counterproductive, as long as you can use it as a stepping stone to later learn the other meanings that character has.
Memrise is the best for the rote learning part, if one needs Mandarin only for daily life outside work
But… in the real life - such as my own real life, which at the moment means dealing with hightech production etc - HSK stuff and definitions gathered from Pleco and the likes are not only far from allowing the simplest communication, but even sometimes counterproductive.
I am doing all sort of (private) courses now - a ton of them… Unortunatelly, deadlines don’t wait for me to first make comprehensive learning tools and also to finish learning…
does anybody know this one character? it is one single character, not 伟 plus knife
unfortunately, my current project will not benefit from it (deadline is the middle of the next week 
)