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Something that is helping a huge amount - Predulus - 2015-07-18
I've been doing RTK on and off for years ... mostly off, lol, which is why it's taking so long.
A few weeks ago I saw a vid on youtube (I think it was by AbroadInJapan), saying how for him, when he sees the "Ear" primitive, he thinks of Will Smith.
Now, I've used the odd celebrity in my mnemonics before, but what I am doing now, is basically trying to find a suitable celebrity, famous person or fictional character for most of my primitives.
This has two advantages:
1) For me, it is a lot easier to remember an interesting celebrity or character than a simple object like "page" or "cow"
2) Because celebrities and characters have a lot of characteristics and events they have been in, it is easy to incorporate them in vivid stories. I find this makes the stories soooooo much easier to remember!
A few examples:
古 (old) - Yoda. Yoda is about 900 years old, so the little green Jedi makes the perfect primitive here
木 (tree) - Treebeard, the eldest of the Ents in Lord of the Rings
東 - (East) - Sauron from Lord of the Rings (Sauron's home of Mordor is in the East, and the kanji kind of looks to me vaguely like a helmet with horns coming across the top)
田 - (brain) - Davros from Dr. Who - basically an (evil) brain on wheels
火 - (fire) - The Human Torch from the Fantastic Four
So a few compounds...
枯 (wither) - In an out-of-character display, Yoda zaps Treebeard with force lightning until he becomes totally withered up and dry
凍 - (frozen) - Galadriel (one of the only powers strong enough to oppose Sauron) has frozen him in a block of ice
畑 - (farm) - Davros has his secret base set up in the barn of a farm. The Human Torch flys through, igniting all the hay and foiling Davros' plans
So that's the idea ... some of these stories may not suit you, but they are more vivid to me using these characters than just simple physical objects. It often works really well if the two characters are from very different worlds - it creates a mentally jarring effect which makes the combination more memorable.
Try it out if you are having trouble recalling stories easily! Using stories made with characters / people I can often go through a new review set of say 30 cards, without getting a single one wrong!
Something that is helping a huge amount - Myrddhin - 2015-07-18
While I haven't done kanji (or Japanese) in years, a lot of reading up on and testing mnemonics suggests that looking for more concrete images for various primitives could be advantageous. Like the primitive "state-of-mind". This is something that's very difficult to visualize due to its abstract nature, and so it would be a good idea to come up with a concrete image to use beforehand (that doesn't necessarily have to be related to the etymological meaning, which Heisig already often threw out in the first place), like, say, a brain wearing an orange traffic cone. Also, for the keywords, the link-word method could be useful, to create concrete images of otherwise impossible to visualize words, say, 'decameron', which could be visualized as 'David Cameron tying up and eating a sun' (forgive me for the simple examples, I haven't touched Heisig since 2009
).Edit: polishing up a bit
Something that is helping a huge amount - Predulus - 2015-07-18
For the primitive for "Wildly emotional state of mind" (the left hand part of 忙), I use the "Leave Britney alone!!" guy who has been memed so much. So easy to remember him crying and whining about so many things
Something that is helping a huge amount - SellingTokyo - 2015-07-18
the PAO system is used for long strings of numbers, for example to remember Pi or something:
http://mt.artofmemory.com/wiki/Person-Action-Object_%28PAO%29_System
I agree my recall has gotten better as my images have gotten more concrete; Instead of "mouth" for 口, I use Pamela Anderson for example. The reason is I would really confuse whether it would be 口 or 言 on the left side as I was recalling stories. So for 言 I chose Stephen Wright ("who's that turkey?", you may ask), yes because his use of words and deadpan delivery makes for great stories but also because the image is radically different compared to Pam.
I also have a friend who has this very creepy, lonely uncle, so that really worked out (for my stories).
Usually you find a famous person in the top stories on this site, and sometimes you have to dig down 50 stories to find one that works for you, and probably in very few cases you have to buckle down and use your imagination.