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With so much emphasis on "stories" I thought I would share an interesting article from "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", but first here's a quote from the introduction of Remembering the Kanji Volume I (by James W. Heisig) :

Quote:By imaginative memory I mean the faculty to recall images created purely in the mind, with no actual or remembered visual stimuli behind them. When we recall our dreams we are using imaginative memory.

This is the kind of memory that James Heisig encourages us to use.

Writing stories, as in this site 's Study area, is an exercise that can help build concentration and evoke images in one's mind. If the story doesn't suggest any interesting images then it's very likely that the corresponding kanji will be forgotten.

Another way that I like to think about it, is that the brain is a "3d memory". Creating images in one's mind is simply using this faculty of the brain to conceptualize pretty much anything, even things for which we have no memory.

Here is a document on Mental Imagery.

Of particular interest for us is the section 4.2 "Mnemonic Effects of Imagery".

I will quote the last paragraph :

Quote:The findings of this extensive experimental research program on the mnemonic effects of imagery, can be crudely summarized as the discovery of two principal effects. First of all, it was demonstrated quite incontrovertibly that subjects who follow explicit instructions to use simple imagery based mnemonic techniques to memorize verbal material (typically lists of apparently random words, or word pairs) remember it very much better than subjects who do not use such techniques (Bower, 1970, 1972; Bugelski, 1970; Paivio, 1971). Secondly, and somewhat more controversially, Paivio and others claim to have shown that imagery plays a large role in verbal memory even when the experimental subjects are not given explicit instructions to form imagery, and make no deliberate effort to do so. To demonstrate this, Paivio and his associates initially determined quantitative imagery values for each of a long list of nouns: that is to say, the relative ease with which subjects could generate a mental image appropriate to the word, or the likelihood that an image would spontaneously be evoked by the word in question (Paivio, Yuille, & Madigan, 1968).[12] (On the whole, concrete nouns such as ?cat? have high imagery values, and abstract nouns such as ?truth? have low ones, although there are exceptions to this rule.) Once these quantitative imagery values were established, Paivio was able to show, in various experimental designs, that words with high imagery values were consistently remembered significantly better than those with lower ones, quite regardless of any conscious intent on the subjects' part to form relevant images (Paivio, 1971, 1983, 1991).

Source : http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/#4.2

Thanks for shwowing us.

Does it mention any particuarly good methods of making images of things which arn't solid nouns?

I've only read your quote hehe.

norgus Wrote:Does it mention any particuarly good methods of making images of things which arn't solid nouns?

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=104
or more specifically
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1930853...ue&ie=UTF8

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norgus Wrote:Does it mention any particuarly good methods of making images of things which arn't solid nouns?

Good question. I also faced difficulty with many of the abstract keywords as I call them, those with "low imagery value" as described in the article above.

I used various tricks through RTKI :

- look for the full definition of the keyword on dictionary.com for example, the latin roots of the word can help you build an image. It's also very helpful in getting a concept distinct from other similar keywords, since no two definitions will be the same in the dictionary.

example: abet

dictionary.com roots of the word :
[Middle English abetten, from Old French abeter, to entice : a-, to (from Latin ad-. See ad-) + beter, to bait; see bheid- in Indo-European Roots.]

We already have "entice", "encourage" and "urge", but here we can play with the idea of the bait, even make a play of word .. to abet with ... "a bait" . Thus "a bait" is pronunced close to "abet". And now you have a "solid" word with "bait", and you can easily find images for it. And on top of that the bait image gives a distinct concept from the other keywords (urge, encourage, entice) with the idea of urging and helping on someone onto something by "baiting" them.

- use a play of words if you can't remember the keyword easily, it is a memory association, but still try to keep it related to the concept in order to facilitate kanji to keyword remembering (when reading).

Example: I had a story with "slow" that involved the nationalist guy (or "flag-man"), sheeps, and a road. But I kept hesitating during recall, the story was not very good. Finally I thought of a new memory association , the dance that is called the "slow". Now it is a more "solid" word, it is easy to picture people dancing a slow ballad. I kept my original story and image, and just added a couple persons stuck by the sheep on the road, and instead of waiting in the car they get out and start dancing a "slow" to pass the time while the sheep take forever to cross the road. What's importnat here is that the "slow dance" is still related to the original keyword and concept, and thus when I see the kanji, and I recall the image, and the "slow dance", I recall the right concept of the keyword, so it works well from keyword to kanji, but from kanji to keyword as well.

The book I mentioned suggests using the sound-alike method (sometimes known as word link) to make an intangible words tangible. The first example it shows is pronoun. They have you picture a golf pro who just happens to be a nun. She's a pro nun.