Hi, I'm desperately requesting a hook for the banner primitive. I have no idea what the one in the book means, 'think of a banner being a standard. Now think of a crowd reclining before a compass.'??

I just can't come up with a mnemonic with the primitives available: compass/direction and reclining

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT - Okay, I've thought of one but it's quite weak. Hopefully it will do until someone else comes up with one!

You see a BANNER stating "no entrance" so RECLINE in the opposite DIRECTION.

[Katsuo]

You could use the 北枕 (kitamakura) superstition.

I.e. Some people in Japan consider it unlucky to sleep with the head pointing north.

So imagine that every hotel room or bedroom in Japan has a banner set up saying, "No reclining in this direction!"

(If you want the primitives stated in writing order, then change the banner to, "This direction not suitable for reclining!")

I'm not really happy with how I handle banner either, but FWIW:

I just look at the "recline" primitive as the banner itself, flapping over whatever else is there. And I remember the other part as direction, not compass. So it's a banner saying "This way!".

Hoping someone else has a better suggestion than this. :/

[ファブリス]

Virtua_Leaf Wrote:Now think of a crowd reclining before a compass

You might still want to use something else but just in case , this is how I understood it : Heisig uses a "second degree" image here. The banner is often a sign of rally, politics, protestation etc. The compass here is like a direction that everyone follows (maybe even blindly). And I think he used "reclining" in the sense of "surrendering" to the compass 's "directions".

Well he says to picture banner as a standard, so maybe it might help to picture a standard bearer like this one:
http://www.pf-militarygallery.com/images...X-Regt.jpg
They might have ones you might like more in a google image search.

I couldn't help but think of the bus guides around Japan with their little banners leading tourists in the right direction.

All suggestions have been read.

Thanks guys, I'll try one at a time until something sticks.

If it helps, imagine the Boy Scout (common substitute image for Compass which is used for Direction Kanji primitive) holding a Banner (yeah, it's the recline primitive, so the substitution is taken with care).

I had a few issues with Banner myself. I believed he was dead. And he continues to make me think he is dead till he can control the rage within him.

I put on a crotchety old guy's view of the world for this one ... more specifically, a staunchly conservative one with an undying hatred of "lazy, degenerate hippies."

The 1960's in the United States was an era of vast cultural upheaval ... the "hippy" movement in the younger generation were seen as lazy, and unnecessarily inflammatory by the older. They refused to become slaves to the corporate machine of capitalist America (or, as their parents would say, "Why don't you get a job!?"), and were always there to rally for the next political cause (civil rights).

So, knowing that, the two sides of the primitive become easy to remember as the way in which two different generations perceived the movement --


The hippies themselves thought that they were perpetually holding a metaphorical compass, indicating the correct "direction" that they should take the world in (the political activism) ... a BANNER that they can rally under, and lay down before.

The crotchety old suits, on the other hand, saw them as lazy, and all too eager to "recline" on the job, ready to kill America through laziness. The BANNER they rallied under was the cause to draft the lazy recliners, and make upstanding citizens out of 'em.



That's my trick -- it works for me, but I'm an arch-liberal political junkie. ^_^

I hope it helps.

As soon as I encountered "flag" it started to interfere with "banner". So I made "banner" the "(boy scouts') banner" and "flag" the "(national) flag" to make sure I didn't confuse the two.

Since it's an enclosure, I think of it as a big banner held up over whatever it represents.

It's quite a frequent primitive so I just learned it without a mnemonic though.