I'm just about to begin Chapter 27, and need to select my 'person.' Having read this thread Whose Your "Person" (Lesson 27)? I've decided to go with Mr. T because there seems to be a lot of good stories out there already for when my own creativity comes up short (and it's those person images that have the best effect.)

However, this got me thinking of how many other people I've populated my kanji with, and from reading through others' stories I've noticed how frequently characters and different people come up - so I thought a thread dedicated to some of the interesting people we've come up with (hopefully only those who've really helped us along) could help spread the wealth.

One of my favourites has been Edward Scissorhands. I use him for the FINGER primitive. He can also become Johnny Depp. So, for example: with TOUCH: Johnny Depp is in sub-Saharan Africa when he sees a WOMAN carrying a VASE on her head. She is so beautiful he wants to TOUCH her. (And being Johnny Depp she says yes.)

Or: SKILL: Edward Scissorhands has a lot of SKILL when it comes to trimming BRANCHES.)

I have a whole Edward Scissorhands series I'd like to type into this site.

Anyway, I also use Snape from Harry Potter as my Taskmaster, and Foghorn Leghorn as my Turkey. OK, he's not a turkey, but neither is LARGE a St. Bernard, but it works, like this: QUASI Foghorn: "That's not me son. That's just a statue of me made out of ICE. It looks like me son, but it's not the real me. It's a QUASI me. You know what that means, boy? That means it's not the real me, it's made out of ICE ..."
How can you not love Foghorn?

I've found that in addition to using solid objects, like TREE, MOUNTAIN, FISH, etc, that using people or character as mnemonics for a primitive works great.

Thoughts?

BTW, I can't figure out how to insert kanji into this thread. Advice would be greatly appreciated.

My 3 favorites:
Colonel Sanders/KFC chicken for fingers. very versatile. (eg. the Colonel feels so lonely, he makes himself a life sized chicken wrap to embrace 抱)
Hitler for taskmaster. (Usually I imagine a gay man in a Hitler get-up)
and of course, Mr. T.
These personifications take on their own life as you learn new Kanji and add more stories. I have found personifications to be some of my strongest stories.
I just think of the Colonel and I start laughing. But I also find myself craving his chicken now...

BTW I'm not sure if you already tried this, but the easiest way I find to insert kanji is just to copy and paste. Or if you know the reading, you can change your keyboard input mode to Japanese and type it in hiragana then hit the space bar that should work too. Hope that helps..

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There's been quite a few topics indirectly discussing the person primitive. I've edited the topic title so hopefully this one will gather more ideas together.

Here's some related topics :
"Person", no. 951. What's good?

This one was fun :
Fingers / Shrek primitive?

I think that for a character to work as a primitive, that you want to pick someone with such deep associations that the person has become a metaphor for their unique characteristics. Not just any character will do - you want ones that are ICONS for what they are.

Rizzo's story for melancholy 憂 as Hamlet was a stroke of genius; It doesn't recur that often (so far for me only in tenderness 優) but when you do encounter it, "Hamlet" captures a huge chunk of strokes in one easy to remember package.

Not a specific person, but a specific group: "Haibane" works really well for me to remember the 羽 feathers primitive. I almost always reach for Haibane when building a story for a kanji with 羽 in it, because I have such strong associations with those characters after watching Haibane Renmei.

I had a string of stories where I took 者 to be Tokiko Mima from "Key the Metal Idol". That one didn't work out in the long run - the early stories worked very well and stuck, but that primitive gets used a lot, and it seemed that Tokiko ran out of steam. I found that Pinocchio worked out better...and of course Pinocchio is the Ur story that KtMI was based on. Much as I liked Tokiko, she wasn't the root metaphor in my mind for a puppet becoming human - Pinocchio was, so he works better.

I'm following the pack and using Spiderman for 糸 with some misgivings, just because I've never been that interested in the comic or movies, so I don't share as rich a set of associations with that character as I'd like. But he's enough of a cultural icon I'm hoping he'll work out for me.

The only personification I've used systematically is Lieutenant-Commander Data for "state of mind". It's one of my favorite characters, I've watched every episode of TNG many times, and he's perfect for imagining weird situations related to emotions.

Other than that, I don't really like personifications that much, I've tried a few others but most of the time I find that I'd rather make a story using the meaning of the primitive.

Since I'm scheduled to begin studying chapter 27 tonight, I'm also going to have to chose a character to represent 人. Captain Picard is a popular choice and it would be an obvious choice for me, but since I've already used Data, there could be interferences with some of my Data stories.

I don't find Mr. T very inspiring. I like the A-Team but I don't really think there is enough there to really help me make memorable stories.

I've just had a crazy idea while writing this though. Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap, in each story he would be someone else. That seems like fun. I don't know if that would work or just be confusing.

I realized my Sam Beckett idea would have been very difficult in practice and I don't need to make things harder than they already are.

So I've decided to use... Harry Potter!! I think it's a good choice, the magical universe easily allows weird stories to still make some sense. And having read the books several times I have a lot of material to use as inspiration. The movies have provided me images that I can use when visualizing my stories. But most importantly, it's easy and fun to make up stories involving Harry Potter.

I've used him already in a few stories but never as a primitive personification. I'll just have to adjust them slightly to avoid confusion. None of them required Harry specifically, so I'll just replace him with Ron or another Hogwarts student in those stories.

This is probably the most culturally sensitive part of the mnemonics: I had no idea who Mr T was and had to look him up on Wikipedia when I first saw him popping up in people's stories. Similarly, I have no idea who most of the other suggested characters are. :-)

On the other hand, when I was doing my reviews a long time ago, I used 'Karlsson p? taket' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsson-on-the-Roof) - something that English-speakers are unlikely to be familiar with. :-)

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Codexus Wrote:So I've decided to use... Harry Potter!

This should be a popular choice! I guess you can work a story/mnemonic with a wizard and pretty much any kind of primitives Also there is plenty of material from the movies to work on.

Just remembered another specific person that has worked really well for me in stories. Probably only works if you were around in the 70's (and didn't take Cheech and Chong's lifestyle to heart, so that you still remember that you were there...):

Cheech Marin works great for that Mexican taking a siesta in thirst 渇, audience 謁, brown 褐, hoarse, 喝, etc.