I find it hard to come up reliable images involving "words", "saying" or "speech". Perhaps because a lot of my other stories involve someone saying something already.

The radical looks a bit like a jack-in-the-box and it's certainly a vivid object.

Does anyone have any opinions on whether it's a good idea to adopt it or is there some hidden pitfall I'll run into later (I'm currently at about 570)?

Personally, I find it kind of important to know what the radicals actually mean so I only change radical meanings if I know I'll be able to remember the original meaning (for example, Spiderman is perfect to use in stories and easy to remember as thread).

This is just a special interest for me since I like kanji, I want to know the names of the radicals as well. As for simply learning them for common use, I doubt it matters much.

Well it's already quite well burnt into me that it means words the problem is that words are not easily visualised, at least not without coming close to another primitive or keyword.

Knowing the.. real... meaning of the radicals can also give clues as to what the Kanji might mean. Not always, but sometimes

Regardless, I think remembering the Kanji's more important. If it doesn't work for you, find a different mnemonic that does. I kept with words/say but did have my fair share of problems with it. Maybe instead you could make it the image of a famous speech you're really familiar with? Then associate all those Kanji with that radical with that speech.

Anyways, if you go with your route (Jack in the box) you won't hit any conflicts with that specific primitive name through RtK1 (all I've done, I went on my own after that) and I would think it would stick better than say/words does.

[Katsuo]

Overall, it's a good idea to change some primitives to stronger images because it often makes remembering the characters much easier.

Possible pitfalls are:

1) You may get confused if you don't do it in an organised manner
2) You usually can't share stories with other people
3) You may unwittingly choose a word used later in the book

Like the example in Tobberoth's post, I try to use an alternative which is related to the original.

So for 言 "words, say," etc. I chose "keitai" (portable phone). It's related in both meaning and shape: You "say" things into a keitai, and 言 looks a bit like a keitai (first stroke is the aerial, the "mouth" is the bit you speak into).

Having said all that, I think jack-in-the-box could work well too.

I always used microphone. It does look like a microphone after all.

To me it's a sharpie. It works out really cool.

There aint no problem using that. I personally used words because it was so simple and i associated it with anything written down, spoken, or said.

to me, 'jack in the box' seems too concrete, i cant see myself making any story with it.

edit: typoes

Can you visualize it as words on a page with the lines being the words and the square on the bottom being a page or a mouth?

Jack-in-the-box is pretty clever. You may run into problems reading kanji-keyword later, because you won't always be able to remember the keyword from the kanji. This is because (in most cases*) the "words" character will act as a cue to the general meaning of the kanji. The problem is that most kanji in the "words" group pertain to communication of some type. So just make sure to make it a *talking* jack in the box...