Most of the kanji associated with heart are just talking about emotions rather than an actual beating heart, and its all kind of vague. It works best when I immediately jump from the keyword to the story or part of the story, which is what I tried to do.

I'm still finding frame 609 (想) wickedly difficult to remember, mostly because inter- isnt really very good, someone should have assigned it an alternate meaning of something we can actually use in a story.

Also, 602, Loyalty (忠)
"Your loyalty is to what's *in* your *heart*." is just too vague to make it memorable. I don't want to end up brute-force memorising the story because that defeats the point of heisig entirely.  I feel there needs to be a connection to something more specific. For example, the loyalty story I wrote:

"#Loyalty# was something *Richard the Lionheart*'s evil brother knew nothing about, for *in*side him no *heart*, lion or otherwise, could be found at all."

I think it creates a direction connection to the specific (lack of) loyalty in a very memorable and famous story, with a spooky twist that he has no heart at all.

Still, horses for courses!


Anyway, I have added a bunch of stories from frame 595 to frame 615, using my idea. I wonder if anyone with a spare few minutes would let me know what they think?

you can have my babies for that one

i tried breaking up and jiggling it around and poking it but thats a genius story!]


would it be madness to do that? to simply swap all the primatives with much easier to remember ones? like heart > richard the lionheart and cave > bat cave etc.?

theres a certain level of caution because you might screw up for something later ... but recently my speed has dropped to like 20 kanji a week instead of 200 a week it was before.

Last edited by Wizard (2008 June 24, 1:53 am)

Except that the sun in question is actually an eye... I'll recommend aizeya's story for this one.

aizeya wrote:

A common carving in the side of a tree is "I (eye) heart so-and-so". Just imagine the tree itself trying to understand that concept!

A little word play there, but it worked for me.

Likewise, for box I borrowed this one:

ziggr wrote:

A bento box has bamboo mat in some of the the wooden partitions, to keep the eyeballs from rolling all over. -- Because I can never remember inter-.

I think we can agree with the last part.

Top stories only have limited value. The real gems are often elsewhere.

Last edited by woelpad (2008 June 24, 3:16 am)

Wizard,

I agree that it often helps to make specific stories and avoid concise sentences which seem to fit but do not have a strong image attached. For instance for the loyalty keyword, I imagine a paranoid king who decides that every one of his subjects will have a microchip-bomb inserted in the middle of their heart so he can kill them at will if they are not loyal. And the image I have is the microchip on the top going down towards the middle of a real heart, so it is quite strong.
As for making primitives more concrete, there are persons who decided to use persons for many primitives (with a link to the meaning of the primitive, my preson for the primitive "thread" is spiderman). I do think it helped me, so you could give it a try.

Last edited by nyquil (2008 June 24, 5:11 am)

Creating characters and associating them with Heisig's primitives is very helpful! Often you can specify both in the story, so everyone can use it. If someone doesn't like the character they can change it, but the original primitive is there.

However don't go crazy on creating homemade primitive replacements, if everybody does that the Study area won't work so well. I think associating a character to a primitive works great in the Study area, but replacing the primitive altogether is less effective for sharing purposes and usually not necessary, in my experience.

Wizard wrote:

The top story, is "The concept of love is basically two hearts inter-acting as one."

I am starting to think that phrases like this, although concise, are not the best way to remember the keywords. I wonder if some people are ignoring heisig trying to trick the minds eye, taunt it, tease it, etc.

I agree. That story could work very well for one person who can turn it into an image meaningful to them, and not very well for someone who tried to remember it as is.

That's why it's great if you can write a story that's more evocative like you say.

While the story could be written in a more colourful way, short and sweet isn't bad either, it leaves you to fill in the gaps so there is more freedom for the user of the story and no need to write 15 different variations of the same idea.

Many stories like this could be considered as a kickstart for your own image.

Here you could for example literally visualize two hearts being interlocked.

Wizard wrote:

I'm still finding frame 609 (想) wickedly difficult to remember, mostly because inter- isnt really very good, someone should have assigned it an alternate meaning of something we can actually use in a story.

I think of inter- as lincoln logs.  The eye being the part cut out for the logs to connect.