I've been working on RtK for about 6 weeks now and I have been spending probably too much of my time on it. Due to my daily habits I have spent most of my time learning new kanji whilst walking around, so I have been making up pretty much all of my own stories. As a result of this, many of the primitive elements, especially those which appear often, have come to take on a personality of their own and I now see them as characters in a rather elaborate play.
So for example; fingers is "the man with long fingers," (slightly evil perhaps) crotch is "the man with the big codpiece," (a rather lonely and tragic figure 寂しい) sheep is "the sheep captain" (a sometimes righteous explorer 義), turkey "the turkey hermit" (who really does seem to display some of the characteristics of a religious hermit, and he appears alongside the kanji for hermit 催, which I didn't even know at the time of naming him; you can only imagine how happy I was!), wheat is "the market gardener" (who is a wealthy land owner who thinks himself something of a fist fighter 秀) amongst others. And it seems to me like often times the kanji in which they appear are subtly related. (I like darth vader 壊, top right, but he doesn't get out much)
I'm just wondering how many other people do this, and if so what characters do you have for the primitives and what sort of characteristics do they have?
By the way, I think Mr. T is Joan of Arc, but don't tell him that because I don't want to be that fool to pity.
Evil_Dragon
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2008-08-21
Posts: 683
To me it works crazy well. State of mind is just too abstract. I tried to make up stories with that keyword, but there was never a clear image that was concrete, funny, scary or ridiculous enough for me to remember - that's where characters come in. Now the Dalai Lama, a memorable person I can relate to, appears in lots of stories, giving clever advice to people or more often than not doing crazy stuff like bullying Nelson Mandela or dressing up as a prostitute (no offense intended, I respect him). Those images will never leave!
If you are still halfway through it's not too late to start using alternate keywords. As mentioned before I used "state of mind" before and as time passed, they somehow stuck. However, it was never nearly as fun as imagining stories with the Dalai Lama.
Some more characters I use are 竹 Kung Fu Panda, 斤 Jack Nicholson (The Shining, anyone?), 彳 Super Mario (no real connection here, I just wanted someone memorable as this appears quite often).
If a Kanji uses none of my characters but I still need someone memorable (with superhuman abilities etc.), it is usually Chuck Norris. Or Donald Duck if he has to do something ridiculous.
Last edited by Evil_Dragon (2009 January 03, 9:48 pm)
I've done a fair bit of RtK1, but I've still got quite a lot to do and I'm not afraid to change the stories around a bit; to be honest I think that two stories can be better than one - gives you two ways of getting to the answer. So as I get the state of mind kanji thrown up by the SRS I will probably start linking in the Dalai Lama to the story. Thanks again for the tip.
I already used Jack Nicholson for the puppet, and guess who the fellow on the left is, 阿: yeah it's Bob Marley. Who can save Africa? Bob Marley can!
Using characters is definitely much more fun that using dull abstract keywords, but I suppose you need to keep a balance between people and objects to make good plots, and maybe even a few locations. Maybe a reanalysis of the kanji to distribute the primitives into these three categories would make the whole process easier.
KanjiHanzi
Banned
From: Scandinavia
Registered: 2008-12-16
Posts: 127
bandwidthjunkie wrote:
I've kept alter as alter, except on the left I distinguish it as Zen alter, and to be honest it has worked really well. But of course different things work for different people.
Yes, it's a pretty good picture since you can put anything on top of it. Nevertheless, I have followed the advice given by many here: use human characters whenever you can, and I've found that the very "movement" of a Real Person helps to vivify the images, so to say. For me.
My Mr Fingers is an actor known for his expressive HAND MOVEMENTS. Ms. Thread is a TV personality also known for something like this etc. etc. They just have to obey my sick imagination and perform as I direct them :-) (They should KNOW!)
Last edited by KanjiHanzi (2009 January 04, 1:32 pm)
