RECENT TOPICS » View all
Fingers / Shrek primitive?
Index » RtK Volume 1
- « Previous
- 1
- Next »
Shrek is an ogre who is fond of "human finger snacks" (think Twix).
I first thought of using severed human fingers, to make a distinctive image which would be less prone to confusion with actions or persons.
From there I thought of using the severed fingers as forensic evidence, or as a snack for an ogre. The first one didn't come up in any of my stories, but the second one worked very well. You can find some references in my stories for 657 "pinch", 659 "fingers", 665 "propose", etc.
By extension the "fingers" primitive almost became Shrek himself, but my personal preference was to always involve the fingers in the stories to keep a reference to the chinese radical (which is in fact a compressed "hand" if I remember well).
Someone also came up with "Fingers the thief" which is a great idea as well. In fact you could easily switch between both, with Fingers the thief living close to Shrek and very afraid of loosing his precious fingers, and hence leaving Shrek's property alone. 
thegeezer3 wrote:
when it came to recalling Id simply overlook that they were a critical part to the kanji. I mean litterally every story involves someone touching, holding something so it led to confusion.
Agree. Concerning this and my previous post I'd like to explain a little further the reasoning behind the "severed fingers" primitive:
What I did with the "fingers" primitive, is turn it into an image where you can visualize the primitive itself, as a complete, separate object. Hence I came up with the image of "severed fingers".
It was not for the purpose of having a gruesome, rememberable image, although this can be useful too. Interestingly, I never actually pictured the "severed finger snacks" that Shrek is fond of. I always picture the character Shrek himself. So the "fingers" became Shrek by extension, but in my mind I like to know it as "fingers", so that I can directly think of the corresponding chinese radical.
It's something I found even more important when experimenting with kanji-chains. In kanji-chains, when you have several kanji which share primitives (as is often the case in ON yomi groups), you need to make sure to picture each kanji as a complete entity in its own distinct location, even if you have to duplicate some characters several times (such as Shrek here if you had a kanji chain with several kanji involving "fingers")... otherwise there will be confusion during recall.
It helps the recall if you can make sure that your primitives are stand-alone, separate, complete objects which give little or no way to confusion.
Of course you don't have to vividly imagine mnemonics all the time. I'm just getting into the "technicalities".
@MightyMatt : it's perfecly fine if you can work with the "regular", hands, fingers, eyes, etc. I've done it many times too. But on occasion, or for some people, this is more difficult so the elaborated version is useful. In any case we're in mnemonics territory so we shouldn't be shy of using our imaginative prowesses 
johnzep wrote:
I have a bit of trouble sometimes distinguishing between my different people I use for the person radical, the thread radical, and the left part of 待 radical (Mr. T, Spiderman, The Flash)
Yeah, although most agree by experience, and Heisig himself suggests, that using a colourful character can help memorization for "person" and by extension, other abtsract primitives; Heisig's other point about sticking to one image per primitive is still valid.
So using one person of your choice for the person primitive (especially such colourful characters as super-heroes) is probably best.
So regarding cracky's comment above, I think it's ok to use characters for several primitives if you don't overdo it. If you take care to use distinct characters (i.e. a political person, a super-hero, a music celebrity, ...) then you shouldn't be confused.
Several members also said they used a "group of persons" succesfully as a primitive image. Hence you can have a group of super-heroes as your "person", but the logic is still the same, for purposes of the image, it is always the group then that should be emphasized.
When a colourful character is used to help with a primitive, I've found it was easy to switch between the primitive itself and the associated character. So with "fingers" I often used Shrek, but also used "fingers" without any associated character succesfully for easy kanji like 打 "strike". So I effectively used more than one image, but only one character. And there is a relationship between the character and the primitive's "root" image, which helps if I have any doubts during kanji -> keyword recall ("Fingers the thief" was a great example of this). Out of my head, something like "Superman" for "power" would be a good example as well. Sometimes the abstract "power" alone could be sufficient in short, "snappy" mnemonics, other times Superman will come to the rescue
- « Previous
- 1
- Next »