Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Sino-Plutonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1. 199 1 )
lip untouched as the epitome of modesty. Needless to say, mne-
monic techniques of this kind aren't good for anything but ad hoc
memorization of isolated lexical .items, such as "boning up" for a
test in high school or college, where foreign languages are all
too often treated as bothersome requirements that students will
never use once they graduate. True proficiency can obviously
never be acquired through the purposeful imposition of an alien
phonology and irrelevant semantics (not to mention unwarranted
cultural expectations) onto the structures of a language that
must be used spontaneously and without self-consciousness. We
will revisit to this point shortly.
Now, however, let us return to the topic that prompted this long
digression into Harry Lorayneb bag of tricks: the memorization
of Chinese characters. We have all seen books that attempt to
teach kanji by rationalizing their shapes. They start with a
picture that somehow illustrates the "meaning" of the kanjf, and
then, by a process of gradual distortion and transformation, move
from the picture to the visual shape of the kanji itself. Today,
there are even computer programs that use animation to enliven
the metamorphosis. The underlying assumption behind all these
materials is evidently that the llmeaningless,ll unfamiliar, and
hard to distinguish shapes of the kanji befuddle the student. By
seeing how an inscrutable shape like -6 can be derived from a
picture of a horse, for example, the student allegedly acquires a
trusty mnemonic link. What do Lorayneb professional insights
tell us about this strategy of pictorial rationalization?
In order to make a proper evaluation, we need to specify
goals in terms of which we can measure success or failure.
Suppose the goal is to recall the of a hundred ken ji
at sight as quickly as possible. (This is analogous to Harry
correctly calling out the name of the first person to stand up in
a large group of people he had not met before greeting each as he
or she entered ,the room.) For the sake of argument, let's assume
that the "meanings" are expressed as English tag wordsLo; the
only qualification is that the tags must reflect the sense of
words in which the kanjf are actually found in written Japanese.
The appearance of a kanjJ is to a person's face as its tag is the
person's name, so the student needs, according to Lorayne, to see
in the image of the kanjd a bizarre thing or event that so_mehow
brings to mind the tag word. For example, I could imagine 3 as
the face of a man in profile, facing left, wincing in anguish,
his right hand slapped over his brow and eyes (crossed lines at
top depict fingers), screaming in despair at the top of his lungs
(mouth wide open, four dots for teeth and tongue) in a hoarse
voice. Hoarse--horse. No good seeing a horse ftself in the
kanjd--too logical! If Lorayne is right, pictorial rationalization
is wrong.