Has anyone used of considered using a PAO system that uses categories instead of fixed images?
For example, having a set attribute like “sticky” to represent an item, and when you are coming up with an object it can be anything that is sticky, such as a beehive, superglue, or peanut butter.
But the categories would have to be at least somewhat mutually exclusive, because if you had “sticky”, “spiky”, and “round”, there are objects that would fit all of those (a durian fruit).
I’m wondering what your thoughts are if this is something that could be pulled off. I have been trying to figure out a way to create a PAO for Mandarin Chinese vocabulary, and I am going to try this for the tones. My PAO has the standard images for Pinyin starts (b-, p-, m-, etc.) and finals (-ao, -in, -uang, etc.), but I am going to be flexible with the objects since there might be a way for me to thing of an object that fits a certain category while also tying it to the meaning or writing.
For example, for 钱, the Pinyin is qián, and the word means “money”, I might have might have this:
| Person | Action | Flexible Attribute Object | Full Image Including Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Queen Elsa for “q-” | Spinning for “-ian” | “Heavy” for rising tone | Queen Elsa trying to spin a giant, heavy coin |
In the case of this I wouldn’t have memorized the writing, I would probably make a separate image for it. This is just an example of encoding the pronunciation and meaning. It would probably be pointless to do this for something where there are more things to memorize, but in this case there are only a few tones. I would love to hear your thoughts. Is this something that would be helpful or redundant?