I saw a post on here a while ago in which someone made a PAO system for all of the Japanese character sounds. I was wondering if anybody has tried, or maybe thinks it would be worthwhile to make a PAO mapping more broadly to try to capture words.
For example, there would be all of the standard Japanese character sounds, in addition to sounds that you commonly hear outside in other languages, like “va, vi vu, ve, vo”. And so if you wanted to encode the word “Vegetable”, you could just have your PAO images for “ve-je-ta-be-lu”.
The general purpose for this would be to help memorize words that a mnemonic image doesn’t readily come to mind. I am aware that you can just come up with mnemonic images, you don’t need a system for this.
Also, I wonder if coming up with PAO mappings for these basic syllables would drive you insane because you would think of repetitive images everywhere.
My mappings would look something like this:
Numbers
Syllables
0-4
ba, bi, bu, be, bo
5-9
da, di, du, de, do
10-14
fa, fi, fu, fe, fo
15-19
ga, gi, gu, ge, go
20-24
ha, hi, hu, he, ho
… and so on for all of the PAO numbers, including syllables for the letters “v”, “l”, etc. At the end would be “a, i, u, e, o” for numbers 90-94, and the past five would possibly be for -r-, -l-, for clarity more than utility because it would otherwise be repetitive.
Its quite cool how far you can take PAO and combination systems for these related uses.
Do you already have a PAO? Or 00 to 99?
If your focus is on the consonant - vowel, you might be able to make a consonant - vowel 00 to 99 based on the major system. You could just remember in your mind that G is 6, or 7 is H (if 6 or 7 is already mapped to something else)
You could also try to make places for each of these consonant - vowel combinations, and use the place as the grounding for the first few letters?
For example, Ga would be my garden, Ge would be at a friend called Genevieve’s house, GI, would be the bottle shop (for gin), Go would be at a traffic light? And on and on…
I’d be very tempted to match it to some sort of number system if you had one, so that
sa さ 00 - ss - Zeus, shi し 01 - st - Soot sprite, su す 02 - sn - Sin, se せ 03 - sm - Sam, so そ 04 - sr - Zorro
then you could keep on with the dakuten / rendaku versions:
za ざ 05 - zl - Zeal, ji じ 06 - zsh - Zatchbell, zu ず 07 - zk - Zack, ze ぜ 08 - zf - Safety, zo ぞ 09 - zp - Zapp Brannigan
t/d could go with the teens, p / b with the nineties, etc, leaving the aieuo and n, which could go in the fifties, since there’s no l in japanese, and the hs can go in the eighties since there’s only sort of barely an f or v in Japanese.
If you don’t have a number system, though, it may be worth thinking about their kanji relatives. For example, さ comes from 左, meaning left. If you associate any person with being left handed, say Ned Flanders, then that should make a completely acceptable PAO.
I use a sort of PAO for a while (or rather PO since I dislike fixed actions). Person was the first syllable, and object was the second.
あいうえお are respectively Aoki, Isako, Uotani, Eboshi, Osono
かきくけこ Karushifa, Kiki, Kureno, Querida, Kokeshi
Etc.
Basically for each kana/syllable I could use a person beginning with that kana/syllable. I usually came up with people on the fly (It helped that I used to watch tons of anime/serie in Japanese so knew a lot of Japanese characters/people).
But I never finished formalizing it. I felt it would have taken too long to fill up the full list, for not so much use in the end: it’s useful to encode a word that you struggle to remember because it gives a starting point (tells you how it sounds, at least the first two syllables) but it’s somewhat slow both to encode and decode.
