Hi Tony,
Just a thought: In remembering the kana I have to use my own creativity, because I’m of a different culture. Meaning: the idea of Heisig working with images, for me is a very good one. The only point is that most of those images do not work, because I’m from another cultural background (and language), so they don’t ring any bells. Some are excellent to understand f.e. the row, row, row your boot 3 for Ro is perfect, but others seem so far fetched I don’t even know where to start with my understanding. F.e. tossing puppytails and hairpins. There it’s much more simple to think that Dutch cows say ‘mu’ and drink from an indoor water-basin which looks like む. And Ra is much easier to remember as a strange 5, because strange in Dutch is ‘rare’ (pronounced られ). I enjoy finding those little helping hands out by myself, but maybe it’s something to notice that for learning the kana, every country/cultural background needs its own specified version of Heisig’s book.
Best,
Dun
I think that many people aren't crazy about the stories with puppydog tails and boomerangs and such, but there is a reason why Heisig chooses such odd objects to make stories with: first, he wants to create stories that are *not* mundane or everyday, because stories like that are easy to forget. Stranger stories and images seem to stick in the mind better, and are more difficult to confuse the details of.
Heisig tries to avoid using the individual shape of a single かな to create a pictographic representation for a similar reason. I fell into this trap when I was learning the かな myself. For example, I tried to remember さ as a "samurai" and ち as a "cheerleader", and drew little faces around the characters to try to learn the shapes. Shapes are hard to "memorize", though, and as a result it took me months before I could always remember which way those characters face. The result is that I frequently confused the two. There are many "Learn the Kana" books that draw little pictures for each kana, but none of them are particularly well known for making learning the かな significanltly easier. If it was easy to learn the form of line drawings, then it would be almost as easy to memorize the shapes of the かな, and no pictures would be needed in the first place!
If you use the common parts, then there is actually a lot less to learn. Each element of ら is present in other かな, for example, so if you learn it as a strange 5 then your effort in learning ら is not aided by (and does not aid) the learning of other かな. Also, incorporating the fact that ら contains a "puppy dog tail" and a つ shape will focus your attention on the similarities between this and other かな, and have the effect of improving your handwriting.
Some of the stories in RtK are admittedly pretty bad (especially in the カタカナ section), but I think that the basic method is very good, and shouldn't be subverted. Learning the かな using images is certainly possible, but trying to do that with 2000+ kanji will almost certainly doom you to failure. =(