The Story-Card Catalog

The Form card makes a character make sense; the Story card makes the arbitrary remainder stick. One master rule governs every entry below: the Story encodes only the residue the Form leaves — binding the components into one drawable gestalt, and pinning the part of the sound the Form’s series fails to predict. The First Principles of the Story Card derives that rule and the two axes — 30 character situations crossed with 42 memory levers — this catalog resolves into 34 card-types. The levers come from the Modified Method of Loci and Rules of Effective Memorization; the course material stays private, synthesized here. Five of the 34 are the built showcases from Story Cards as Memory Scenes; the rest are open.

How to use it. Read the character’s situation off its Form — composition type, how far the reading drifted, which component is empty or worn or doing double duty — and pick the archetype whose residue matches. A character often fits more than one (a phono-semantic with a heavy drift and a worn radical at once), so compose them. The delivery mechanics in the last group set card FORMAT and are orthogonal to glyph type; they layer on top of any content archetype. This is a living list, kept for a future authoring agent to select from per character and to extend the day a situation arrives that none of these fit.

By how the glyph is composed

Pictograph see-it-whole (NEW) — Residue: one shape, nothing to bind; fix abstract strokes as one recognizable picture, anchor its own sound only if it donates one. Levers: ancient-pictograph recovery + draw-as-anchor. Example: 木 splays roots and branches into one still; no binding, no sound-pin.

Indicative mark-placement (NEW) — Residue: where the locating mark sits and what it points at; the meaning lives in a position. Levers: salience on the mark’s placement (the placement-salience sub-lever is a design extrapolation; loci sources only “absurd”) + spatial distinctness. Example: 本 — stage the tree, then make a glowing stroke at its foot the whole point.

Meaning-meaning interdependence (Showcase 4) — Residue: the interdependent action that fuses two meanings; arbitrary glue, no sound to pin. Levers: bind into one gestalt + interdependence. Example: 美 — the 羊 crown is worn and danced with by 大 in one moment; recall is meaning only.

Depictable sound + salience (Showcase 5) — Residue: bind a meaning-radical to a drawable sound-piece and pin a family-crossing drift. Levers: salience on the answer-bearer (a design extrapolation off loci’s “absurd”) + absurdity. Example: 動 — 重 is a house-sized boulder shoved by 力 the flexed arm; the giant piece flags itself as the {d,zh} sound-bearer.

Bare-glyph fix (Showcase 1) — Residue: a sound piece with no native picture, plus a heavy drift to pin; skipping the phonetic loses the series and is forbidden. Levers: fabricate a picture for a picture-less piece + residual-sound pinning. Example: 衙 — 吾 becomes a self-important official thumping his chest saying “ME,” and the scene pins wú→yá.

By the sound residue

Sound-silent bind (NEW) — Residue: binding only; the reading is fully predicted by the donor, so the Story has zero sound residue. Levers: arbitrary-residue-only scoping + bind into one gestalt. Example: 然 — bind 肰 + 灬, fire under meat, and spend zero beats on the reading, since 肰 gives rán exactly.

Series-member sound-near-free (NEW) — Residue: the binding plus the swapped meaning-radical; the sound is shared family knowledge. Levers: connection density + bind into one gestalt. Example: 戴 — bind the distinctive top to 𢦏 and lean on 載栽裁 so the reading arrives near-free; name the series.

Phonetic-donor sound-anchor (NEW) — Residue: anchor this character’s sound cleanly because daughter characters depend on it, even where its own modern meaning is a loan. Levers: connection density as series machinery + salience (design-extrapolated). Example: 方 — pin its sound as the root of 放房訪防, kept separate from its own contested boats/plow picture.

Auditory / jingle sound-series card (NEW) — Residue: sound-series cohesion carried without a drawing. Levers: auditory/verbal mnemonic + connection density. Example: a short rhyme stringing same-series characters gives the group an auditory retrieval structure; the depictability gate does not block it.

By the meaning residue

Attribute encoding (Showcase 2) — Residue: a sense feature — size, color, manner — that none of the components encode. Levers: dual coding / attribute encoding + multisensory/affective salience. Example: 麋 — the deer is staged oversized so “large marsh deer” recalls with the scene; 米 carries the near-free tone.

Historical meaning-bridge (NEW) — Residue: an opaque sense-drift where a component looks unrelated to the modern meaning. Levers: historical meaning-bridge dramatization + interdependence. Example: 漢 — run 氵 through river → its people → dynasty as one visual progression so the water earns its place.

Phonetic-loan rebus card (NEW) — Residue: the picture predicts nothing about the modern meaning; a pure sound-borrow. Bridging the picture to the loaned meaning is forbidden. Levers: historical meaning-bridge + 假借 loan-mark discipline. Example: 來 — draw the wheat-plant, MARK “come” as a loan sense (Outlier’s 〇) so no false bridge forms; the rebus-chain itself is the mnemonic.

Polyphone single-scene (NEW) — Residue: one drawable scene carrying two sound-and-sense targets. Levers: bind into one gestalt + one recall target per card. Example: 便 — one scene on the shared sense, careful not to lean toward only biàn or pián; the reading split lives in meanings.byReading.

Non-redundancy re-angle (Showcase 3) — Residue: the redundancy risk itself; the Form pre-spent the obvious scene, with an opaque sense-drift left over. Levers: arbitrary-residue-only scoping + interdependence. Example: 領 — drop the Form’s collar-derivation; restage 令 as a barked command-tablet whose order turns the 頁 head.

By a problem component

Empty-component card (NEW) — Residue: a stroke-group carrying neither meaning nor sound. Three legal moves: drop it, repurpose it as a free prop, or render it as glass. Levers: glass/transparent rendering + salience triage. Example: 射 — render the empty “body” as a see-through glass figure so its non-functional status is in the image; 沒 — drop the worn 殳.

Worn-component card (NEW) — Residue: a component the student cannot find in the modern glyph, worn into other strokes. Levers: known-host anchoring + spatial distinctness. Example: 春 — use 屯 only because the Form’s detail callout pins where it wore to; the scene rides the three top strokes as drawn, sun beneath.

Dual-route component card (NEW) — Residue: one piece doing double duty, meaning AND sound; show only one role and the other retrieval route is lost. Levers: dual coding + multi-directional reconstruction. Example: 堅 — 臤 grips so hard it reads “holds firm” while its qiān is flagged as the sound; one piece, both routes.

Recurring-radical persona consistency (NEW) — Residue: the radical’s reusable identity, valid only when cast from the component-sense and only when it survives every sibling. Levers: fixed personas + component-sense casting + cross-sibling consistency check. Example: 亻 is always a standing person across 休/便, cast from component-sense, validated against siblings, recombined into fresh action each card.

Same-shape false-friend / positional-allograph card (NEW) — Residue: the same shape with a different origin per character, or per position; the risk is blindly reusing one persona. Levers: same-shape guard + component-sense casting. Example: 阝 — a hill when on the left (阜), a city when on the right (邑); never inherit one persona across the false friend.

Whole-glyph special cases

Repeated-component multiplicity card (NEW) — Residue: the multiplicity itself is the meaning — many, forest, crowd. Levers: decompose, one element per piece, + distinctiveness. Example: 森 — three 木 at different sizes and angles so the count reads as “forest”; the multiplicity is the recall target.

Function-word use-slot card (NEW) — Residue: a grammatical function with no picturable meaning. Levers: permutation / use-case mapping + reverse explanation. Example: 的/了/把 — stage a tiny acted use-case, the slot the particle fills in speech; the recall target is the function.

Confusable-pair discrimination (NEW) — Residue: the risk of mistaking the glyph for a near-twin; the distinguishing stroke is the residue. Levers: contrastive encoding + salience. Example: for a glyph one stroke off its twin, dramatize the distinguishing stroke as the decisive prop so the difference is the recall route.

Simplified-divergence independent scene (NEW) — Residue: a second, independent set of components to bind; the Simplified glyph can parse completely differently. Levers: self-contained scene (design-extrapolated) + fabricate a folk picture. Example: 辦/办 — author the 办 scene from its own pieces (八 = sweat, folk), never referencing 辦’s frame.

Folk-parse encoding card (NEW) — Residue: the true parse leaves an unmemorable residue and a folk picture binds better. Folk-picturing is product editorial policy, not a sourced lever. Levers: fabricate folk picture + cross-sibling consistency check. Example: 动 — read 云 as a cloud (folk:true) heaved by 力, marked folk, no corrective language, kept only if it survives the series.

Effort economy, anchoring, and verdicts

Story-null verdict (NEW) — Residue: near-zero; the Form owns both binding and sound. Story-null is product policy built on the sourced salience-triage principle. Levers: salience triage + arbitrary-residue-only scoping. Example: 百 — the numeral diagram plus sound leave no honest residue, so story:null; a forced scene would manufacture redundancy.

Leech re-encode (NEW) — Residue: after repeated failures the single scene is a demonstrated encoding defect that resists default treatment. Levers: lapse escalation / rule-of-3 + connection density. Example: a character failing ~3 reviews gets escalated to its sound-series root, contrast set, and use cases rather than its original scene re-run.

Known-host anchoring card (NEW) — Residue: a sticky component the learner already met inside a daily-use character. Levers: known-host anchoring + connection density. Example: 嫩 — pin the stubborn right side as “the top of 整,” a character written daily, importing its stability.

Live-vocabulary sound-pin (NEW) — Residue: a reading best locked through a word the learner already speaks. Levers: live-vocabulary sound-pinning + kinesthetic/articulatory salience. Example: build the scene around a daily phrase, say it aloud, and feel the mouth-place to lock a cross-family reading.

L1 cognate-bridge card (NEW) — Residue: a component whose meaning or sound maps onto the learner’s first language. Levers: L1 metaphor / cognate bridge + historical meaning-bridge. Example: 力 — route through English “plowed through his work” so the plow→effort extension rides a phrase the learner already owns.

Delivery and format mechanics

These set card FORMAT and combine with any content archetype above.

Production / writing-direction card (NEW) — Residue: recall of the written FORM from speech, the reverse of every glyph→meaning card. Levers: production / form-generation + multi-directional reconstruction. Example: given the spoken word, cross-match a candidate sound-component against a candidate meaning-component to produce the glyph (the IME method).

Attribute-edge multi-card set (NEW) — Residue: one character delivered as separate edges. Levers: attribute-edge split + one recall target per card. Example: one character yields a form→meaning card and a form→sound card, staggered across days by pipelining.

Drawn-image card (NEW, constrained) — Residue: a card shipping a real sketch as content. Levers: draw-as-anchor + generative construction, held in tension. Example: ship an actual sketch of the scene, against the sourced tension that a supplied image risks reception over the representation the learner constructs.

Guess-gated reconstruction card (NEW) — Residue: a card delivered as a prompt-face against an answer-face. Levers: pretest / committed guess + generative construction. Example: show 衙’s parts, the learner commits “courtyard? office?”, then reveal “government office” plus the chest-thumping 吾; the miss cements it.

Forward-planting two-way card (NEW) — Residue: a phono-semantic wanting both recall directions. The forward-planting lever has no source basis and is kept as a design option. Levers: forward-planting (design extrapolation) + multi-directional reconstruction. Example: plant the meaning-radical early as an unexplained “why is that here?” that the arriving sound-piece resolves.

What is new beyond the 5

The five showcases all bind components and pin a sound. The catalog opens room the showcases never touched:

• Non-redundancy on the SOUND axis — the exact-match phonetic (然) spends ZERO sound beats, since the series owns the reading entirely.
• Dual-role components (堅’s 臤) encoding both the meaning route and the sound route from one piece.
• Empty (空) components get three legal moves, not two: drop, repurpose, or render as glass (射).
• Worn/invisible components (春’s 屯) ridden through the Form’s detail callout for a piece the student cannot see.
• Donor-vs-member series logic: anchor a productive donor’s sound as machinery (方) versus letting a member inherit it near-free (戴).
• A fixed-persona registry for recurring radicals, bounded by three guards: component-sense ≠ character-sense (口 = “sound,” not “mouth”); same-shape ≠ same-identity, identity by position (left 阝 = hill, right 阝 = city; the 𡗗 family); and the cross-sibling consistency test (a persona must survive every sibling, which also gates folk parses).
• Contrastive cards built around the distinguishing stroke of a confusable pair.
• Known-host anchoring (嫩→整) and live-vocabulary sound-pinning.
• The auditory channel — rhyme, alliteration, meter, jingle — a non-drawable mnemonic the strict depictability gate wrongly excluded.
• Kinesthetic/articulatory salience (the {d,zh} same-mouth-place self-test) and L1 cognate bridges as distinct sound-pinning and elaboration levers.
• Phonetic loan (假借) handled precisely: mark the loan sense (〇), forbid bridging the picture to the loaned meaning, let the rebus-chain carry it.
• Polyphone single-scene handling (便) and historical meaning-bridge dramatization (漢: river → people → dynasty).
• Story-null as a first-class authoring VERDICT (百, 智力) — product policy built on the sourced salience-triage principle.
• The Simplified-edition axis (辦/办) — a second independent scene from the Simplified pieces only.
• Three new situation classes: repeated/multiplied identical components (森, where the meaning IS the multiplicity), function-word characters (的/了/把, encode a use-slot), and positional allographs (role selected by position).
• Delivery mechanics: guess-gating with hypercorrection, reverse-explanation reveal order, the attribute-edge split into multiple staggered cards, the production/writing-direction card, and shipping an actual drawn image.
• Effort-economy moves: salience triage, the lapse-escalation/rule-of-3 loop, and permutation/use-case mapping as routine elaboration.

Recommended next showcases

The eight cards that earn building next, each demonstrating a capability the first five lack:

1. Sound-silent bind (然) — the single most load-bearing demonstration: a card that deliberately spends zero sound beats, proving non-redundancy on the sound axis. High-frequency, the cleanest counterweight to the five.
2. Empty-component glass card (射) — the third, source-named treatment of 空 components the synthesis originally missed.
3. Dual-role component (堅’s 臤) — one piece carrying both routes; easy to author wrong by silently dropping a route, so high value to standardize.
4. Story-null verdict (百 / 智力) — teaches restraint: when not to author a scene at all.
5. Confusable-pair discrimination — contrastive encoding around the distinguishing stroke of a near-twin, a lever absent from the five.
6. Cross-sibling-validated persona card (the 阝 hill/city false friend) — exercises the persona guards the single-character showcases never reach.
7. Auditory/jingle sound-series card — a deliberately non-drawable mnemonic for a phonetic family, correcting the over-strict depictability gate.
8. Production/writing-direction card (IME method) — the reverse recall direction, speech → glyph, the glyph→meaning showcases never enumerate.

The operational copy of this catalog lives with the Tsumugu Encoding Dictionary‘s authoring rubric, where the selecting agent reads it per character. This page stays the living index: add a row when a character arrives that none of the 34 fit.