A revelation on readings/pronunciations

So I've been doing a lot of smart.fm/iknow.jp to try and get back to where I was before I stopped it and to decide if I want to stay on that route once it becomes a paid service.

Before I thought I liked it because of the science terms they throw around claiming to have the optimized method of retention, but really I think I've come to realize the reason I like it because it seems more challenging than a lot of the other applications I've seen out there. Nothing else I have seen has gone to differentiate president of a company, and of a country and a prime minister and company from corporation. Maybe it's flawed logic, but it just seems like a harder tool is more designed for people whose final goal is fluency, not just basic knowledge of the language.

Anyways, so I've caught up now to where I was in Oct/Nov and I've started learning some new stuff (core 2000, step 4) and I was getting frustrated that the progress was so much slower for remembering the pronunciation of words compared to the writing using the RTK1 book. I can remember the kanji very well and that takes 10% of the brain power that it did before doing RTK1. So if going between English written words and Japanese written words, or vise-versa it's easy, but I found myself having to review the pronunciations over and over again. I was also having problems where I would mix up the pronunciations and the words and then I came up with an idea...

I decided to apply the Heisig method to the pronunciation. I would make up stories based on similar sounding English words. Here are some examples:

manufacturing/production= 加工＝かこう＝kakoo
sounds kind of like gakkoo, which I already know is school. You go to school so you don't get a manufacturing job. Even though I already know ka(加) from kaeru (加える）and koo(工) from　koojoo (工場) I can't seem to remember it from 加工 easily, but once I made this story, I never stalled more than a second thinking about how to pronounce it.

drastically=大幅＝おおはば＝oohaba
I already know oo(大) as big then I think of the drastic change in health my baba (Ukrainian for grandmother) had right before she passed away.

success= 成功＝せいこう＝seikoo
sounds like "say code", so I think of a computer hacker who finally successfully breaks in and says what the code was.

directly=直接＝ちょくせつ＝chokusetsu
I think of "choke sets you" and have a mental image of going directly to a set of Mafia bosses and choking sets (or groups) of them instead of wasting time trying to talk with them.

graduation=卒業＝そつぎょう＝sotsugyoo
sounds like "so you go". I think of a valedictorian speech going "so you go out into the world..." also I already know gyoo.

I like this because like with the heisig method, it builds on the readings I already know. This allows me to reinforce what I already know at the same time as learning new ones. Otherwise stated, I don't need these stories for the kanji I already know the readings for, only with the ones I don't. Yet it saves me the time of having to go back and review the old ones specifically. (hopefully that makes sense)

Also once I figure it out from the story I always say it OUT LOUD. just to make sure that I say it correctly and not "so you go". I also suspect it just helps with the muscle memory.

So far this has helped me a TON and quickened my speed in iknow.jp but I'm still a little nervous about committing to it. I have a gut feeling that it may cause problems later on. One big thing that makes this different than RTK is that the book was made knowing what all 2042 kanji would be. This way Heisig could lay them out in way to avoid learning 然 before 犬. Where here I don't know all the words I will be learning and I don't feel like going through the effort to look them up and try to calculate some systematic approach of learning these words efficiently.

Either way, time to try it out for a week or so and we'll see how the experiment goes.