Mnemonicking Niftily
I went there. I used an adverb in the title. Boo.
Anywho, mnemonics!
First off: yeesh, sorry about the long post. Maybe giving it two goes to read it through would be better than trying to get it all at once.
I'm wanting to share some knowledge I've accumulated in about the past eight months about them - and about memorizing in general - that I've found AMAZINGLY helpful, if anyone's interested. Some books and websites will be listed at the end of this post, too, 'cause I don't know everything about this topic and I don't want to bombard with info. I find it really fun and helpful researching this stuff. (Ahahaha, and who knows everything about anything in the first place?)
I also don't recommend sharing all this mnemonic stuff with others unless they're stressed about a test, and you've already thought of a mnemonic yourself for their situation. Most people will just think it's weird and think, "Well, it works for you, but not for me." OR I'm just bad at presenting information to others, ahahaha.
So here’s some basic information about mnemonics ("basic" because this is a collection of info from two books and a five hour audio set, ahaha):
• Visualize as much as you can. (Puns are GREAT. I memorized that Camaquã is a region of Rio Grande do Sul and where it is in Rio Grande do Sul - which is in Brazil - by thinking of a kumquat, a fruit, which I thought sounded pretty close to “Camaquã.” Detail the pictures, too, so they can stick easier and longer: imagine the shadows, lighting, reflections, cloth wrinkles, dimples, hair color, wind messing up the hair, the fur, or kicking up dust or whatever else may be around.) Some things don't need puns to visualize - like a pair of eyeballs staring at a fortune telling tea cup can mean "visualize." (Or it can be a fish ("vis," which has a sort of "fish" sound to in it in that word) swimming in green goo ("u," which has an "oo" sound in that word) that's not feeling too well ("al," which sounds almost like "ill" in that word) and has a pair of eyes doing a doctor's checkup with a stethoscope on it ("ize" = the eyes).)
• You can make stories. Weird stories are better, and the stories don’t need to have a point, kind of like my fish example. Just slap together the first things that come to mind. (How I memorized a list of “apple, pear, tangerine, pineapple, orange, grapefruit”: first there’s the Apple logo, and then it changes into a realistic apple spliced with a pear (“Half pear, half apple! It’ll eat you in your sleep! ROAAR!”), which has a stem grow out the top made of a line of tiny little tangerines, which ends up having a pineapple grow out of the end and then plop to the ground.
And now this is Spongebob’s house we’re talking about, so the front door opens up and oranges spill out, which then plump up and puff into grapefruits.)
• It’s easy to remember by association. (A song might come into your head in the middle of a conversation because the person talking said three words line up like in a song you know. You see a lion statue and think of China, Africa, or New York even though there’s nothing else around to remind you of those places.
You can associate puns to things, people, or places, like by associating a license plate number to a van. (I’m giving an easy one to save space) 100 HUG can be Benjamin Franklin from the 100 dollar bill hugging the van, just to check if you pass by another van with a HUG license plate if it’s the same one or not. I like memorizing the fun plates with letters like USA, DAY, DOG, and YOU.)
• Combine stories with puns.
• Shrink your stories into tiny things - your starting "thing" can be the first item that came to mind, like my "half pear half apple and put them around in a place, preferably a building with many rooms that are significantly different from each other. "Different from each other" can mean for use or by looks, like two closets might look similar but feel different because one is intended for storing paint buckets and the other for machine parts. Just imagine yourself walking around the place and looking around. At least, that's what I've found works best for myself.
• To memorize information for life, review it six times: (1) right after learning it to make sure you understand (2) the next day (3) a week after (4) a month (5) three months (6) one year. That goes for a book you want to remember, to names, to what you went over in your math or foreign language class because it forces you to repeat the info over a spread of time. It's easy to remember those like "the next big increase of time." Immediately becomes one day, days become a week, weeks become a month, and months become a year. The three months is a little bridge to make the 11 month gap between the year and first month more reasonable.
• Moving your lips to the words you're reading or whispering them out loud helps with retention a bit, too. It also may get you to focus a bit more on what you're reading and on the word choice.
• For information you don't need to remember in a snap, like a test you have to cram for tomorrow, but instead you just want to remember for life, don't use mnemonics with all the weird images. Mnemonics can be distracting. (Learning Spanish with flashcards that have pictures on one side and the Spanish word on the other seems to go faster than doing "English word one side, Spanish word other." At least for me. I can't speak for you, haha.) The phrase "SQ3R" is good: Survey (skim info), Question (what did you see that looked interesting, or what made NO SENSE from the glimpse you got), Read (actually read the stuff), Recite (try covering up parts to see how well you can recite it by memory), Review (keep going over it).
To me, though, it feels like it takes an extra day or two to memorize information with SQ3R, so it's not so good for cramming. And the information doesn't always come up in your memory reliably, either, so an association or two could help.
• Be interested: and this next part is from Howtoremember.biz (this page specifically):
Here’s another secret: everything is interesting.
Seriously. You could write a dissertation on dust bunnies, if you had to. Start asking questions. (Where do dust bunnies come from, anyway?)
We find things dull when they have no meaning for us. You could give the most exciting story in the world a blank stare if it was written in a foreign language.
How do we find new meanings? Partly, by looking and listening with greater attention. But also by connecting new things to what we already know.
Make Connections
We remember by connecting.
Think of a baseball geek. He can remember thousands of game scores, because he’s interested. Obsessed, even.
But those scores don’t float about in isolation. His brain is a baseball network, a power grid humming with thousands of criss-crossing connections. Every game score is connected to those players, to those teams, to the epic story of that particular season.
End quote. Ahahaha. I love school so much. Memorizing's like a hobby for me now. I have a totally different view on memorizing stuff since learning about mnemonics. Oh, and numbers and letters can have their own images since they're difficult to visualize. That's not for this post, though. Well, I can do alphabet quickly: by shape is fun. These are some of my mnemonic letters: A = an arrowhead, B = butterfly, C = Mont Blanc Noland (Yes, a cartoon character if you're not familiar with him and Google him - his nose looks like a "c" to me, ahaha.), D = Mine Turtle (from asdfmovie), and E = a toy castle. You can rotate the letters however you want, like how "M" is an eel because it looks like an open mouth to me. My favorite is Z: a helicopter.
• And one more bulletpoint about a part I don't see mentioned much anywhere: Sleep. Sleep is important - review stuff that's most difficult to remember right before bed to remember it in the morning - and it helps just about everything with your brain work better. Google has plenty of pages and sites about how much sleep you need depending on age.
That's that about sleep. And, just a few more notes (I'll be shutting up soon, really!): Getting background on information is best, like the baseball geek example that the Howtoremember guy gave. Also don't forget about simpler mnemonics, like acronyms. (Before I learned all the fancy mnemonic stuff, I once crammed for a test by making a 16 letter gibberish acronym with each letter standing for a different event, place, or person - added some vowels to keep it pronounceable - and got a better score than I'd expected on the test. I don't remember what the score was since that was six years ago; I just remember it was higher than a C. It could've been a B- or and A+. I really don't know.
Sentence acronyms, such as "Four cars go dead at every bump" or "Fat cows gas death after eating bunnies," for remembering the order of sharps in treble clef music are good, too. Overcomplicating's bad, but don't think too hard about it.) And all this doesn't help your "critical thinking skills," really, which is a common argument against them. Though mnemonics do help bring up more information at better times than if you didn't associate.
Some places to look if you'll want to learn more about mnemonics:
Books
• Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It - by Kenneth L. Higbee
•The Memory Book: The Classic Guide to Improving Your Memory at Work, School, and Play - by Harry Lorayne & Jerry Lucas
Sites
Mnemotechnics.org [wiki + forum]
Howtoremember.biz [blog] (I haven't read it fully. The author doesn't seem to support mnemonics much from what I've read, and he's got other great ideas about memory.)
Google.com (Um. Yeah. Find out your own helpful search strings... 'cause I haven't kept track of mine or all the sites I've used, haha. Didn't think I'd go back and record them for others. Oops.)
That's all for now.
Yup. That's what I've got. Thanks for reading! (And don't forget to reread this tomorrow, next week, and so on if this is your first time stopping by this post.)