A giant explosion goes off outside and Joseph Stalin runs into the living room and sees Elvis petting a Llama that lives there and shouts “You two! What jus’ happened?”
Sound ridiculous? How does this help me recall better? That’s the point. In that one sentence, that’s part of a much bigger story that takes place in my Soviet style apartment block, I managed to tie in the Estonian words elama (to live) and juhtus (happened) into a memorable visual that I can use to learn words. I’ve only started this method a week ago and right from the get-go I was surprised to learn how fun and effective this is. In theory you can use this method to memorize anything from speeches to math formulas to the anatomy of the human body and there’s even a system, which I’ll get into in another post, on how to memorize series of numbers. This post is a documentation of my memorization strategies and the Memory Palace method.
To give you a brief background, I’ve delved into a lot of different tactics to try to learn everything. I realized I was onto something when in my first semester of college I started getting A’s on all of my art history exams, the one class I falsely predicted I would fall asleep from boredom in and get the same C’s I got in high school. The biggest difference was how I took notes. The teacher led the classes by putting up slides of the art works and proceed to talk about them. I had a sketchpad and I attempted to draw what was up there and scribble down the important details before she moved onto the next slide. When test time came, I had a mental visual that I could associate with my notes and help me recall better. If you’re trying to memorize from class lectures, for starts I recommend you read NPR’s article Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away.
Several years later I got into language learning and tried out everything from Rosetta Stone to Duo Lingo to Memrise, which had been my favorite method. What I like about Memrise was that it’s a community driven website where you can find pre-made flashcard style lessons for whatever language you’re trying to learn. Better yet, you can create your own personalized lessons whether for personal or teacher aid use. Additionally you can attach audio and Mems to each word. What’s a Mem you might ask? According to Memrise:
“A mem is anything that helps you create a connection between a word and its meaning. Often colloquially called “educational memes”, a mem could really be a photo, GIF, mnemonic, video, cartoon, example sentence, etymology or even a witty remark. The only end goal of a mem is to enrich your learning by helping you commit something to long term memory in an enjoyable, vivid way.”
One I created while studying Spanish
With that being said, that’s how I went about fairly successfully memorizing language vocab for Russian, Spanish, German and Estonian thinking that it was the most efficient way to recall better. That was until I stumbled upon this thing called a Memory Palace. A place where you store information for retrieval later on. My immediate thoughts were “Genius! But how???” The wikihow page didn’t do such a good job of selling it to me so I put it off until I remembered my old business partner meeting some memory palace genius named Anthony Metivier who has a nifty 4-part series on his website that explained the concept well enough for me to start.
How do I Build my own Memory Palace and Recall Better?
TL;DR; Pick a place you’re super familiar with (current home, workplace, etc…) -> Draw it somewhere -> Create a linear route through that location doesn’t backtrack or intersect (to avoid confusion) -> Create a list of words (preferably sorted alphabetically) -> go through the route and place ridiculous Mems throughout the rooms -> Practice by running through the story forward, backward, from the middle inwards, then outwards, repeat.
Choose a Familiar Setting
In the picture above I quickly/compactly sketched out a floor plan of the parts of my apartment building that I’m familiar with enough to have a story take place in. Once that’s sketched out, create a linear route that doesn’t intersect or backtrack with where you previously were so you don’t confuse yourself.
Select what you Plan on Memorizing
Right now I’m working with 25 new words a day. In the image above you’ll notice in larger text the 25 words with the definition to the far right of their pages and in the bottom left of the left page I arranged them alphabetically so I have an order. It’s helpful for me to have them in alphabetical order because that way I know if I’m at a word that starts with V, there’s only so many other letters the next word can start with.
Create the Story
This is the most time consuming part but also the most fun. YOU get to decide how this story goes and You get to choose which cartoon character is giving Mao Zedong a wedgie. For this part of the step I went ahead and created a list A-Z (plus Õ, Ä, Ž etc…) and attached a memorable person to each letter doing a specific action with a specific object ex. Eckhart Tolle is holding an eggbeater and encroaching on a nervous Fat Albert who’s fiddling his fingers and wearing a pink, red and blue frock. And I went ahead and memorized all of these using my first memory palace. Now whenever I need a person, object or action I have these to choose from (though sometimes it makes more sense to use a different character). The more ridiculous the story, the more it helps you recall better.
Anthony Metivier recommends you have this story written somewhere whether it’s on paper or in an excel doc like this one. And remember, this story is just for you to help you recall better. Unless you understand Lithuanian, some parts of my excel doc won’t be readable to you, but that’s not my problem 😀
Practice Makes Recall Better
The biggest advantage I’ve found with this method over rote memorizing methods like Memrise is that the words you learn don’t live in a vast void. I can recite to you the 75 words in order that I’ve learned over the past 3 days verses being able to give you the meaning of the word only when it shows up in my Memrise review.
I hope Anthony doesn’t hate me for copying from his video (which you should watch regardless) but here’s his steps on retaining what you memorize into the long term memory. For each palace over 5 days:
- Follow the palace forward 3 times
- Follow the palace backwards 3 times
- Follow from the middle from middle out
- Follow from the middle in
- Play leapfrog & complete the journeys
I’m still pretty new to this but I have to say it’s pretty freakin’ sweet that I no longer rely on my smart phone or computer for vocabulary review. I can’t wait to see what other shortcuts I come across. If you’re still interested to learn more, I recommend watching this TED talk by reporter Joshua Foer who himself got sucked in while trying to write a story about it and ended up winning a memorization competition one year later.
With that said, happy memorizing!