Best ways of memorizing stuff? (Advice Center) Language Learning Forum

Best ways of memorizing stuff?
Tags: Flash cards \| Memory
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19 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

rdearman
Senior Member
United Kingdom
rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5225 days ago
881 posts - 1812 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin

Message 17 of 19

02 January 2015 at 7:57pm | IP Logged

Tyrion101 wrote:

Doitsujin wrote:

@Tyrion101: It would be helpful to know what language(s) you're interested in, because there are some language-specific techniques, for example, RTK for Japanese and Chinese. There are also lots of mnemonic verses for remembering Latin grammar.

I use a method similar to Iversen's word list method and link words for Indo-European languages. (I've also experimented with Anki, but it didn't work for me.)

IMHO, there's no one-size-fits-all method. You'll have to experiment with the different methods suggested in this thread and pick one that works for you.

French is the main one at the moment, though there are others, Russian (eventually) and Mandarin, want to learn Korean someday as well, but I'm mostly putting these aside until I can firm up my French to the nearly automatic point. I think I stated somewhere on the site my primary language interest is Asian (Russian isn't really Asian, but I've always wanted to learn it.)

You can edit your profile to show what you're studying. It then appears beside your name on every post. :)
2 persons have voted this message useful

timothymoser
Newbie
United States
MasterOfMemory.com
Joined 3604 days ago
1 posts - 1 votes
Speaks: English*

Message 18 of 19

07 January 2015 at 2:26pm | IP Logged

IarllTroseddwr wrote:

I would highly suggest taking a look at Master of
Memory. There is a podcast where the host takes listeners questions about specific items they need help
memorizing and he has created a Spanish course that is based on Mnemonic techniques.

Thanks for the shoutout, IarllTroseddwr! And…

James29 wrote:

That Master of Memory Spanish course has a headline advertisement saying "Become Bilingual By
April 1" and it does not say anything about the "program" but asks for a lot of personal data to be entered.

Really sorry about that. I was doing a 1-time end-of-year course giveaway for my podcast listeners, so you showed
up on that page at the ONE time it looked that way haha! But as IarllTroseddwr says, the whole course (and all of
Master of Memory's information) is freely accessible, and it works. I'd love to help anyone in any way I can.
1 person has voted this message useful

Ari
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 6571 days ago
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Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese
Studies: Czech, Latin, German

Message 19 of 19

07 January 2015 at 3:58pm | IP Logged

I find Spaced Repetition to be very useful when you're a beginner and when you're advanced. As a beginner, you don't have much access to extensive material. You can't do tons of reading and listening, but rather have a limited amount of material to work with (the course). Here flashcards will help you memorize words in isolation, because just repeating the lesson will tend to let you understand the phrase because you remember the context, not because you remember the individual words. As an advanced learner, flashcards are useful because there are very low-frequency words that will take you an unrealistic amount of reading to learn. I've got a flashcard that taught me the word "deciduous", which I came across in a Wikipedia page once and wanted to know. I'm not going to read an entire book on tree botany to learn that word, but the few minutes in my life I'll spend on that flashcard are absolutely worth it. Just like how if I wan to remember the capital of the Federated States of Micronesia (Palikir), I'll make a flashcard about it instead of reading a book about Micronesia. Or rather download a deck of countries, flags and capitals. :)

In addition, flashcards are great for learning common expressions (L1->L2) and for learning grammar patterns like conjugations, gender (of words where that's hard to remember) and collocations. It's a great tool for plugging those little holes that exposure alone won't fix.

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