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Phenomenal Memory | ||
Tags: Memory | Learning Technique/Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| divexo Groupie Australia Joined 4985 days ago 70 posts - 74 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 17 of 49 20 September 2010 at 11:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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^ Andy E, they claim to be quite effective for long-term storage that can keep information stored for years.
I read somewhere that one of the more reputable members on the 'pmemory' forum learned Italian with this method by studying 7-8hours a day for a mere three weeks to fluent. Will try and contact him about this, as it seems pretty crazy/unbelievable. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5229 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 18 of 49 20 September 2010 at 11:42pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, I can't say anything about the method proposed in this thread. I only browsed through the info-pdf and it seems to be the same visualisation method that is described in many books. I bought one such book about 15 years ago and learned the super-memo techniques described in it. One part was just plain visualisation of thoughts, names and the like as story-lines. This wasn't very spectacular, since I did that already. The part that was new to me was a system of symbols that signify numbers from 1 to 100. You needed to learn these symbols by heart once and then you would use them to create visualisations. This is an easy way to memorise lists or any kind of enumerations, because you always have a number in them. I only learned the first 20 symbols and forgot a few over the years. The ones that I really use in everyday life are 1 to 10. They are sufficient for most situations. If you want to commit such a list to long-term memory you have to refresh the visualisation from time to time, but in general they stick extremely well. I memorised the OSI Model of network communication more than 10 years ago with this method and I will never forget it. The second layer is the datalink layer. The number 2 is a swan in the method I use. I see two swans that with entwined ("linked") necks. The fourth is the transport layer. 4 is symbolised by a shamrock, and I see tiny trains transporting various things across the leaves of a big shamrock. And so on. The visualisations should be your own ones, and they stick the better the weirder they are. Ideally they should be animated. The real challenge is not to memorise and to retain the images but to visualise abstract concepts. This may take some practice. Sometimes you can exploit words that sound similar to other things or you create puns, contradictions, whatever is absurd enough to be special. Some lists get lost quickly. It depends on how much you want to remember something. I usually forget shopping lists after one day, because they are useless once the shopping is done. Edited by OlafP on 20 September 2010 at 11:49pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6897 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 19 of 49 21 September 2010 at 9:07am | IP Logged | ||
I can see its benefits in memorizing lists or sets of items and how it can be applied to vocabulary (like the LinkWord system, for example) but are you making use of any visualisation method as part of your Schliemann experiment? I skimmed a lot of this material when I was approaching the task of memorising Assimil dialogues but in the end I've gone with the technique I mentioned in your log. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6897 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 20 of 49 21 September 2010 at 9:08am | IP Logged | ||
Please do. I'd be interested to know. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6497 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 49 21 September 2010 at 9:43am | IP Logged | ||
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I have also just read the homepage, but so far I agree with OlafP and others: this "seems to be the same visualisation method that is described in many books." Which isn't a bad sign in itself, but perhaps a sign that some newcomer tries to make profit on an old thing with a new name.
Quite generally I don't see the relevance of learning long sequences of unrelated items by heart. When you study languages you only have a few sequences of this kind (for instance prepositions that govern a certain case, e.g. "an auf hinter in neben über unter vor zwischen" in German). Apart from these isolated cases you need to connect words and expressions in some foreign language with a meaning, and that meaning can be hinted at through pictures or words with a similar meaning from another language (=translations) or through relationships with other words in the same language. But the sequential order is hardly ever relevant, so methods that may be excellent for remembering the order of 52 playing cards are irrelevant for vocabulary learning. Ultimately your goal in language learning must be to build a mesh of words and meanings in your target language where everything somehow gives associations to something else, and this means that there isn't just one kind of 'correct' association. Everything that can give a word or expression some kind of resonance in you mind is relevant as a memory hook. Edited by Iversen on 21 September 2010 at 9:46am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5805 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 22 of 49 21 September 2010 at 11:50am | IP Logged | ||
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To summarise what others have said: you don't memorise a language, you learn it.
You can memorise the contents of a dictionary, but all that achieves is that you have the dictionary in your head instead of on paper (or on computer). You don't "know" a word when you have to look it up in a dictionary, and it doesn't matter whether that dictionary is in your head or in the outside world. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6497 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 23 of 49 21 September 2010 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||
Well said. When you learn a new word or an expression you have just put an object in your brain unto which innumerable connections to other things will in due time attach their tentacles - and the process of learning a language is the process of building this mesh. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5229 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 24 of 49 21 September 2010 at 1:41pm | IP Logged | ||
There is nothing left to do with the text I chose, because for the most part it is a sequence of visualisations. It is brimming with objectifications and personifications, surrealistic pictures that are modified, inverted and what not -- that's the kind of stuff you have to do yourself in normal circumstances. The benefit of learning a large amount of text by heart, as I see it, is not to parrot your way through a language. This is what you do when you use a phrasebook. A large amount of text may be of help with imitating the language in the beginning, but the chief benefit should be to have a big number of sample sentences available from which you can abstract the language rules on your own. This is what the brain does anyway. Nobody taught you what an animal is. It just cannot be taught. But you saw dogs, cats, crocodiles, monkeys, ... either in the real world or on pictures, and over time it became clear that they have something in common, and this is why they are all called animals. It is impossible to say what exactly they have in common. People often have difficulties with mathematics, because it is only about abstractions. Once you get an example of a theorem then things start falling into place, because your brain can generalise from the example to the theorem. The theorem only says that things behave the same way for all possible examples. Language learning seems to work the same way. As a child you hear millions of phrases and your brain just finds the rules on its own. The only necessary condition is that the amount of samples is big. If you only know dogs then you won't understand the concept "animal". If you learn from a phrase book you cannot detect the rules of the language. Edited by OlafP on 21 September 2010 at 9:11pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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