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Bootcamp 2012 — Day 6: The bizarre method for doubling your recall of languages, facts and definitions

I know many of you are trying to learn languages. Or maybe you’re studying medicine, pharmacy, law or a subject that first appears to require a lot of memorization. For these types of classes, I’ve sought out and tested the best methods for improving your recall.

Today I’m going to share with you just one of the methods from Learning on Steroids for handling these types of learning tasks.

First, a Quick Reminder

Tomorrow at 10am PST (compare against your local time here) I’ll be reopening Learning on Steroids. I’ll be sending the link to sign up in tomorrow’s email as well, but you can check out the sign-up page here.

Registration will only be open for 7 days, after that I’ll be closing it down again. The last time I held open registration was over a year ago, and I don’t know when it will be open next.

Aside from the pace (Learning on Steroids has weekly, not daily, emails), the content from this bootcamp is very similar to the guides you’ll get in the program. So if you’ve found the content of this bootcamp useful, you’ll probably get a lot of value from the full program.

The price to sign-up is just $14 for the first month. Future months are billed at the same price, but I’ve structured the program so that you’ll get a ton of useful ideas whether you want to just use the program for one month, or the full twelve.

If you’re unsure, the program also has a 60-day guarantee, so there’s zero risk in trying it out.

Now Back to the Memory Technique…

A core element of the strategy I teach in Learning on Steroids is avoiding memorization. For most learning situations memorization is unnecessary and often the ineffective way to learn.

Frequently I get emails from students who claim they “need” to memorize for their class. When I probe them to uncover what they’re actually learning, it may have quite a few details, but very rarely is it something that needs to be memorized. Instead it’s something that needs to be understood in a proper context.

Even when some memorization is inevitable, understanding the core ideas cuts down your work immensely. For example:

• Before you memorize a formula, aim to understand it thoroughly first.
• Before you memorize a legal or accounting rule, understand its logic.
• Before you memorize chemical process, understand how it works.
• Before you memorize anatomical definitions, understand how they fit in the body.
• Before you memorize a foreign language word, try to connect it to words you already know.

I advise understanding first, not just for philosophical reasons, but for practical ones. By doing as much work as you can understanding, simplifying and connecting an idea before you memorize it, you drastically reduce the burden of memorization and increase your learning speed.

Memorizing, the Smart Way

From now on, let’s assume you have understood the idea to the greatest extent feasible, but you still have a ton of details to memorize. How do you do it?

The approach most people follow is just to use some kind of flashcard-style review. For language words you might use a software like Anki. For processes, you may test yourself at recreating the steps without checking your notes.

This kind of testing is helpful as a basic step, and if you are faced with a lot of details to memorize it is something you should definitely be practicing if you’re preparing for a test. That said, its primary mechanism is repetition. You’re simply repeating the idea to yourself until it is burned into your memory.

Repetition alone is highly inefficient.

People who compete in international memory competitions (yes, there is such a thing) have instead learned different mental techniques for creating memories faster, no matter what the information is. This allows them to memorize thousands of random digits or pages of text verbatim.

Here’s just one of those techniques, adapted specifically to remember foreign language words and terminology.
Image Association for Vocabulary

The key to most mnemonic systems is the idea of a link. This is the idea that memories cling particularly well when the subject is visual, emotional and absurd. Boring and abstract ideas are forgotten.

The link works simply:

1. Create a visual symbol for the first object you want to link.
2. Create a visual symbol for the second object you want to link.
3. Combine the two into a vivid and ridiculous mental picture.

This scaffolding underlies dozens of different mnemonic techniques, for memorizing lists, maps, structures, numbers, names, definitions, processes or formulas. This leads to exotic memory systems such as the major system, the memory palace, pegging or the chain method.

Exploring all these different systems for each memory task is something outside the scope of this bootcamp (although I cover quite a few in Learning on Steroids), so today we’ll just focus on one application: memorizing words.

Let’s say you want to remember vocabulary words from a language. Then the linking steps are as follows:

1. The first object you want to link is the target word you’re trying to learn.
2. The second object you want to link is the translation of that word into English.
3. Create a visual symbol for each word.
4. Link the two visual symbols in a ridiculous mental picture.

I’ll walk through each step in detail with a couple examples:

Example One: chavirer -> to capsize

Let’s say you wanted to memorize the French word chavirer which means “to capsize” in English. The first step is already done, we’ve selected our two linking objects, in this case the two words we want to connect mentally.

The next step is to create a visual symbol for each word. The way to do this with our foreign word is to think of what it sounds like. To me, the word sounds fairly similar to the two English words “shave” and “ear”. My visual symbol for the chavirer will therefore simply be a giant ear with a beard getting shaved. My visual symbol for the English word is easy, it’s just a boat capsizing.

Creating the link now involves creating a mental pictures which combines the two words in a ridiculous and highly vivid way. For me this is a giant ear getting shaved in a barber’s chair as its canoe flips over violently in the water.

If you’re having trouble making the connection absurd enough, try increasing the size or number of the visual symbols you have connected, like I did with a giant ear.

Example Two: para siempre -> forever

Switching to Spanish now, let’s say you wanted to memorize the phrase para siempre which means “forever”. The first step is again the same, come up with a “sounds like” visual symbol. This one for me was a “pair of” “sea imp prey”, so the mental image to me looks like a pair of magical sea creatures which are being hunted or preyed on by something.

Now the tricky part here is that “forever” no longer has an easy mental image, since it’s an abstract concept. So here we need to create a second visual symbol for the English word as well. To visualize forever I imagine a twisted hourglass so that the sand running to the bottom gets shuffled back up to the top.

Now for the link, I just create an image of a pair of sea imps being preyed on by thousands ferocious twisted hourglasses.

How This Doubled my Recall Rate (Without Adding More Time)

If you’re not used to mnemonic techniques which are based off of visual linking, this may seem like a bizarre and time consuming process to memorize something. In fact it’s actually the opposite.

When I was first learning French, I wanted to see how this method would work in a controlled setting, so I spent a month using various mnemonic techniques giving myself thirty minutes to memorize 50 new words every day (1500 words in total).

For one week, I tried just the normal repetition process. With less than 30 seconds per word, even retesting the same words each day, my recall was only 35% when I did a random self-test at the end of the week.

For another week I used this method. My recall rate shot up to 75%, even though I used no more time to prepare and memorize. (In the other two weeks I tried two different mnemonic methods which didn’t pass the test and performed no better than rote memorization.)

When practiced repeatedly, you should be able to use this to use this method in 15-20 seconds per word. It only seems long if you haven’t practiced it much and struggle with this new method of thinking.

Indeed, world-class mnemoticists can often use this technique in just a couple seconds, allowing them to memorize thousands of digits perfectly only hearing the words once. You don’t need to reach that level of expertise to make use of the technique in your studies, but it shows that the method isn’t fundamentally slow.

What if You’re Trying to Memorize Something Other than Languages?

I chose languages because it was a popular choice amongst the people attending the bootcamp, but I realize many of you face different memory tasks. Maybe you’re studying law and need to memorize cases or statute numbers. Maybe you’re in medicine and need to remember pharmacological or anatomical terms.

Unfortunately discussing all the varieties of this system is beyond what I can do in a one-week bootcamp. However, the basic concept is almost always of a visual link. The different systems are merely ways of translating your memory problem into one that can be solved with this method.

In Learning on Steroids I cover several variants for different memorization problems.

ACTION STEP: Day Six

This is definitely a technique that requires practice. Unless you’ve heard of it before, it’s highly unlikely that you’d be able to pick it up just through trial and error. What’s more, if you don’t actively practice it, the method won’t be a habit for when you actually want to remember something.

For this bootcamp, I want you to practice on one foreign language word (or terminology if you want to translate a piece of jargon into plain English). If you’re not currently studying a language or don’t need to memorize anything, just try out the method once for fun, since you may be able to modify it later to other areas of your interests.

Here’s the steps:

1. Find a target word -> English word translation. (Use Google Translate to find a word pair if you can’t think of any)
2. Use the sounds-like method to create visual symbols for both the target and the English word.
3. Close your eyes and visualize a mental scene which is both vivid and absurd and combines the two visual elements.

In practice, you should combine this with flashcard-style review (or direct practice, in the case of speaking a language), not as a substitute. If you do it well, however, it can double the effectiveness of every minute you spend memorizing in terms of total recall.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll send out the final bootcamp material and reopen Learning on Steroids.

Best,
-Scott