For words that are abstract, such as If, or I, you can create a system.
Are you familiar with a system called Person/Action/Object ?
If so, you do not have to number the action, that’s a personal choice. Anyway, here’s a suggestion:
Make 26 locations, each location in one journey and each location must have enough room for two grown men to have a fight. Make a Person Object System for the letters of the alphabet, just as you would with numbers, or a Person, Action, Object System if you prefer that. One will give you two digits (Letters), the other will give you three.
Say you want to remember the word ‘I’, but don’t want to get it mixed up with the word ‘EYE’, you have Indian Jones and his normal action could be using a whip. The Whip would also represent the letter I. Anyway, ideally you can make a system where most of the letters match the persons name as well as the action beginning with the same letter.
The world ‘IF’ could be Indian Jones ‘FENCING’, which could be the action of Fred Flintstone or someone you know called Fred, or whatever name.
Note that I used a cartoon character. Real people have real expressions they express through body language, so we tend to remember these better, since we are affected by the emotions of others, however, cartoon characters still work. I have more than one alphabet system. In one of my systems I have Spiderman Spinning a Web for the letter S. Generally, I use real people, but you don’t have to.
I suggest you memorise these using the 26 locations you made. 26 rooms. Practice getting those characters interact with objects in the room, or if it is outside, say on a junction in the road, work on getting the character to interact with a plain old boring road. You’ll need to think up some pretty creative solutions and maybe you’ll come back here for advice. Try first though.
Some letters will be harder than others. I have as my letter Y, in one of my systems, a person call Yiu (you). His action is playing a Yi Wu, which is a Chinese musical instrument. This might be of no use to you, so my point here is to make sure you use people that are familiar to you. That familiarity means you already have an association with someone in your head, be they a friend or a celebrity you watch all the time, so you much so that you know their expressions.
Don’t feel restricted by rules. Lets say you get stuck on X. What about Xavier from the X-Men in his wheelchair doing stunts. Once you have memorised him at location number 24, you will soon come to automatically know the wheelchair represents X, not W, but keep most as they are. For the letter U, you can use Uncle with an Umbrella on a Unicycle.
You can use this system to memorise the spelling of complex or foreign words as well. By having a series of numbered locations, you can memorise the order of the letters by using the numbers of the locations as sign-post in the road. In the way, the numbers are your navigation aid. So, if you have a journey where you come to a junction, instead of not knowing which way you should go, you can take a mental look around for the number that follows the junction number and the person will only be in one of the possible locations, making you a human sat-nav.
F can be Family member or Friend. Y can be Yeti or a very hairy friend, if you don’t know anyone called Yvonne or Yvette. For object, you can think of them easily, or pick up a dictionary or copy of the some brochure that sells many products, such as children’s games, toys, gardening tools, instruments, etc. Violin is one of mine. Actually, I have all musical instruments in one or other of my systems. I have X-Men’s Patrick Stewart playing a Xylophone in his Wheelchair.
Say your at a word like tomatoes. Easily you can visualise a tomato, but tomatoes is the plural, so all you have to do is bring the tomato to life, perhaps by giving it arms and legs and a set of boxing gloves, then get Eric Estrada to Spin a web at him, for the letters ES. Tomato-ES.
I suspect you are British, because your musical question reminds me of a song, or catch advert phrase from my childhood, and yours I guess, so I can estimate your age I think. Ho ho ho, Green Giant. There’s a G for you, right there on your profile picture. What about an action ? Eating a Giant corn on the Cob,. Giant is the G, but it doesn’t have t6o be, because it will be obvious to you that it is the action of the Green Giant. not only that, but we instinctively remember the location of food. Food is one of the things that is naturally memorable and one of the main reason our long term memories evolved in the way that they did, enabling top memory athletes to exploit this and remember vast quantities of seemingly unmemorable information. The Method of Loci (Roman Room System/Memory Palace System), evolved to enable us to survive. Literally, in ancient times, when we were cavemen, our lives depended on it. Otherwise we would be eaten by some animal, or forget where the food, water and opposite sex were.
Today, the reason memory athletes use an ACTION is because a movement, or a sound, since sounds are created by something moving, make us concentrate. They do this by forcing us to pay attention. Even if you have ADHD or some other thing making concentration difficult, you can force it. I know it will work for these people for the simple reason that they have not been run over by a double decker bus. The double decker bus is just as dangerous as a man eating lion, not that i’ve ever seen a man eating a lion. lions are far too chewy.
Anyway, I hope that helps. If not, I guess you don’t know what P/A/O is. If that’s the case, there are lots of posts on here about it. Most of the posts just use the abbreviations because it’s such a common term among memory athletes. You might coma across other shorthand stuff which means the same. Person/Verb/Object, but P/A/O is by far the most common term.
For some, the action itself is a number. In this situation I suggest you make it a letter, but you might find it restrictive, as opposed to creative. It would be easier to start off with Person and Object. The object is simply something to focus on that may also tell you the number or letter.
The reason for the size of the location is to get you used to interacting mentally with your environment, but also because, outside your own home and some close relatives, you probably know hundreds, if not a couple of thousand locations, but you probably don’t know those locations in detail. You don’t need to. Another benefit is that, if you Grandmother is the opposite to OCD and always moves furniture around, if won’t affect your system.
It is common for athletes to use a mixture of both types of location. The reason is that, if you are in say, a real palace, then it’s a large room with lots of locations. You can view perhaps 26 locations without moving, so you could memorise an entire deck of cards in one location. The fact that you aren’t mentally navigating to the next location will save you time. But if you want to remember 10 decks of cards because you want to be a grandmaster, you might use parts of the room for fast cards and larger locations for long cards, since you have more time to mentally wander around and may not have lots of locations that you know in such precise detail.