Hello Shelby, I think you might find some useful stuff on this thread on pathological mnemonics posted last week: What is the best memory system for studying medical diseases?
Also keep in mind that you rarely have to study ‘truly verbatim’, eg memorizing a given formulation of a sentence, which simplifies things. Memmorize Bullet points, not novels. Mind mapping helps a lot when it comes to that. As for mental taxation and abstract images: It all comes with practice. I’m currently memorizing Austrian Constitutional Law, both for abstract use and verbatim, for the latter of which I’ve created a small journal on this blog, so I’ve run into a lot of that stuff: Memorizing Austrian/EU constitutional law verbatim: A hubristic journaling project
Some basic strategies to try are:
- If you can’t come up with something which ‘embodies’ the concept you’re trying to memorize (such as my image for ‘federal state’ being one of the national heroes of mine) try and see if you can’t come up with a word matching the first syllable. So for ‘Convention’ I have Aki from the anime ‘Chainsaw Man’, who has a signature move where he shouts ‘Kon!’, which of course matches up rather nicely with what we’re trying to remember.
- If you’re for some reason going for true verbatim memorization, maybe establish a PAO for the most important vocab. So for ‘Convention’ the Person would be Aki, the action his signature move (summoning a giant demon fox to swallow a given object) and the object his Nail-Katana.
- Try to simplify as much as you can. Group loci with similarities in the same space, like when extending a class in a programming language.
- Flashcards, Feynman method and tons of training examples are your best friend.
Concerning Bruno: His wheels are, on the whole, too inefficient to memorize large chunks of text and not optimized for germanic(ish) languages such as english and german. That said, if you’re interested in his work I can recommend Scott Gosnell’s English translations, based off which I’m currently trying to decipher his ‘Thirty Seals’. There’s a lot to dive into there. Also seeing how this is a relatively common question on this forum, you might want to search for some very interesting posts farther back in time.
Good luck 