I fell out of love with verbatim text memorization, but I’m here to reboot it!
My previous method was doing redux (first letter of each word) which I found incredibly slow going. I could probably have benefited from taking more breaks.
I’m trying writing down glyphs representing each word and seeing how I go there.
My handwriting is so messy I can’t read my own pictographs!!! Not sure what to do about that – does anyone have some suggestions?
I also learned today about a “rebus”. Something to play around with soon!
Maybe I could store a rebus per line at each station of a memory palace… Right now I’m not incorporating a memory palace at all though. I’m just trying to get my bearings.
My handwriting and composition foresight is such a problem.
I used pressure to indicate lack of understading,spacing between words to indicate the importance and a cursive letter in the entire world one or more to indicate(I need to know more).
It reduced the need to cross out words by atleast a 100% and it increased the clarity of my words while making my writing a bit faster.
It added more meaning to my words.
I am not sure whether it improved my handwriting but applying it can tell.If it does not work then no loss but if it does work then there can be some benifit,Except a loss of an ink,pages and time etc.
Use it at your own risk and after consulting a teacher and preferably not for exams.
I may use it for an exam.But at my own full risk only.
I use a memory palace for verbatim, one locus/station per line, paragraph or section (depends on your preference), with an image telling me the broad idea, sometimes a special mnemonic when I get one word or expression always wrong.
I like to keep track of where I am in the text that way. Then the first letter method to nail down the exact words. It also allows to start wherever you want in the text and even if you forgot a bit you still have the rest.
In anki I have one card for each locus and I put the first letter in the hint field, which is a field that opens only if you click on it. That way I train remembering with no hint, but if I’m stuck I still can see the first letters, which is much better for retention than just reading the answer.
I go in and out of love with Anki. Eventually I get overwhelmed or bored or both and stop using it. What are the ways you use it?
Anki is inherently boring, you do crazy stuff with it though if you want to:
I personally use it the boring way and try to think of what kind of cards would help me most. For example if memorizing a 000-999 list, you could record yourself reading the number and put that as the front of a card, fill in the black, number first, picture first,etc …
The thing with Anki is that I recognise that there will be times where I will like it and do a lot of it, and times where I won’t like it and do less, and it’s ok if I’m not at 0 cards every evening.
For example I know that during holidays, even if I would have time to do my anki reviews, I’m almost never “in the mood” for it (other environment, other activities, people to see, etc.)
So I do two things: I anticipate by not doing too many new cards in the two weeks before holidays, and I put very clear priorities. I have one deck which I absolutely want to maintain (which I can do in 15-25 min. which is easy to do and I can even skip days) and others which are for fun and/or not so important where I just don’t care if I have a backlog.
I’ll just tackle it little by little when I come back. And if I don’t feel like it, I’ll move it into my archive deck, where I put subjects that are “on hold”.
Also very important, anki is only a scheduling tool. The learning and using the knowledge happen outside of it. The key is to integrate as much as possible what I learn into my everyday life.
For example, my niece is into geography right now so I have been making memory palaces for countries and capital cities in my grandparents home with her. It’s more valuable than reviewing geography cards in Anki.
Same for languages, my point is always to learn intensively for a while, but once I reached the level allowing me to use the language, it’s not as important to stay on top of anki reviews. My time is better spend using the language. I’ll do the anki cards as much as I can, but I don’t really care if I have a backlog of vocabulary cards. After all, I’ll encounter the words in what I hear/read (or if I never encounter these words again, then it wasn’t very useful learning them).
For verbatim texts, the whole point is to have them in my head to meditate on it or to entertain myself, depending on the type of texts. Anki is super useful for the learning phase but afterwards it’s more effective and enjoyable to make use of it in daily life than to maintain an anki deck at all costs.
Any chance the mods could merge this into my main memory journal “The adventures of bestieboots and her questionable memory”? It quickly got about general memory
As far as handwriting, my suggestions are:
It took us a while to learn to write when we were younger, now you need to relearn.
As far as Anki goes, I’ve written elsewhere on the forum, here’s a recap:
For learning a language, I starting entering every word I didn’t know from a book or TV show in Anki and it quickly became overwhelming. Instead of giving up, I changed it up!
I started writing every word I didn’t know in a notebook instead of entering it directly in Anki. Whenever my daily reviews in Anki were under 10 minutes, I’d go through my notebook and find some words that appeared more than once, and add those to Anki. If a word appears multiple times, it is obviously more useful than words that appear only once! This method made my learning feel very efficient.
Thank you all for the helpful feedback.
I misspoke when I said handwriting, I mean the legibility of my small sketches/pictographs. If I draw someone standing on a table, I may not know what it is, for example.
Maybe take a drawing course? It doesn’t need to be very high level, just a few video to learn the basics (how everything is made of a few simple forms combined in different ways).
Also, after completely forgetting what a mnemonic meant (I recognise what I draw, but can’t remember why), I now note a few keywords in a corner to jog my memory just in case.
Here I get the “disperse” idea but why are these people running after balls of yarn (and not something else), I don’t know anymore 
Oh i really love this. I’ll post a photo of my work to complete the trade 
I need to decide whether I’m going back to anki or all in on obsidian SRS plugin.
5 lines of a short practice and i just wrote in the mantra. Ignore the bright orange.
Accidental 8" ruler for scale. It’s massive. That is my hand print in the corner
Do you think practicing words on ML will improve my ability to memorize verbatim quickly?
I’ve no experience with ML sorry.
What I’m testing this last holiday is to recite the things I’ve learnt (as mich as I can) to go to sleep. That way I’m not depending on any device to distract myself if I don’t sleep and I get reviews in. And if I fall asleep quickly all the better.
You’re given a list of words and you have to recall them, essentially.
Last night I did the falling asleep practice of the major system. Counted up from 00 and came up with the first word I could think of that fit.
Since you’re already writing stuff down in your pursuit of verbatim text memorization it might be worth it to look into Rozan note taking which is meant for real-time interpretation / translation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FastWriting/comments/1gsa6is/qotw_2024w46_verbatim_rozan/
Had a beautiful experience:
I had an intuition (which I store as a “hint” about what the intuition was to prompt me) stored in a memory palace loci, went to store it and BAM it was already there. Such a neat experience.
Wow, that feel when you realize you’re using a memory palace to recall in the middle of speaking to someone… Should make these metaphors
Built an animal A-Z peg list. I don’t feel intuitive with any alphabet even my “own” so it’s not as effortless as the memory palace to navigate non-linearly.
I’m thinking of breaking up the chunks of the alphabet so I can mentally navigate between them. Store them in a palace like before.
I’ve been practicing storing as I go, including insights during meditation.
