I’m trying to memorise small passages of laws word-for-word. Until now I’ve mostly used memoria rerum to remember the relevant content but I want to challenge myself for greater accuracy. To that end, I am searching for a suitable method.
Here is an example I’d like to memorize verbatim, from Article 6 of the European Human Rights Convention:
In the determination of his/her civil rights and obligations or of any criminal charge against him/her, everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law. Judgment shall be pronounced publicly but the press and public may be excluded from all or part of the trial in the interest of morals, public order or national security in a democratic society, where the interests of juveniles or the protection of the private life of the parties so require, or the extent strictly necessary in the opinion of the court in special circumstances where publicity would prejudice the interests of justice.
Or this section from Article 263 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union:
The Court of Justice of the European Union shall review the legality of legislative acts, of acts of the Council, of the Commission and of the European Central Bank, other than recommendations and opinions, and of acts of the European Parliament and of the European Council intended to produce legal effects vis-à-vis third parties. It shall also review the legality of acts of bodies, offices or agencies of the Union intended to produce legal effects vis-à-vis third parties.
And continuing:
It shall for this purpose have jurisdiction in actions brought by a Member State, the European Parliament, the Council or the Commission on grounds of lack of competence, infringement of an essential procedural requirement, infringement of the Treaties or of any rule of law relating to their application, or misuse of powers.
As you can see, the subject matter is rather complex and abstract, therefore not lending itself easily to the classic memoria verborum. A possible approach I’ve yet to test would be this: Using the same method as some actors, that is writing down the first letters of each word to memorise, as shown here by Nelson Dellis: https://youtu.be/k8k_rNTDjJM?si=2uiAw_DKiBI5LFyC
I then plan to use Bruno’s memory wheels to encode these first letters (and characters such as ‘;’ or ‘.’) into images to integrate with the palaces I used to memorise the relevant contents (perhaps using nested palaces with large chunks of text like these), giving me an additional cue on the words used.
What do you think? Is there another method I should try/integrate?
I used to work as an actor and there are 2 ways - you either memorize your lines peretly and then show up to rehearsals or you walk around rehearsals with your script/book and learn the lines as you rehearse. If you can memorie, as an actor, without adding emotion option 1 is best. The text you need to memorize is short .One week end, and you would memorize it. The alternative is to focus on keywords. So, choose keywords from the text that will trigger your organiic memory. In any case, you will need to read the tet many times. If you want to go fully nerd mode, you need one peg per word. Possible, but not necessary. Better to memorize like an actor memorizes speeches, repetition (which, by the way, is the Swedish word for rehearsals)
I go into a bit of how I memorize verbatim in the thread. Not entirely, but there are a lot of details I share.
I suppose it’s a bit of a cross between what @maxvik mentioned as using a peg list (for abstract text I use sound-alikes, puns and wordplay often) and the repetition method.
Sort of semi-linking phrases or short snippets of words from the text to imagery/scenes and I practice speaking the text out loud while running through the memory palace/peg list of scenes/images.
I also run through the memorized chunks forwards and backwards. As well as out of order (doing every other memorized snippet forward and then the ones I skipped going backward/ odds one way, evens another) and various other playful ways of cementing my visual-lingual links to the text to be instantaneous and enjoyable.
Well that was a very interesting read, I didn’t expect it would wind up as a discussion of the existence of free will.
In the determination of his/her civil rights and obligations or of any criminal charge against him/her
So the images I’d normally use for this section would be something like 'Dieter Bohlen (German Celebrity, Dieter sounds like ‘Determination’) giving MLK’s ‘I have a dream’ speech (civil rights) while chained to the lectern (obligations, since the law ‘binds’ us, the notion of vinculum iuris). A beagle boy (from the old ducktales cartoon) charges at him with a spear (criminal charges against him/her).
That does take a lot less images than remembering the first letters. The thing I’m concerned with is those little words in between. How will I remember it’s ‘In the’ and not ‘For the’ or ‘In the Determination’ and not ‘When determining’? I suppose practice (spaced repetition) makes perfect there, but would you still recommended the actor’s method in addition to memoria verborum?
Also, what do you think of establishing a PAO/PO for the most common vocabulary? So for example ‘law’ would be Moses (the Simpsons version) hefting the ten commandmends over his head.
I used to study law well, long time ago and only for a limited time and if you study law typically you will remember all the important phrases simply by understanding more, and using more examples. In law some words are more important than others, and this needs to be remembered.The words and phrases enters your mind and sticks, normally, without more efffort than say, 6 to 8 hours per day of regular work on legal matters with the desied law as a relevant fator for the case in question.
You could also consider a 2-sound phonetic PAP based on the major system sound clusters.
For example, “Lava” ~ “L-v-” contains two sounds from two clusters, namely {l} and {f, v}. If you have an image for the combination ({l}, {f, v}), then “L-v-” would be that image.
The workflow would be something like this:
Choose two representative sound from each word and create an image
Every first and third words should be persons, and every second one should be an action
Each 3-word group is now a PAP image
Store each PAP image in locus/peg along your palace/list
You can either extend it to a 3-sound system, or add an extra “color”/“accessory” layer that can be applied to each person, which means that person words can now be made out of 3 sounds.
IN the theatre, the better ones (I never saw one), there are people reading the script as the play moves along, suffloer is the name of the profession, in Norwegian. Basically, if you forget a line they will give you a reminder. Norally one word is enough for the actor to remember the line but it depends on how drunk he is, lol. I worked with a star who had a itre of beer on each entrance He dried once in a scene wiith me, but since the play was pure shaite I just improvised, and he got back to it.
@maxvik I’m not entirely sure that’s a suitable method for what I’m envisioning, since I am a law student and therefore only have a limited amount of cases to solve. My university is also not in the habit of citing laws verbatim when working so there’d be less ‘organic repetition’ and recitation of the law than you may be used to. I should also mention that of course not all sections of a law will see an equal amount of use when working on cases, especially in the constitutional law course I’m currently studying for.
I’m also not looking for a way to remember the meaning of individual words and phrases like ‘inter partes’ or ‘erga omnes’, but rather searching for a method for remembering the exact wording of sections I already know the content of.
@maxvik The section from Article 6 I posted above is 113 words, with the full article being even longer. Considering this, 20.000 words is a large but not impossible amount of words to learn for a given field of law, with a lot of the vocabulary carrying over to other fields.
@maxvik I wouldn’t really say I study ‘the use of language’ per se any more than a programmer or a journalist does, though you could make a case for that when it comes to the interpretation of ambiguous laws. I’m not entirely sure how that plays into mnemonics though?
The Major system has 10 sound clusters, one for each digit. If you go the 2-sound route, then with a PAP you only need to memorize 100 persons and 100 actions, without a third 100 objects.
For obligation, I’d probably choose “g” and “tio”, which is a “sh”. And if this happens to be a person word, then if I have an accessory slot, I’d choose “b”, “g”, and “sh”.
Whether to encode everything or just select words should depend on you really.
You could also try something simpler and see how it goes.
Consider a Person-Giant hat-Giant shoes system, where for each sound cluster in the major system, you memorize 1 person, 1 hat, and 1 shoe, meaning that you only have 30 images to memorize in total.
Using this scheme, I might encode obligation as Naruto wearing a giant Sun hat and giant Nikes (the image is completely arbitrary, btw, there is no connection to the major system lol). The exaggerated size is for easier retention of course. Then I would store this in its own locus.
Of course, this is less efficient, since we will be associating one locus with one word instead of 3, but it is also easier. One could also point out that one might just as well go the good old route of coming up with an image for the word on the fly instead, which is fair enough, but with method one gains the quasi-deterministic aspect.
I like this question. You probably won’t be shocked when I say I think you have options.
Stuff I do (food for thought):
A few things I do to disambiguate on the “in-between” words:
Words and phrases have rhythms. Rhythms are old-school memory techniques that can be “felt”.
Paying attention to stressed/unstressed patterns is all this is. “In the determination” is Unstressed (“in”) —Unstressed (“the”) Unstressed (“de-”) —Stressed (“ter-”)
u—u—u—s or da—da—da—dum / "in—the—de—TER"
This is markedly different from “When determining” (but NOT for “For the”)
In many (not all) situations this is an easy disambiguating device if the words you get confused have different syllabic patterns because if someone ever sings or hums lyrics/songs when nothing is actually playing, this is often a large part of the method we naturally use without thinking too much about it to “remember” the lyrics.
If the ambiguous rhythm is the same, then this method aint any help.
Wordplay and punnery can also be used (I do this a lot as well). This requires mainly sound-alikes. Play around with joining the in-between words together (in various ways) and utilize sound-alikes to cue scenes/images that help disambiguate: “In-the” : “Inda” : “Inta” : “n-Da” are all ways to begin framing/brainstorming for sound-alikes.
“In the determination” : “In-the-de” : “Inda-D” : “IndieD” : even “Entity” or “In-diddy”
I won’t pay any attention to any comments knocking this method, because for verbatim memorization it combines the former rhythmic method with punnery or wordplay and is, frankly, a method I use plenty to clarify and disambiguate on the in-between words—it allows me to utilize images and associations outside of the domain i’m memorizing to quickly clarify how things are supposed to sound. It may not be for all individuals, but it’s handy as hell.
Not getting words mixed up is all about having cues to clarify which specific words are being used. So any method that breaks down properties already possessed by words—such as rhythm, where/how the sounds are created in the mouth (eg, plosives like b and p are closely related, fricatives like “fff” and “shhh” are called fricatives for good reason, nasals like “mmm” “nnn” and “nnngggg” are related, plosives like k and g are closely related and still somewhat related to b and p although less so)—is something to explore.
You may not choose these techniques, so I’ll summarize my method for coming up with them:
break down the properties of the ambiguous objects (in this case, in-between words)
play with using cues that can clearly and quickly disambiguate on those properties.
I really like that idea. Take a look at this comment. It’s short but I specifically talk about mnemonic considerations for commonly used terminology within domain. Might inspire some ideas to play around with that’ll work for you.
I hope you find some things that work for you! I’m curious to read more as your journey progresses (if you take the time to share, which you very understandably might not).
The ‘stressed-unstressed’ method reminds me of the oratory rythms discussed in ancient rhetoric treatises such as De Oratore or Rhetorica ad Herennium, which also feature discussions on memoria verborum. I wonder if that was consciously used similar to the way you suggest?
