Hi,
I am looking for help on how to memorize a small dictionary of about eight thousand ancient Greek root words and combining forms. I already started but have run into a lot of problems.
Please help, but please make sure that you have already encoded hundreds of images yourself and that months and maybe years have gone by, wherein you haven’t had to review but even now if you wanted you could recall the images and associated or encoded information on the snap of a finger. It won’t help if you yourself are only starting out because that means you won’t have the right answsers.
I insist on this point because I have already encoded more than a thousand images, and only now realize that I am doing something wrong - something very, very wrong - since after going back to my very first set of ten words yesterday evening, I realized that I don’t remember even two of the ten words and only bits and pieces of all the images I originally encoded, which totals more than fifty. In other words, to memorize ten words, I had to find and connect fifty or so different images. End result? Memorized two words, after hours and hours of work.
And, all the way through the first hundred words that I memorized, it is the same. In each set of ten words and their corresponding mnemonic images, I don’t remember the words or only bits and pieces of them, like the image I use for one part of the word, or maybe I remember the image but not the connected meaning, or maybe the two or three or four distinct senses of a word but not the images or the word itself, etc. It’s all totally broken up images and information. I remember spatially where the images are placed, but often not the details of the image I used to attach other images, and so sometimes nothing, except more or less where I encoded the word and all the corresponding images.
I would like to do it like Dr. Yip Swee Chooi did it, if anyone knows how he did it. I saw his video where he says he finds images for the page he is on (say page 1,308) and encodes them in some fashion thereof, but unfortunately I am worried that this guy is just a charlatan like so many others.
What I mean by charlatan, I am afraid, is that if we don’t repeat the memorized information everyday, forever or for a very, very long time, as in years or maybe months and months and months, that we won’t ever be able to learn that much with it. Maybe say twenty images or something, but not hundreds and hundreds and even thousands and thousands.
The reason I question him is not because I know he is wrong. I really, sincerely, DO hope he is not wrong and that he can show others how to do it the right way. It’s not enough that he gives us some “method” to do it. We have to be able to mimic that method and have it work for us too. There is of course a lot of profit in it for him if he repeats the images often enough that if anyone ever asks him to repeat it, he can. It is a totally diferent thing if he did it ONE TIME, however long that took him, and was DONE.
If he repeats all the time, basically what he has done then is memorized a bunch of information (in his short term memory) and just repeats it enough that if he is ever tested he can claim to have memorized it (in his long term memory, and only once, such that he doesn’t have to keep reviewing and reveiwing and reveiwing the memorized information).
If he has to keep reviewing and reviewing for however many months or years even after all the wokd of the first time through has been completed, that would still make him A TON OF MONEY if he sold the system in Chinese; SINCE, a ton of Chinese people want to learn English VERY FAST and effeciently. And, since he is tested on his memory but not whether he reviews it all the time, no one can ever really know whether he reviews all the time. No one wants to learn Chinese if that means they have to relearn it everyday for say years and years and years before it really is “in the brain.” If that is the method, then it is exactly what we already have by just doing it the normal way.
Do you see?
So, if you have used the method of loci or whatever method it takes, and have REALLY MEMORIZED hundreds upon hundreds of words or a LANGUAGE, such that you don’t need to review the images everyday but can review them anytime you need, however long afterwards, even after years and years, then please, please, please, please respond!
I don’t want to keep investing my time, working hard, and failing. I already purchased a course at phenomenal memory. It was too hard to follow and I didn’t want to complete the course because the owner was very strange and the course book was weird and it was too much trouble and didn’t seem to make sense. Later, I used another book by Ron White, and that seemed to work in the beginning, but then after several months have gone by, from when I first started my “journey,” as they are called, I only now realize that for hundreds of images, the method of loci is not working.
Perhaps my problem is that my first location is too small. However, the next location is much bigger, and it is still problematic. There are words and other things I don’t remember. Also, some of the locations themselves are hard for me to remember in detail, and therefore I can’t review them with enough scrutiny that they allow me to recall the images I originally attached. On the next location, again on which I attach ten words and therefore sometimes with each word, more than five images, either in a “linear order,” one image upon the other, or in a “grouped order" several images attached to the first, the problem is the same. I remmeber say the actual words, but not the images, or images but not the words, or not the distinct part of the location and therefore nothing, or so forth.
As I review all the first hundred images, I find multiple errors all over the place, and it makes really really mad.