In case it might help someone else, here’s the erratic path I took.
For the first 200 digits I used the Major System for each five digits and created a word or phrase. For example, 14159 was “tart lip”. 26353 “in jail mule”. I made a chain of associations between the phrases creating short little stories. For instance “tart lip” had a woman at the window of a cell with heavy lipstick. Then I picture a mule pulling the bars out of the wall to let her escape to get those two phrases. This required quite a bit of repetition. (I wrote the equivalents down on an index card and whenever I walked I would study them.
Then at 300 on I wised up and added journeys to the mix. With that I added each phrase’s image/story to a locaiton. This sped things up quite a bit but I still had to come up with the equivalents for the numbers. It got to be pretty automatic.
To keep from forgetting, I started counting my stomach crunches with Pi. I would roll out of bed each morning and do 1000 crunches counting with the digits I had memorized. At first I kept the cards next to me for any faltering, but now I can say the digits actually faster than I can count because it’s all single digits as oppopsed to seven-hundred-and-forty for example in counting.
