How to squeeze 5000 words in a few palace?

Language Learning
1

Hi friends,
I have some question about memorizing vocabulary memory palace. I am not very newbie on this technique and I already be able to put items in one palace with a reasonable time (with 1-2 mins). My goal is to memorize 5000 french words in my palace and I have question about how to balance number of memory palace and number of vocabulary per palace.

I saw the guideline suggests to put around 20-50 items per palace. If i want to memorize 5000 words, I will need to create more than 200 palace and I think that’s too much just for one language…

I also tried another method that I create a empty room but put all related words in the empty room and connect them all together. Is this a good approach? The problem is still exist because I still need to have a lot of palace to handle words.

Can anyone help me explain what I did wrong?

3 Likes
2

@metivier and @LynneKelly have some excellent sections on language learning via memory palaces in their works, maybe they can give some advice? Lynne specifically discusses French.

2 Likes
3

Thank you for the tag, @TheHumanTim. This topic is of particular interest and I am working on improving what I have done to date before I go public with it all.

Hi @zzzero. I don’t think you have done anything wrong. I am not sure about the 20-50 items per palace. My palaces are way bigger than that - I leave the house and continue the palaces around the neighbourhood. I have about 10 km mapped out for various topics. The main ones I work on now are for languages. I am doing French and Chinese (Mandarin / Simplified script). The Chinese one is based on the radicals - a component of the character used for indexing. That has 214 locations because that’s the number of radicals. Every location is a whole house or shop or suchlike, so lots of detail to add endless vocab. The few locations which have a huge number of words, I have included the other side of the road.

I am comparing how you would implement palaces for French and Chinese. Given how different the languages are, and that there is the script issue with Chinese, the palaces are structured very differently. That’s what I have been working on for a while now.

For French, I have a number of palaces because that worked better than the single one I started with. I have alphabetical palaces for verbs - one for each of the three different types, and another single large alphabetical palace for nouns. I have another for adjectives. Then I have another palace, which I named Les mots embêtants - the pesky words. All the other stuff, mostly adverbs, that I couldn’t work out and didn’t want to stop and think about the part of speech. My brain just jumps to the right palace. They are all just walks from home in different directions.

I use very big palaces so that each location has lots of detail and I encode (usually) when physically at the location. I walk one of my palaces every day. I have aphantasia, so no visual memory, so maybe you can visualise a location better than me, but I find that when I am physically at a location, I notice something which links straight away. But sometimes, vocab just links to what I already have there without visiting it.

Chinese won’t work like French because there is no alphabet and the parts of speech don’t work like that anyway. So it is completely different. My Chinese palace is my current obsession!

Love to hear of anything you find works.

Lynne

5 Likes
4

I use several MPs for French vocabulary as well, but I never considered using them for specific verbs or adverbs, just words or phrases as I want to learn them, but now that I’ve read your advice, I’ll set things up accordingly, so thank you.

2 Likes
5

I have a website that makes a map as you add words to it!! I do not know if I am able to post the link though ^^;

1 Like
6

Please comment here on how you go. I learn so much from other people on this forum.

I find the French verb ones particularly useful because the palace my brain leaps to tells me whether it is -er, -ir or irregular. I originally had the noun one as well, and added the adjectives. I tried an adverb palace but got confused what was an adverb, and I also had lots of words like alors and ainsi and needed them desperately. Hence les mots embêtants palace.

I also sometimes associate words with a French bestiary I created if I need extra help. For each possible starting pair of letters, I have an animal - or something else if I couldn’t find an animal. So if I need an extra clue to ainsi , say, that gets associated with un aigle, and the eagle helps, especially with really abstract words.

This thread is making me wish I had more time for the languages. This is my favourite of my many memory experiments.

7

Hi Lynne. Thank you.

I use various memory methods, with some being more successful than others. My main problem, however, is needing more and more space; I just run out quickly, but in fairness, they are worth learning, especially now that I am using them more effectively.

I don’t learn decks of cards or long lists of numbers; I concentrate primarily on historical stuff, like WWI and WWII, and the lives of significant historical figures, mainly those from philosophy. I am particularly interested in Stoicism, so a lot is used there.

I love learning languages. For example, I was already quite fluent in French, but it became difficult to remember what to say; I don’t live in France anymore and haven’t since 1987, when I returned to Ireland, and I use the language less than I used to, but now I am trying to get back into it. Yes, there is the Internet, and I can follow French shows on YouTube. Still, at 65, it isn’t easy to retain what I hear. I understand, OK, but retention for when I want to speak is the problem, and here the memory palaces help enormously.

1 Like
8

If I wanted to memorize 5000 French words, I would consider this strategy:

  1. I would find a list of the 5000 most common French words. Then I would eliminate any words that I already knew. There’s no point in storing those.

  2. Do a search on Zillow for listings in a given area - preferably an affluent part of a city. Filter your search to show only the houses that offer 3D virtual walk-throughs. These are sometimes multi-million dollar houses.

  3. Walk through some of the huge homes that you find. Some of these houses - homes that cost several million dollars - can easily provide 100+ stations/loci.

  4. Though Zillow alone will last you the rest of your life, you can also find various real estate companies online that offer 3D virtual tours of houses and condos. And there’s Merchant View 360, Google Street View, and a slew of other tools online to develop loci - inside or outside.

  5. Still too many memory palaces for 5000 words, right? Not really. What if you stored 2-4 words per locus? You probably couldn’t follow an exact PAO approach, but doing something similar would work. I would definitely include a verb at each station in the memory palace so that action is included. So you might have something like an animate object (person, cow, dog) performing an action to an inanimate object. Just a possibility.

Yes, you could put only adjectives in some palaces and only verbs in other palaces. Or you could put only words starting with ‘A’ in a few palaces. Words starting with ‘B’ would be in other palaces. Your decision about organization and grouping of vocabulary can be whatever works best for you.

9

Thank you for posting that. I’ve never learned 5,000 words in one method, using different loci for different subjects. Of course, I intend to be a bit more of an explorer and adventurer. My main reason for getting into memory palaces, etc., is for the challenges, so I should use whatever works. Thank you for providing so much food for thought.

1 Like
10

I really like @RMBittner 's idea of using a Memory Town. That is a town full of stores and services where everything is named in the language you are learning.

1 Like
11

The memory town technique for language acquisition originated with Dominic O’Brien. His 1993 book, How to Develop a Perfect Memory, explains it in detail.

Dominic writes, “My personal best, using this method, is 320 new German words in an hour
(after one sighting of each word).”

While I love that book and highly recommend it, American readers should note that many of Dominic’s references therein are British. He uses British celebrities and locations frequently as he explains his methods. Of course, now that you can virtually explore almost anywhere and also see a slew of famous individuals’ photos, this is much less problematic.

12

I agree: How to Develop a Perfect Memory is a fantastic book that was my first introduction to memory techniques. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

13

I also love Dominic O’Brien’s books, and as well as the memory palaces, I use a Memory Town, with masculine and feminine places. I use that for whatever appears there, such as in the fruit shop and supermarkets, but not for other words. For masculine and feminine, I also have two characters, Fleur and Petit Prof (actually two teddy bears) who join the story or image if I need them to ensure I remember the gender.

I find that I also need the verb palaces, adjectives and pesky words. And for nouns that don’t fit anywhere else, such as professions.

I am interested in the idea of using virtual palaces. I have aphantasia, so no visual memory which is why I find actually physically being somewhere works much better than imagining the location - especially for encoding. This may not be the case for those with good visual memory.

One research program I am involved with is exploring the difference between memory palaces and Aboriginal songlines - the latter is encoded in place, uses song and movement, and is done communally. Being a university project involving researchers from four universities, it will take ages just to get through the protocols, let alone report on the results.

I am trying to mimic that with the Chinese memory palace, adding in as much as I can of those elements and I am finding it makes a significant difference. But I am starting with a lack of visualisation, so my personal experiments may not apply to others.

All good fun!

Lynne

4 Likes
14

Pinyin, including self-invented pinyin has helped me remember quite a few words and phrases.

When I took level III in Brisbane a few years ago, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked and the whole course was in characters and Chinese only (except when the teacher was cheating).

To keep up, I modified mindmapping and followed a fairly strict-clocklike formation for character (center), tone (12 o’clock), pinyin (1 p.m.), core meaning (2 p.m.) etc.

The mind map page proved reliable as a kind of quasi-Memory Palace, and this has transferred nicely to other tightly-focused uses on other kinds of pages ever since.

If I ever go on to level IV, I’ll definitely use the approach again for characters.

1 Like
15

Could you expand on this please? I am not sure that I understand what you are saying. How are you using this mind mapping technique?

1 Like
16

Perhaps the best way to understand it is to try and replicate it based on the description.

I should have previously mentioned that tone combinations are all reflected in a 00-99 PAO. Since my 00-99 PAO is 52% in a permanent affair with the memdeck I use (Tamariz stack), I sometimes use the same images as playing cards for the tone combinations.

In other words, I can write 34 and think of 4D on the mind map for zhuǎn bèi. Adding the card isn’t always helpful, but sometimes it becomes a ninja star or an ad hoc sweeping tray, etc.

As some will already know, number systems are bi-directional and of great use in language learning if an alphabetical association can’t be found. It’s still an alphabetical association, but just looked at differently.

So in this case, zhuǎn on its own could be 62. Though when I actually memorized zhuǎn bèi I just though of Lac Le Jeune near where I grew up with director Michael Bay making a movie. That was not the best imagine because jeune and zhuǎn didn’t sound the same upon further scrutiny, but it was good enough for the test.

That’s another cool aspect of having a mind map: You can visually work out how associations for sound are going to interact with associations for the tone combinations without having to “see” them in your mind.

It’s faster, more direct and gives the mind a spatial reference similar to a Memory Palace, and all the more so given the use of the hand, which as @LynneKelly recently pointed out in an article, provides a very special level of “encryption.”

Note that I also included Buzan’s 3-color rule in many of the mind maps when I had my colors around. I used to think that idea was kind of strange, but upon reflection, I hypothesize that it probably allows for some diffuse thinking as you’re switching colors, if not a kind of interleaving.

Using a clocklike formation as an additional point of reference is another “hack” because you don’t technically need to see a clock to remember that 12 is north of 6, etc. But I find that it does edge to something more like what I would call a mental picture.

1 Like
17

Thank you all for your helpful replies. I apologize for my delayed response, as I have been very busy with work. Your suggestions have inspired me to explore new ways to utilize the memory palace technique. I truly appreciate your guidance! I plan to expand my palace and test how many words I can retain in a single palace. I will share my experience here and keep you updated.

1 Like