Journal - Learning German as my first Memory Palace Project

[cameri]

@Kiluanji

But I begun applying this simple point of expecting reviews, which helps with alleviating the pressure I put on myself so I can actually progress, something that perfectionism only hinders.

That is awesome! The more I play and the less I think about getting it right or fast enough, with less pressure, the better I do, the better I become, and the faster I am. And reviews is just another way to do what anyone needs to do to learn a language, but not just reviewing endlessly the same things of course. As a child learns, at every review, at every exposure, another context can be exposed, the word can be lived differently, imagined differently, perhaps even within a sentence, an idiom, etc.

@Kiluanji

I am considering timing-limiting each entry - 1 minute per word - but I am hesitant, because it might be too early on in my practice

I tried using a timer from time to time but it had a bad effexr on me, so I forced myself to get me to go the distance in different ways. Just keeping on trying to simply place whatever image comes to mind without thinking if this will work or not, and just moving on, never thinking twice, knowing that I will be going back soon anyway and some will work 100%, some just a bit, some a lot, some non at all, but I take a breather and have fun retouching the images that need updating. THAT speeds things up, words in less than a minute guaranteed with a little practice and perseverance.

OK, now bear with me, I think examples speak louder than my lousy explanations. So I hope you jump down this rabbit hole with me :

I have “abhängig=dependent” placed in my journey. Now let’s walk backwards :
Already know it’s an ab- word because the last 15 or so locations have ab- words in them and way way way before the first ab- word’s location, I had placed a gigantic beard and hat reminding me of Abraham Lincoln in its own location. Now when I get to abhangen, all I need is to place something hanging, then I get to abhängig, I see Fiverr! That’s what GiG made me think of first. Then abhängigkeit, now all I need is to place a KiTE at the next location. Around 20or so words later I will go back to see what I can get back from my image creations how good was I and how good am I at guessing the parts I didn’t even make images for :

Abraham Lincoln for Ab
Failed to remember! Added gigantic mushy abs abdomens filling the location (bus stop shelter) and yes there is still a big hat and beard !!!
2nd speedy review 100%

Miniture man bowing down = Abbau = reduction, decline…
100% remembered on first review

A building covered by a gigantic photograph (I knew bild is image)= abbilden 100%

my Hungarian monuments which is my image for u n g = Abbildung 100%!

a camcorder reminding me of REC for Abbrechen
Failed! Made it fall across the street onto my photograph covered building and on second review 100% remembered!

beautiful wooden deck for ab DECK en
100% remembered!

a gold-plated plane, since I know what teuer means and I associate a plane with Adventure = abenteuer 100%

a great beautiful tree with Autumn Leaves for the word fall, Abfall = trash (I focus on trash and leaves are all falling in an overflowing trash bin) 100% remembered

my friend Gab for abgeben, 70% remembered on review! Added hockey goalie pads since he’s a goalie and there made out of government application forms

Result = 100% remembered it was abgeben + to give, hand in, submit

Jumping to abhängig, what I used Fiverr gig ! Failed! Nooooo then IGgi Pop the singer appeared and took Fiverr gig s place, on next review 100% remembered

abhängigkeit , just a kite flapping away through a hole in the ceiling, 100% remembered on first.

I skipped a few to not get banned from this forum but let’s say it took about 5minutes and an extra 2-3minutes for the first &second reviews. For 20 words. That’s what I get for letting myself go.

At beginning, I was so worried it wouldn’t work that I’d spend an hour and so much more effort for a measly 20 words.

P.S I’ll answer you other questions happily tomorrow. I hope this helped even if just a tiny bit. Cheers!

[Kiluanji (Alvaro Neto)]

cameri, on the back of this advice, as well as an old, which in turn helped me understand this following thread better

Many(and I mean it) useful tips you need to learn massive vocabulary with Mnemonics

It has been a lifetime since I studied German, but I remember how I filled my head with enough of the language to visit Germany a few days in 1982. For me the most difficult part was knowing that I don’t know the language well and my fear of sounding uneducated in front of a stranger. I had one year of German in school, but that is merely an introduction. If you are in the same hurry I was in to learn “survival” vocabulary, then here is what I did: I learned a simple and useful sentence in…

I went out and bout a Rechtschreibung, thinking it was a Worterbuch, so I follow the advice of placing loci by word affixes. The good thing about this book is that it breaks down the syllables, so I have no guessing requirements on which affixes to memorize.

My first thought was to consider learning all 50,000 words in Duden’s kompakt Rechtschreibung, and it took me some 20 minutes to realize how silly and inefficient the idea is (for me). I decided instead to mark the in the Rechtschreibung the vocabulary the Goethe Institute requires to pass A1 to B1 (seems Wortliste beyond B1 are not provided by the Goethe Institute, leading me to believe that vocabulary becomes a lesser priority beyond that point) and make that my Memory Palace project.

Instead of practicing today, I was marking the book, and I will be doing that for a few more days - the time it will take me to cover the thousands of words given by the Institute. But this seems like a more worthwhile plan to learn the language.

In line with Paulo’s observation in his thread, I am complementing vocab memorization with actual speaking practice - and yes, I use the disdained textbook approach as well, and I think this approach has way too bad a rep.

[cameri]

@Kiluanji

I never needed to plan different palaces for these. One image to introduce “ENT” (an army of ants) will naturally end when and ambulance appears with its dirt, smoke and lights (ER)

Not quite sure what you mean here… so you’d have different images for each word stem - e.g., ENT and ER - and they would be contiguous to each other? That seems like an approach quite different to loci in the memory palace where you place individual and separate images (perhaps an approach better than the one I am aware of).

I meant that, instead of having a journey for Ab words, another for Er words, etc. My first ent- image is not entnehmen even though entnehmen is the first word of many starting with ENT. No, my first image is one representing ENT alone, and that army of ants image representing ent for me puts an end to my long EIN words (Einstein was my first image followed by the first EIN word einige=few,some (IGg i pop again did the trick, clearly it’s not einigi!)

[cameri]

@Kiluanji

Second question: did you come up with the list of word stems to memorize yourself, or did you use some sort of guide? And either way, would it be helpful that I build my own list of word stems from scratch?

These bigrams and trigrams are in order of frequency, 20 of each.

Prefixes, I just used if there were enough words (in top 4000 words) with them. Anything that has less than 5or so words, I passed…

Having my 40 images beforehand made it faster and often times funner, added a sense of familiarity on the long run. I definitely recommend that.

[cameri]

For learning to use the language right away, I strongly recommend what has really helped me, the Michel Thomas audio method. You ll learn how to construct sentences with the most basic words and he’s a lot of fun.

Also Assimil conversation based method helped me a great deal.

[alex.lima]

Which email address please? The video says I need to log in