Hello,
I am new to this forum and I made an account so I could get some assistance with how to memorize history dates. I have my end of year history exam in about 4-5 weeks and so I wanted to use the major system (which I have learned already) to assist me in recalling dates for specific events. So what I want to ask is this:
How do I use the major system to recall the exact date and month for an event? (I’m not worried about the year)
I understand how to do it if I was just learning a date for an event but not sure about including a month as well.
For example if I choose the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12th, 1790) would I use 7-12 as July is the seventh month?
The concern I have with this is that I would probably get mixed up and write down December 7th instead of July 12th.
The only solution I can think of at the moment is to create a different list of 12 pictures for the months and use the 31 pictures I already know for the dates. Is this how you guys would going about doing this?
Any help would be greatly appreciated as soon as possible because I have a practice exam on this coming up next week.
For those interested I am studying the French (1781 - 1795) and Russian (1905 - 1924) revolutions so as you can probably tell there’s quite a lot to cover.
Thanks
Make an alternate PAO. If you have a PAO list that is. If you don’t, simply use a X-O-O system, x being first image, o being an object. First image will be whatever the event is, the most unique word of the event, or something that represents it : clergy. The second image will always be the month, the third image will always be the day. Make sure to write down all these dates and events on a piece of paper so you can review them.
If you don’t know how PAO works; three images, each representing a number, are linked together. That’s what you would do for this task.
Bateman
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One tip I would give in life is to always use the ISO 8601 date format, namely, YYYY-MM-DD.
Doesn’t matter if you’re reading European or American textbooks / webpages then as long as you make your notes properly.
In business this has also been a life saver when working with groups on different continents.
Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12th, 1790) would be 1790 - 07 - 12 which you could encode to remember in any way you wish.
I use a POA (Person Action Object) method normally. I had to learn some years when helping my daughter with history and we came up with a PA PO system thus:
17 - In major system this is DK
90 - In major BS
07 - SK
12 - DN
Year: Danny Kaye biting & screaming
Month: Stephen King
Day: Dead Ninja
Warning: Not an expert, actually still quite a beginner.
In one of the memory books I read about a trick to learn the major system without making new images. You re-use your “old” images, but imagine them in a different way, for example covered in ice.
That might work for you as well by fixing a certain appearance to the month and the other one to the date. You month images could be covered in ice, or could be all pink or instead of being normal images be cartoon images or… there are countless possibilities.
AimpliesB (now reading about PAO, sounds tough to me to make the link… and not link an event image with the wrong number image)
