Memory palaces and memory towns for Mandarin Chinese vocabulary - Am I doing it wrong?

General Memory Chat
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http://www.uncomfortableoptimist.com/random-words-random-journeys/

This article was posted by mystery a while back and it described the problem I’m having perfectly.
I’ve been learning Mandarin for around 9 months now and have been using memrise.com pretty effectively to get to the level I am now (around hsk 5), despite the fact that my mnemonics were not as visual or involving as I recently discovered they should be (e.g. by involving senses and having gross/raunchy/stinky stuff in them). However, recently I reached an “ok plateau” (described in Josh Foer’s book: “Moonwalking with Einstein”) where my progress was slowing but through a little research I discovered the potential power of memory palaces and towns, techniques I am still excited about.

Before I knew about the memory town a few days back I was just using the house I grew up in to memorise characters and still remember them all very effectively. Then I discovered the memory town and the apparent need to organise vocabulary in to relevant areas of the town.

I decided to place characters in houses and words in other buildings and streets, which seemed like a solid idea. The few loci I’ve created so far in my town are very effective but lately I feel like I’m spending way too much time thinking about WHERE to place the loci (mum’s house? corner shop? street? park?) rather than actually creating and reviewing them, as it explains in the above article. Today I sat down in silence for 45 minutes and only managed to effectively memorise 8 chinese characters at different locations! I’ve just started using this technique but it has become more difficult than before I began using it

I’ve seen several articles stating that many people don’t need to do this. Instead they just think of random mnemonics not tied to a loci in a memory palace, the exact technique technique up until recently (thankyou memrise!). What bugs me is that I have no problem thinking of very creative images in my head as instructed by many helpful and knowledgeable people on this and other similar websites and books, but my indecisiveness and new urge to make everything perfectly organised in my head is stressing me out a little.

In summary, my questions are:

On memorising language vocabulary, am I placing too much importance on structure and organisation?
Could I still learn Chinese characters and words effectively not using the memory town?
I’ve read through gavino’s massive memory palace, the movie method and others but which method is most effective here?

I’d appreciate any comments at all.

Thanks!

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Yes. The benefit to using what Josh Foer suggests is, you know it’s an action word, so it would be in the gymnasium, or you know it’s food, so in the cafe. If you don’t organize it like this, you have to search everywhere.

Yes. You can link the word to it’s definition. The drawback to this is, you cannot review them independent of any materials. As in, you need some sort of hard copy to review everything you memorized.

It depends. Gavino’s method is mostly for creating huge amounts of loci, for people who can’t think of that many journeys that are complete. It also creates a nice hierarchy of organization. But it depends, I usually use linking for foreign words (spanish). The movie method? Is that using scenes from a movie?

Bateman

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For languages, I personally only put words in a palace during the initial learning phase because this aids revision.

I personally don’t think that spending lots of time and energy to find appropriate places around a town would be well spent, although I disagree with the memory god that is Dominic on this one - not something to do lightly!

By all means select any journey or palace that you have available and put all your pronouns there or have a series of palaces for your verbs or adjectives etc.

But I can’t see any real value in putting verbs in a sports centre as opposed to anywhere else.

If you do any reasonable amount of rehearsal and repetition, you sure will know which palace/journey a particular word is in - and most likely you will zoom straight there, without having to travel the whole journey either.

Incidentally, I don’t do this, but I know a lot of folks don’t use a palace at all and only concentrate on making strong links between the base and target language words.

Gavino

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Cheers for the replies guys

Bateman:

So you’re saying that in your opinion it is essential to fix certain words to certain phrases? Fair enough I don’t have much problem doing that but what about abstract terms (for chinese characters) such as “although” or "besides“ etc, I’m having trouble with these. Even when I think of something interesting I then think "ah, that doesn’t really fit in my garden/lounge, etc e.g. 责备(ze bei - responsibility/blame), I picture myself vomiting onto a ‘bay’ covering everything and then a french celebrity I know screaming at me and blaming me for messing up “ze bay!”. brilliant. Then I start to think “nope, can’t place that in the park” or “maybe I could use a beach I used to go to - oh no! It’s not in my town - so now I need to construct a beach adjacent to the back garden of my grandfather’s house…” aaaaand it’s been 15 minutes thinking about one word.

“Yes. You can link the word to it’s definition. The drawback to this is, you cannot review them independent of any materials. As in, you need some sort of hard copy to review everything you memorized.” (don’t know how to do that quote thing yet) -

Not sure I completely get this one, when would I not have a hard copy to review from? I would see the character/words and then access the mnemonic/loci, are you saying you review your words just sitting there analysing your memories? I think I’m missing your point on this one, sorry.

Yeah the movie method was something I saw on another site I think where you incorporate several different loci into a memorable movie scene, which is great for someone like me who’s a little obsessed with films.

It’s only for kanji/hanzi but check it out here: http://drmoviemethod.blogspot.com.au/2008/08/what-is-movie-method.html

Gavino:

Great to hear that there is no be-all and end-all in these memory techniques. I’m not sure if my problem described above is due to my placing too many limits on my imagination or not placing enough limits on them. For example to remember 降 I imagine chasing a cow up into the air and landing on a hill sprouted up from my grandfathers garden, when the cow crashes it breaks its horn. This didn’t take long to think of really but then began once again to doubt the placement of it, specifically that its a verb and verbs belong in…etc. Another problem might just be that not quite getting the basic principles of loci…could you (or anyone for that matter!) describe a few abstract chinese characters yourself to compare?. I mainly have moving objects and tv/movie characters interacting with them in funny/gross/raunchy ways to help me remember, what about you?

I’m rambling now so I’ll shut it for a bit. Anyway, cheers for the advice!

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Could be. If the memory town does not work for you, discard it.
It might be helpful, maybe just not for you.

BTW. It should be obvious where to place the words in the memory town.
With French, the ‘Le’ words go into one side and the ‘La’ words go into the other side.

In German you have male, female and neutral. So you need a town with 3 parts.

If a German word is female, it can only go into one part of the town.

Why are you thinking so much where to place the words?

Yes. And also there are other ways to get the same result.

How did you divide your Town?

Try them out. Then let us know.

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hi kinma,

I understand that words like ‘bench’, ‘lake’, ‘bus’, etc are quite simply memorised but my level is intermediate and I’m currently moving onto more complex abstract terms where the loci seem to be much harder to place. With Chinese there are no masculine/feminine words, so that dividing up the town doesn’t apply there. However, I was thinking about putting individual characters (of which I wish to eventually learn around 5-6000) in houses and words in other buildings, venues and streets, and then place verbs in one neighbourhood and adjectives in the other, but then what of adverbs? prepostions? cheng yu? idioms? (of which chinese is highly dependent). There are just so many factors I’m finding myself a little overwhelmed.

There may be an issue of not having been back home to my town in a couple of years making it harder to imagine every nook and cranny but mostly it’s my indecision of how to categorise and where to store the words.

Hope you can offer more helpful advice, cheers

Edit: just to be clear, I meant ‘more helpful advice’ as in I found your previous advice helpful, so give me some more :confused:

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Sorry, I should have been clearer. If you ONLY link the words to their definitions, without putting that image in a locus, you need a hard copy of the words. If you put them in memory palaces, you can review them pretty much anytime anywhere.

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Found a great article that will be really helpful to anyone studying chinese, especially for characters/pronunciation (posted originally by ‘kylemeko’):

2 Likes
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I fail to see the added advantage of doing this.

Would you ever not distinguish a verb from an adjective? I wouldn’t. I suspect you wouldn’t either.
So if this is the case, why make it difficult by putting constraints on placement?

Don’t take offence, but it sounds like you are making the simple difficult for no reason.
At least I am failing to understand the advantage.

If you would use 4 parts of a town to store the tonality of a word, then I would be able to understand.

Can you help me with this?

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Hey none taken, I’ve since done more research and found the article i posted before immensely useful. You’re right I was making the process way too complex. Being indecisive and a perfectionist can cause a lot of unnecessary stress and ball-ache!

The article describes in detail a combination technique for memorising both read/written character and pronunciation (something I’ve been doing separately for the most part. First, there is a set method of memorising pronunciation using fictional/non-fictional characters for the 25 or-so consonant sounds and (personally familiar) places for the 12 various vowel sounds. The Heisig method is then combined with it. I comfortably memorise around 25/hour with this technique (hell of a lot more than I was doing previously) and with much less mental effort.

Highly recommended.

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This makes more sense :slight_smile:

Now the placement of loci adds to the picture.
I have heard about the Heisig method.
I assume you mean the book ‘Remembering the Hanzi’? (for Chinese)

Do you recommend the book?

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Hey neale296. I also really like the method you posted. How would you adapt the method with bigger words? I really like the method but since I’m not studying characters I’m trying figure out a method to work with multiple words together with different tones.

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Interesting post. I’ve jumped on to help myself learn. I just started learning Mandarin. I already speak some very basic Cantonese and recently scarted learning to write Traditional Chinese. I intend to learn simplified later, because, perhaps ironically, I find simplified more difficult. Here’s some of the things I have noticed.

Chinese people learn English in all the schools there, but the translation system, Romanization, as the name suggests, is based on Latin. The first person to do this was a memory man called Matteo Ricci. Anyway, since then the same approach has been followed with every single translation system. I went through them all looking for a good one. Franskly, there isn’t one.

English words are based upon a series of codes. The spelling of English words happens as it does for a reason. The books don’t take that into account.

This causes the same problems in reverse for Chinese people, who will read words but sound out the letters as a Latin person might do. Chinese people make the same mistakes that the stereotypical television character of a Chinese person will make with sounds. This means they will have good spelling, but ask them to say the word. Write down a word like PAN for a Chinese person that speaks English though having never visited the West and that person will say PEN. The vowel sounds are all messed up, except for the O, in most systems. There is only one system where O changes sound to them and it’s rarely used nowadays anyway. All the systems mess up all the other vowels.

In reality, it is common for them to switch certian sounds as well. For instance , in Cantonese, Lei Ho (Hello) is commonly said instead of Nei Ho (Hello in correct grammar), Ni Hao in Mandarin. This applies to other letters. I noticed a pattern emerge that is phoenetic. It seems, if you know the Major System of phoenetic codes, you will soon spot these patterns. G and K are often switched.

To me, the risk of learning any of the Romanization systems is making mistakes because I have spent all my life conditioning myself to English sounds, rather than Latin sounds. English does not have tone markers as it does in Chinese lesson books for either Mandarin or Cantonese. The same is true for street signs in China, which is a system of it’s own, but also Romanized. So, when I see a letter, regardless of what system I have ‘memorised’, my past umteen years of ‘memorising and practising’ the original sounds of English over-rides this. For this reason I started to learn Chinese writing. I don’t know much and I am in no rush, because I quite enjoy writing the characters. I also like looking at videos where you can hear a Chinese person speak the characters, which is helpful for noticing the different dialects used for the same words. Anyway, the writing is not that difficult if you buy a stroke order book. The characters and construction, from the limited knowledge I have on the subject, seems completely logical.

What I think would be a good idea is to find a person that speaks Chinese. You can do this by joining Weibo, which is like Facebook in China. Chinese people are fully aware that their spoken English is bad. To them it is the most complicated language in the world, which makes sense, since Englsih also uses worlds from lots of other languages which do not follow the English spelling rules.

A Chinese person would be happy to find a westerner to teach them English and teach a westerner Chinese. They are very much into technology, so can send you recording of sounds. Providing you have a microphone, you can do the same back.

If you do want to memorise the characters and the spelling, of either phoenetic sounds, or the spelling of BOPOMOFU or whatever system, it’s worth making an alphabet system. Say you make a PAO system for the letters of the alphabet, then a PAO system for the other 26 letters of the alphabet (upper and lower case), get a stroke order book and memorise the spelling of whatever system, or your own phoenetic spelling written in the book. What you will notice in a Chinese stoke order book isthat you learn the easy characters first, then add bits to the easy characters. The Romanisation translation is only ever a few letters long. I actually use P/A, P/A, because the vast majority of Chinese characters only have that many sounds.

If you do decide to join Weibo, feel free to add me and we can learn from each other. it’s a pain to use the site at first, but you soon get used to it. Plus you get to see characters in Chinese all the time in the adverts, because the writing is embedded in photo’s the translator won’t change them. The Chinese can type Englsih, so you don’t have to worry about that.

Ps. Good luck and thanks for the tips.

Weibo:
http://www.weibo.com/u/3161720720/home?topnav=1&wvr=6