Hi all.
I’m in my 70s and I didn’t discover the mnemonics until fairly late in life, so I’m a user, but far from an expert.
I want to encourage one of my nieces to introduce her young son to mnemonics, but I fear she will need a fair bit of help herself. Unfortunately I am a long way away from them so personal interaction is impossible.
Can anyone suggest a good book for this purpose - for introducing parents to the topic and helping them to introduce their children?
What’s the age range there? I doubt there is any good books for kindergarten or preschool… in fact, I doubt there are really any pedagogical books when it comes to memory techniques.
You could just have them look at the basics here on the forum… there is a starter guide under the Resources link as well.
Idriz Zogaj (President of the Swedish Memory Sports Council) actually wrote a children’s book series a few years ago. The first book is called “Addi & virriga pappan” (Addi and the confused daddy). Unfortunately it’s in Swedish, so it might not be very useful for you, but it’s supposed to be pedagogical. 
From the book description on the website (translated):
Addi is five years old. She is joining her dad to an employment interview for a job as animal caretaker in the city zoo.
“A dad can’t have a better job than that. Imagine, then I can pet all the animals in the zoo whenever I visit him”, thinks Addi.
But her dad has some problems remembering the way and it is very important to be on time for such a meeting. How will this end?
‘Addi & the confused daddy’ is the first book in the children’s book series “Fun to remember” och covers the most basic memory technique - to link information together by creating a funny story. An easy trick to memorise simple information.
Thanks for the response.
I’ve sent this link to my niece and suggested she jump in herself.
Well, I did find a little booklet, more of a long document really, that would serve quite well to get a parent introducing mnemonics to a child. The approach is very simple, as it should be, and just introduces the Linking Method and the Major System in very basic but quite usable ways. The author’s child was 5 years at the introduction of Linking, and 6 years when the Major System was introduced.
Be Brilliant
Teach Your Child to Memorize the
Easy Way with Simple Mnemonics
by David M Brown
It’s an Amazon Kindle Title of only 12 printed pages and sells for US$3.99. This forum doesn’t allow links but just go to Amazon dot com and search for the above title.
Note to Amanda: I don’t know if you are familiar with Amazon Kindle, but there are millions of titles available from all genres imaginable, at prices a fraction of what you will pay for paper, and all easily and instantly available. I have a Kindle reader device, but you can also read Kindle publications on mobile phone or computer using free downloadable app. Just search. For the last several years I have sourced 99.99% of my reading as Amazon Kindle downloads.
I do hope you pursue this with Coop. You’ll never regret it and there will come a time when he will be eternally grateful.
PS Mastering the Cyrillic Alphabet in a little over an hour was no mean feat for me and I’m really only an amateur at mnemonics.
Here’s a link to the article (on my computer it says 12 pages, 2,300 words for USD $2.99).
We need Google Translate and all of that stuff to get much better still… come a far way already over the last say 25-50 years considering… but wouldn’t it be nice to not have to worry about things like language barriers anymore.
Hi William - great to hear you want to help your niece.
There wasn’t a specific book for how to teach kids. I simply just learned myself and brought it down to a kid level. Youtube is great and also Nelson Dellis’s book “Remember It.”
At 5 years old my daughter can memorize up to 80 random words using a mind palace and the US presidents. She can also remember names, numbers and scriptures/poems using various techniques.
Like most Australians raised so far from the rest of the world, English is my only language. I travel a lot and I’m currently in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. When contemplating learning a few get-by words in the local lingo I decided to skip Georgian, as it is spoken almost nowhere outside the Caucasus. A large percentage of the population also speak Russian, so I opted to learn a few phrases in that language.
However, before I go into a shop with some specific purchase in mind I always make a pre entry in Google Translate in Georgian. It’s amazing how far that app has come. None of the natives ever have a problem with any of the translation.
As to memory techniques, I am so often frustrated and disheartened by how difficult it is to convince parents unfamiliar with mnemonics as to what a tremendous boon it will be to their children as they progress through the educational levels. One great regret of my life is that I didn’t become aware of mnemonics techniques until late in life.
A bit late to the game, but may I suggest you look at “Mind Maps for Kids: Max Your Memory and Concentration” by Tony Buzan (found e.g. from https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Maps-Kids-Memory-Concentration/dp/0007197764). Used it myself ~10 years ago to help our son to get started.
Thanks Thomas. Never too late. I’ll check it out and pass the information on.
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Wow that is great!
I’m finding it a bit hard to decode from my 4 1/2 year old. However, at least the palace exists in her memory, which is a half win at this point.
@bjc201
That’s fantastic.
I encourage the kids in my class as much as I can using mnemonics from various materials and try to get them inventing stuff as much as possible. I think the hold up has been the lack of a memory palace. I’ll think about that.
Need more practical tips. The most important thing is communcating the goal:
you need to link only THIS to THAT.
Communicating THIS and THAT and making sure they understand is half the battle.
Another good book is “A Sheep Falls Out of the Tree” by Christiane Stenger. I think she learned memory techniques as a child at a “memory club” at school.
I’ve been teaching my 5 year old the loci method, and she’s very receptive. She loves making up silly images and putting them in different places in the house. We used the method to memorize a poem, and I helped her recall it by pointing at the relevant locus at the right place in the poem. I think this is a very kid-friendly sort of thing to do.
guys how do I memorize content in 4 months 3years of subjects(7) of them
That amount of information takes some time even with all the methods. Start by looking into the getting started section here. Learn the linking method, memory palaces, and how to turn concepts and numbers into images. Start mentally placing them in locations you’re familiar with and review them often until it’s long term memory. This works best for definitional things where an unknown can be linked to something known and the definition is encoded with it, if you are able to just read and understand the concept theres no need to create a mnemonic for it.
how do I do that man I am cooked I have national exam in a few months
help me accomplish that please