I guess I am late to this party?
. But I have to write because someone else may come across this.
In my opinion, you don’t always have to map a number to a name. Focus on the end objective which is mapping to an image, this is the format for arbitrary PAOs.
I already had a (natural?) feeling (personality, gender and body type) for numbers 1 to 9 and then I added for 0.
Funny enough when I came across the major system in Harry Lorayne’s book, I was like “that’s too much work, no thank you”. Then I set out to form people to match with my feel from 0 to 9. (0 wasn’t natural). Then in memorizing a number, I will form a long continuous link, person one performs action(random according to situation, next number and stuff) on next person who then performs on next…This was long (more than two years) before I first heard of PAO system, gives me that feel of I should have taken this further when I had the chance and the slight annoyance when someone talks about and idea that isn’t yet fully formed in your head but it’s there.
To cut the long story short, I ended up using my association to form a two digit PAO, I just think of a number, think of people I know and find someone who matches. Some were kind of “forced”. I ended up having to use the single digits to learn the double digits (fake feel wasn’t enough). For example, for 26 I linked 2 and 6 persons and linked the 26 image in. I wanted to make a post on this, but I guess this is good enough?
The problem is that numbers look (and therefore feel) similar to me (3 and 8, 2 and 5, 7 and 9). So I can make mistakes when trying to decode without conscious effort and also sometimes while encoding. The encoding problem seems to be slowing me down and preventing me from reaching subconscious competence ( I talk about facing something similar in math in another post) but I will overcome it