I’ve been thinking of the practical value of mnemonics, and where it’s use is strongest and weakest. I was wondering, what can’t notes do that mnemonics can? What makes mnemonics better (or worse) than notes (besides, perhaps, fun)?
To start: mnemonics can store non-linguistic sensory info we don’t know how to describe
Easy. At an examen you cant see notes but you can see mental images. 
. Checkmate.
You can always access your mnemonics and will often be quicker than looking it up in your notes.
Memorization of things learnt in the past, of key concepts, facts and vocabulary allow you to actually understand what you read and ask the right questions to learn new things and exercise critical thinking.
If you don’t remember the basics, your notes won’t produce understanding, they will just reproduce (in whole or in part) texts you don’t understand and facts that you can’t put in relation with each other.
It’s not actually possible to think well if you don’t have the elements for it in your brain ready to be used.
Mostly I just find it has the power to get things in your head much faster than other methods. Once there you have a foothold for either more information to attach itself to, or something ready to practice with to convert it into a skill.
Using it to learn keybaord shortcuts for example is pretty awesome, you get them in your head quickly then you just use them to make them part of your workflow. I still remember that F4 will convert something into a sort of reference cell in Excel, even though I never opened that in my life just from coming up with an example on these forums. Writing notes on it has near 0% chance of causing you to remember what a keyboard shortcut does weeks (perhaps months?) down the line without plenty of review or use.
It’s a god send for language learning, although I draw a blank on most Japanese words and end up having to go through a painful grind on them. Those that get images only take a few reps to nail down.
That said I like notes, when you only take as much as you need then later expand on them in your own words and work with them, they seem to work well. But if you basically just copy text without thinking about it and never touch them again after writing them, or simply read them for rote they are pretty crap.
I guess for things like passwords! Though I would probably always have some kind of physical backup and would never trust my memory entirely with something like a bitcoin address. Having said that I lost my physical backup and wish I had a mnemonic for my bitcoin! Sadly all lost.
Also I think for memorizing words for second language. In my very limited experience these are some use. I don’t want to overstate their effectiveness because I found them of limited use but…I found them useful for memorizing difficult words.
For example I decided to encode Menetelmä. I think of mental+ma, and the stabbing scene from the film psycho. And theres is a heart rate monitor in the shower too. The meaning is procedure, method. That would have taken longer to memorize with SRS on paper.
Having said that, for the vast majority of words SRS and paper is the better choice. Mnemonics is just kind of randomly useful.
Memory palaces specifically are great for making connections between material. For example, noticing a connection between lecture from a previous semester and a current lecture or even something I read in my spare time is easier if made a memory palace out of the notes I wrote. This doesn’t happen the same way with ordinary paper notes, even if I know the material well or review.
Also, I don’t have to review anywhere near as often with memory palaces or other visual mnemonics. They stick better in my mind than normal notes, even if I neglect them for months at a time.
It is also very useful, as someone else stated above, for memorizing difficult words. I needed mnemonics for Ancient Greek because, for whatever reason, flash cards and exercises that worked excellently for Latin, Italian, and other languages failed with Ancient Greek.
Learning forms of words is also sped up by mnemonics, which is useful especially when you are trying to learn a lot of grammar fast.
Hi. How do you use it about greek?
Hello.
To memorize vocabulary, I made a palace for each chapter of the textbook and placed all words there in the order they appear in the readings. I used images that represent syllables (for example, a cat chasing an evil rat to write κατάρατος (cat-a-rat-os), meaning very wicked or abominable). For more difficult words where I couldn’t instantly make a phonetic association, I spelled them using a visual alphabet I created for Latin (to spell medieval names, which are often strange) that requires one image for up to 6 sounds. For example, ἄκρος is asinus crudelis ridet orcam stultam - cruel donkey laughs at stupid orca, and they sit at the top of a mountain because the ἄκρος is the topmost point). For very abstract words, Ι sometimes resort to spelling the definition in another, more familiar language using my visual alphabet.
I review by rereading the readings from the chapter and trying to recall each meaning as I come across the words in context (which is easier than without context, but that seems to reinforce the connection between word and meaning - also, when do I need to know a word out of context?), or simply by walking through the palace.
The problem with this approach is I don’t always know for sure how the word is spelled because I can’t hear the difference between certain vowels, so I use the same symbols to represent them. I can recognize words but not write them or spell them out loud. I am trying to correct that by coming up with a Greek visual alphabet that accounts for these letters.
I did the same thing for forms of words. I also made palaces for weirder, difficult to remember grammar rules.
Hi. Very clever system.