There is seemingly endless debate on “which system is better” and you’ll find proponents of every one on here. You’ll need to try them out and see which makes the most sense to you as things click differently for each person. Ultimately the system is less important than the fluency that you’re going for. Once you’re fluent, the system kind of falls away. That being said, I think that some systems do a better job at getting you to fluency faster and in the process are more geared towards building better practice habits for associating imagery.
The goal is to be able to see a number and reflexively read it as it’s intended association with no conversion steps in between. This is why I prefer the Major System single word/name approach to building PAO lists. If you use the major system phonetics to create a set of people, then a set of actions, then a set of objects, with just a little practice you can literally read the numbers directly as those words. This is where I see the major system having a huge advantage over the Dominic approach.
The weakness of the Dominic system in my opinion is that it really only provides a way to generate the people names directly from the number to letter conversions, and those names are usually in the form of initials. This adds extra conversion steps when learning the system. If you need to decode to initials and then decode those initials to a first and last name, to me that is more work that just reading a single name via major. I can associate 64 with CHeR directly in major without any extra steps. The other problem with Dominic is that it usually forces a traditional building approach to the actions and objects based on the person, not directly from the number. Again, the ideal result is a direct association of the P and the A and the O to the NUMBER, not to the person first and then from that person to the number. Thats an extra step that makes it harder to build those independent element to number associations.
A PAO should be learned by associating each element independently of each other, directly to the number. So that 64 for example, is CHeR when it’s a person, OR it’s CHeeRing when it’s an action, OR it’s a CHaiR when it’s an object. It shouldn’t be learned as “CHeR CHeeRing for a CHaiR” because that is reinforcing associations between the elements and not directly with the number. If you have to make the association by reading CHaiR and then thinking back to which person is linked to the chair to get to Cher, and then try to recall that Cher is associated with 64, this is forcing you through many extra steps that don’t help accomplish that independent direct association.
More on this idea here:
A single digit list is great for starting out and learning phonetics, but you’ll quickly see its serious limitations. Biggest one is that you have no data compression at all. One digit is encoded into one visual element. The only advantage over just rote memorizing the actual numbers is that you can more easily visualize them, but there are still the same number of elements to hold in your mind.
As for how to encode a number like 892, if you only have a 1 digit system you need to encode and perfectly recall all 3 elements, very inefficient because there is no compression. You’d end up with something like Vai Peeing on a heN via major system PAO structure.
By stepping up to a 2-digit system you can now encode at a 2:1 compression. Every element that you use to create your mental scenes contains 2 digits. This is leaps and bounds ahead of the single digit effectiveness. The tradeoff of course is that you need to assign and learn 100 sets of associations, one for each 2-digit number, but really thats a small cost to pay upfront for great returns going forward.
By combining your 1 and 2-digit system for sequences with odd numbers of numbers, your compression ratio is better. You can encode 892 with just two elements and you have more freedom with how to construct your scene. You could break it up as 8-92 or 89-2, whichever elements you like better. So Vai is interacting with a PeN (8-92) or FaBio is interacting with a heN (89-2.) The action then becomes up to you and you’re not limited to the arbitrary visuals assigned by a strict PAO. So this way you get a 3:2 compression ratio and a more intuitive scene construction. Pretty good.
If you eventually go for a 3 digit system, now you just need a single element for this sequence. 892 is FaBiaN in my 3-digit system. Thats it. A 3:1 compression ratio, with just a single element animated however I want which represents all three digits. I can encode 6 digits very quickly with almost no worry about inaccurate recall by simply having two elements interact in a memorable way. Something like 525753 becomes LioNeL GoLLuM. Lionel Messi is on hands and knees hissing about his “prescious.” With a 1 digit system, the visual would contain 6 elements that all need to link and be recalled accurately and in the correct order. Of course, a 3-digit system requires 1000 pre-built associations to learn, so a significantly larger investment up front. How far you go depends on your goals and your tolerance for the grunt work!
Hope this helps or at least gives you some more food for thought!