Hi everyone,
After finally having overcome the initial troubles of the shadow system + two block method, I was wondering if people had made their own modifications?
For me the only modifications where the scenarios where the jack or queen are the second card, and a number on the first card. According to the system of Lance, these would lead to their own word of 4 consonant (if I understand it correctly). However, since I am fairly new to cards, I didn’t want to practice memorizing another set of images.
Instead, I read the Q or J in this case in the same was as the 4 or 8, respectively.
But ofc to distinguish them, I place my special image after it, or if natural, make it interact with the original object. For now I use my brother as this image. So 5
Q = SLR, is a solar panel, but with with my brother sliding from it. Thereby I have 1200 images instead of the original 1352 images.
Perhaps this would slow me down, if I wanted to go for the real pro time, but for now it seemed like a fair trade so I could get started. I wanted to share it with others, and was wondering if anyone had similar modifications.
Q or J in the second position of number-court pairs modifies the phonetic of the suit combo. This is to explicitly differentiate them from what would be otherwise matching number-number pairs. The danger with not making those pairs different in some way is that now you have SLR for solar representing 5h/Qh which could also phonetically map to 5h/4h. So now you have easily misread results on recall.
Adding a differentiating extra placement of something in addition to the regular image to help recall which format it is makes your modification not a true “single image for one card” system. You have an image plus a layer to decode. That will cost time and effort on both sides.
If you know your associations inside and out it’s probably fine, but with not too much extra practice, the S-blends for number-court cards are just as fast as the others. You’re looking at maybe another week or two at most to learn them…
If you’re going to take the time to come up with and memorize 1200 images, what’s another 152 at that point? It’s an extra 10% of the hard work you’ve already done. They’ll be clearly different with no ambiguity of phonetics and no messing about with extra steps for coding and decoding.
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Yess you are right on most points. However, the reason I proposed it was that the extra “s” added by the original system caused too much complexity on top of the already intricate system. If you practice it long enough I suppose the original system might save you a few seconds.
But to get started, I decided it was more important I know these 1200 images well, and can place them fast enough, than add the extra images. So for now the benefit is that the overlapping images I know especially well.
I hope it might benefit some other people who want to start out with the Shadow System. Lastly the case of a number card followed by a Q or J, appears only for ~3/26 images on average.