I never had any intention of sharing my list because it’s become very personal to me. It took me hundreds of hours to fill out and hundreds more to memorize by heart. There were also countless revisions to ensure uniqueness and symmetry among subsets. For instance, you’ll find that there’s approximately the same ratio of animate to inanimate images in binary as there is in card pairs.
No entry is completely arbitrary either. Here are the most common techniques I used to make associations:
first syllable of word
other syllables within a word (2nd, 3rd, etc.)
cutting out consonants/vowels in the middle
linking adjectives or verbs with nouns
fitting phonemes with like-sounding vowels
associating consonants directly with images (k, for instance, sounds sharp, so I would be inclined to associate it with something pointed–whereas f sounds soft/fluffy)
As far as I know, this is the only complete list that’s been shared. Many of the associations will only make sense to me, but in the very least I hope this can serve as a useful reference for anybody considering to use this system.
edit For anybody curious, I perform mental multiplication by “picturing” the phonemes in my mind’s eye–a circle corresponding to each digit–and then performing criss-cross multiplication from right to left, encoding in segments of 3. For example, if I multiplied 3,456 x 5,189 I would see two parallel rows of circles. The leading digit of each would be combined into a single upright image, and the remaining digits would be two horizontal images.
There shouldn’t be any disparities between this and the Excel file, but if there are, the Excel version is the most current. Also, I’m not sure if all the images will work after being exported. We’ll just have to see.
Thank you… I am nowhere close to investing in a three wheel system but I am definitely going to look at yours to get a sense of what I am getting myself into.
Wow that looks amazing. I’m brand new to this and can’t quite figure out how you came up with the “cards and possible sound” correlation. Thanks! Cherie
I’ve been having a really hard time in life lately, so I’m going to take a break from forums for a while. Hopefully I’m leaving something for posterity with this thread. I’m happy I found this place. To my fellow mnemonists I bid you farewell.
Hi - I don’t know if you’ll see this, but I just want to say that this is SO helpful as an exemplary prompt for my own images & associations when building my Ben system. Some of the ways you have solved the ‘nonsense syllables’ problems are just so ingenious and intuitive. The associations are clearly very personal to you but that in turn is inspiring me to cast the net far and wide for my own personal images. Thanks so much for sharing! Tom
It took a truly obscene amount of time.