When I started reading themes about memorization, I got very interested in the concept of memorizing books, articles, texts… Being capable of remembering every single piece of one book or one article seems very exciting—even with the massive effort to memorize it verbatim.
But, after reading the topics about book memorization, I was thinking about the techniques of memorizing verbatim.
I’ve always felt like the method of memorizing books and texts isn’t efficient. It’s like… Every book and text—of course, if made without the purpose of being hard to memorize, like poems for memorization competitions—has an internal logic. The logic is the linguistic: the way that verbs, substantives, and articles are structured.
So, trying to memorize these texts without using this logic seems very inefficient to me. But I don’t know any technique for using this. You guys feel the same? Or am I just crazy?
Would you mind explaining what do you mean exactly to use the “logic of linguistic” to memorise?
I mean many books have a lot of “padding” for different reasons (not obligatorily to make them harder to memorize, but to make the subject easier to learn), and memorising it is a waste.
But for poetry and sacred texts a lot of people memorise them verbatim (because the exact words used matter) and would be very interested in reading the description of your more efficient method. So we’re waiting for your contribution
Well, this is already done, bruno and fludd, I don’t recommend bruno, he is too difficult to understand, but if you consult robert fludd’s art of memory, he is the one who has the way to memorize words with the structure you describe.
Yes, and I think that memorizing books verbatim is an inefficient way of learning - largely because of the tremendous effort that has to be made. Memorizing is different from learning, and that’s obvious.
Now, what I mean by the “logic of language” is this (I’ll give an example from my mother language, which is Portuguese).
The way Brazilians say “uma maça” (an apple) follows a logic. You see, if you try to memorize “an apple” with two images in a memory palace, you’ve just wasted 50% of your effort.
Maça in Portuguese is a “feminine” item, so whenever you call it that in a sentence, you use the article “a”. So, if you understand that there will always be an “a” after an apple, you’ve wasted the effort of memorizing the article.
So if you try to understand the logic of a text, you may be able to optimize it a lot, turning it into more of a puzzle exercise than a real memorization exercise.
Oh I see… Well I don’t know so many people who encode every word.
Mostly people encode the first words of the sentence or the stanza, or the keywords and that’s enough for the whole text to come back to mind.
I mean unless the text is very weirdly written, the logic/grammar of your language isn’t something you really need to think about. You’d just make a note if the sentences are structured a special way.
Also when memorising texts like poetry or religious texts the aim is not maximum speed, but rather slowing down and spending more time with the text (meditating).
So you want to be efficient in the sense that you don’t want to spend much time with the technical side of memorizing (encoding) but then for the “retelling” the point is to take time with it (and ideally share it with others).
Checkout supermemo 18 incremental reading. You can memorize articles and books using incremental reading. You can read thousands of articles simultaneously as you memorize the key points.
As you master incremental reading you will realize most things that are written aren’t worth memorizing. They don’t add value, they don’t add knowledge to you. You’ll learn how to quickly grasp what new knowledge is being shared from an article or book. Then you’ll be able to quickly change the new knowledge into cloze deletions.
Using incremental reading and cloze deletion will make it so that your new knowledge lasts a lifetime instead of the short term. Short term memory techniques are helpful to grasp something quickly and then later decide what is important for long term. Once you’ve decided what is important for long term add it to your supermemo.
I really liked the concept of incremental reading, did some research on the SuperMemo app and its a bit of a shame that it is only available on windows!,
Perhaps there is no real alternative that achieves what this app does…
Trying to brute-force every word never worked for me, but once I started focusing on the structure and flow of the language, like how the author builds ideas or repeats patterns, it got way easier to remember chunks. I think leaning into the “logic” of the writing actually helps your brain predict what’s coming next, so it feels more natural.
Hi.a lot of people says that verbatim is not useful to study. Except definitions, Law things or medicine etc.
Because justly is too difficult. In my opinion you have to use other methods first to understand. Then yes use mnemonics.
It’s not good to memorize word by word if you can’t answer questions.
