Update on filling out the list with the new phonetic mapping:
I’ve gone through the first 6 suit combos, more than 1/3 of the list, and I’ve gotten 1005 out of the 1014 entries filled in. Pretty psyched about that success rate so far! I have a feeling I’ll hit a bit of a slow down once I start looking at the brand new vowel-first suits, but we’ll see!
1344/1352… Half way to go.
Because I stop on black-first pairs, I’m gonna try something like: when I get three red-first pairs in a row, I stop, but the final image bleeds bright red blood 
; when I get two red-first pairs followed by a black-first pair, my final image interacts with a wall 
, indicating a ‘natural stop’.
@TheHumanTim I’d be interested to know if that’s anything like what you tried, and @katiek, @BrandonMemo (& @lanced ?) even more so as it sounds like you’ve implemented something like this successfully??
Thats a good idea. I tried something similar with setting the last image on fire if it was a multiple-in-a-row “continuation” set. I didnt bother with an indicator for the “stop” set because I would know that if the last image wasn’t on fire it was a normal “stop” set.
I think my mistake was capping my scenes at 5 elements. This was way too many. If I try this again, I’ll go for 3 elements and then the signal fire.
May also try just having the last image interact with the current AND next loci, so that it indicates a bridging between the scenes.
A couple of changes to the suit combo sound assignments.
I realized that I could make it easier to remember which suit combos got which sounds…
There are two Major System phonetic assignments that I “split” to accommodate some of the additional suit-pairs beyond 10… T and D, P and B,
In my old two-block system, 
and both shared the T/D sounds. In this system I kept as T and had arbitrarily assigned to the A sound.
I just realized that if I made the D sound, it would be very easy to remember. Almost like a “primary / secondary” sound where the primary is the black-first suit combo and the secondary is its mirror image.
Similary, in my 2-block system, 
and shared the P/B sounds. In the new system, keeps the P sound, and gets B.
I also just swapped the W and H assignments so that the W would be mapped the “secondary” mirror suit combo that uses M. W is basically an upsidedown M, so that makes mnemonic sense to me.
The H moves to the final Red-Black suit combo.
The two vowel sound suit combos have been reassigned to the two Red-Red non-identical suit combos: gets E, and gets A. I like these assigments because a has a shape resembling a lowercase E, and a has a shape resembling an uppercase A. These subtle visual cues should make learning to read the new suit combos a little bit easier.
I’ll update the post above with the new mappings.
EDIT: I’M CHANGING THE VOWEL SUIT ASSIGNS TO HAVE ONE OF THEM BE THE "FIRST-PERSON ACTION SUIT COMBO. See THIS POST for details.
Also, changed Kings to be the value that gets “V” and “Silent,” and made Queens “B”. I’m used to second place kings being silent.
If a chain of 3 ends in a black-first pair (which for me is the normal ending) then I don’t do anything special to remember it. If it ends in a red-first pair, then I just remember that there is something not right about that locus. In many cases you can figure it out anyway from the remaining cards if you’re not sure.
Got it, thanks! The more I learn from people who go at elite level speeds the more it seems “impressions,” “glimpses,” and “feels” come into play. Seems to be because at that pace there isn’t enough time to spend actively creating additional intentional elements within your scenes?
Yeah I like this idea. No blood, no fire, just, like… the vibes are off
I have a new idea for one of the final suit combos that I think I really like…
I’ve been working on filling out the entries of this new system, and all I have left is the final suit combo, , which I initially assigned to the E / I / Y phonetic sounds…
I think I’m going to try to make this set the “First-Person Action” set.
If I see this suit combo, I’ll imagine that I am performing a specific action to/with the other element in the scene or to/with the loci that it corresponds to.
I think this will work pretty well, as I don’t have any “actions” for any of my other elements. This approach allows me to make use of my 2-digit actions, which I already know well. I’ll just see the suit combo and insert myself into the scene. In all my other imagery / scene building, I take a passive observer approach to the visualization, so this will definitely be easily distinct having me as an active part of the scene, influencing it.
This also opens up the words to be able to begin with ANY vowel sound.
Will see how it feels once I start really working with this system!
Finished the full 2704 word list!
Next up: another anki deck creation marathon! I’ll start tackling this later on in the week.
This marks the 5th full “large scale” system that I’ve constructed in the past 2 years… Shadow… All-In-One P/O based on Shadow… Eclipse… Simplified Structure 2-Block… and now this one. I should probably come up with a catchy name for it at some point, haha.
Inaugural Deck Attempt with this system was a success. Took a little while, didn’t time myself, but was able to 100% the recall. The new phonetic assignments will take a while to learn, and there will be lots of brand new associations to train to fluency, but my initial impression is that it’s viable!
It also reinforces my feeling that I REALLY want to be able to use two images per loci and 13 loci for the deck, which is (as far as I know) only possible with a full 2704 image/pair system.
New Anki deck has been created for this system. I just filled in the “word” field this time and didn’t put in any pictures. After doing several of these large systems, it takes SOOOOOO long to update all 2704 pictures that I wanted to just see if keeping it to text worked ok for this one.
One cool thing about this system is that because I’ve already filled out like 5 other 2-card system lists, I had a LOT of options for words and most came pretty easily. This was by far my fastest build, only taking me a few days to completely fill all 2704 entries (compared to 3 or 4 MONTHS for the 1352 needed for Shadow!). I’m already starting to internalize the new phonetic associations for the suit pairs and picture cards just by working with them all week and typing them in Anki. Interested to see how quickly they will get up to speed in practice.
I really love that the reading structure is the same for every pair: suit - value1 - value2. Also think I’m going to really like having less options for sounds for each value as that should allow me to focus in on the correct phonetics much quicker.
Lets see how this goes!
That’s insane! It makes sense when you explain it, but that’s some time savings if ever I heard of any
According to my tagging in Anki, I have 1315 “new” associations to learn if I want to use this system. These are a combination of truly new words/images and quite a few old ones from previous system builds that I had “retired”, but are now assigned differently here.
Lets see if I can lock these into the memory banks by the end of the year and get some decent deck times out of this system!
First timed run. This is obviously VERY slow. BUT I had to look up half of the pairs. I haven’t practiced any of the new associations yet, so I think this is actually pretty good, considering that.
Recall is VERY fast, and decoding the images back to their card values is REALLY easy. So once my recognition speed catches up, I think this will be awesome.
This past weekend I worked on refining my list a bit. I wanted to try to get consistent single phonetics for some of my elements. Specifically the 8’s in second position and the suit combo. Initially these could be associated with F or V, but I wanted to clean this up and make them always map to the F sound.
Having single phonetics was something that I did in my custom 2-block system that I REALLY liked. It helped to focus recall by limiting options when sounding out pairs.
With this system and its more expansive 2704 unique images, having those restrictions will make it easier to learn the new words and to recall them in practice.
I also cleaned up the suit combo to only sound as J (not CH or SH), and fixed the combo to only sound K (not G). This means that all 16 suit combos have a single unique phonetic to start my words/phrases.
Thanks to everyone who helped with word suggestions!
Oof my brain.
I’ve been working on retraining my recognition for the new singular phonetic mappings.
Didn’t realize how fluent I’d gotten with the variable phonetic mapping of major system values and of the dual nature of suit combos using the 2-block approach.
I’n in for quite the undertaking to overwrite these reflexive associations.
It really feels like going alllll the way back to the beginning when I first started learning shadow. And it basically is like that. After making my restriction modifications, I now have about 1500 brand new words to learn to read and visualize and get them up to the one-second per pair pace that I achieved with Shadow (and my pseudo 2704 system.) i know I can do it, I’ve done it before, but man… its some work.
Good thing I enjoy this process!
I think my plan is to tackle two complementary suit combos per week and try to break my reflex of reading them both as the same starting sound. Along with this I’ll be learning all the new words needed for those sets and the new and restrictive sounds for values.
I’m very happy with the optimizations I’ve been able to achieve with this system. Lets see if it translates to success and progress when using it!
Started working on four sets…
(starts with K)
(starts with F)
(starts with P)
(starts with B).
The trickiest one to learn is the as F. I’m used to pronouncing that suit combo as “K/G”, but with this new system, it uses a new and specific phonetic. I never had a suit combo start with F (or R) in my other large systems, which was a holdover rule from the Shadow System. I expect the R suit will be just as challenging. Its not that the words themselves are tough to internalize, because almost all of them existed in my other systems, but more that I see that as the first sound and I automatically think K, so I have to actively make myself say the F sound. For now. It will overwrite and become fluent soon enough!
Interestingly, I don’t seem to be having much trouble recognizing as “B.” In my previous systems, both and could be read as P or B. In this system I’ve split those phonetics to isolate them to a single suit combo each. This is working just fine, thankfully. I’m hoping that the split off on the suits for T and D also go smoothly later on.
So these four suit combos represent 1/4 of the images in the system. I think this pacing is pretty good for learning the whole thing. I plan to tackle one “interchangable set” of four combos per week. This way I’ll have seen them all within a month and then can start drilling for improved speed. I AM planning on using these quartets to do full 52 memorizing runs each day as well just to start getting used to working with the imagery and see what kind of interactions jump out from them.
One last interesting thing I’ve noticed is that I have a tendency to merge pronounce T’s as D’s when they’re in the middle of a word. This is definitely a result of my Connecticut accent where we tend to prounounce words like “MeTaL” as “meddle” or “connecticut” as “cuh-ned-ih-cut.” I have no trouble reading D’s as D’s, but I have to be a little extra careful to enunciate the T sound. It definitely makes me think about how accents affect potential word usage in a phonetic system like Major. This is one big reason there is no universal “perfect” major word list.
(P.S.: just to have it out there… I’m not setting a hard deadline for reaching a sub-1-minute deck, but that is the main goal with it. I think it is 100% achievable, but I’m not going to burn myself out getting there.)
This is why I think ignoring voicing distinctions was a wise move for the Major System in English
