Towards a personal mnemonic language [Advanced project]

[DanteGaxiola]

Hi there.

Some time ago I presented a method for developing a personal visual dictionary from characters:

Visual Dictionary from (unlimited) Characters for abstract words (long term learning, not competition)

Background : Well, after searching as much as I could in the forum for ways or techniques to transform abstract concepts to images, I’ve found a lot of interesting advice which might suffice for most people, I’m sure. However, I couldn’t find no one doing it the way I do it (also, a lot of the advice is leaned toward competitions), so I decided to share my method and system in case it helps someone here, and also to know your mnemoist’s opinions. First of all, my original inspir…

I wanted to give an update after creating and memorizing my first 1000 characters. As explained in the original topic, I use them in tandem with the memory palace technique (particularly with my Guardians method, using especial characters as macrostations with around 12 loci each) to memorize all kinds of information, especially book and article’s content.

It’s been very interesting and just wanted to confirm the effectiveness of the method for my uses. I believe is very common in this forum to hear interesting ideas that people come to and decide to try, but is not so common to hear of them after a while, maybe because the proponents stop using them or because they simply don’t give us an update. Well, after 1000 characters I’m glad to say that the method holds up greatly. The combination with Anki and the consistent use of the characters in multiple memory palaces work great, and I find that in the more developed topics or semantic universes each time I need less new characters and the speed gets a lot better.

What I’ve been thinking lately is that this kind of work is actually getting to the point of developing a “complete” (at least relatively) personal mnemonic language. What I mean by that is I believe that I can have, with enough time, a very comprehensive keyword language of sorts, that allows me to codify very rapidly and potently.

I’m not sure what a good number of key words would actually be for this kind of language, but I guess it would be a few to several thousands. Oddly enough, I believe with the right method this doesn’t have to be especially difficult, but a sustained work of some years. My current average is about 500 keywords/characters per year, all of them being used at least in one memory palace, but a lot or most of them used in more than one. I would imagine I spent no more than an hour a day (likely a lot less, about 40 min) in memory related work, including the original codifying of characters and it’s use in memory palaces. For the mnemonic language reviews, I spent only 3 min a day on average, according to Anki, plus maybe 20-30 min a week for the selection of characters and first learning of 20-30 new keywords.

I imagine that having a personal mnemonic language most be very useful for memorizing, and can only imagine what impact can have if it would be developed since childhood (although I’m aware of the possible difficulties of doing so… spending 40 min a day is no small feat). Anyway, just wanted to share my experience and current ideas on the topic. I’m not currently learning any new “natural” or normal language, but I do believe that my mnemonic language can be extremely helpful for vocabulary. If and when I get to a project like that, I will share my experience.

If anyone know of some ideas related to these, I would love to hear or read, especially if you or the proponent have real experience with it. Any questions and comments are welcome.

Thanks for your attention!

[aicreator]

Yesterday I had thought of an idea in which I created a language or created synonyms to the most common abstract words in the English language which when used with the PNN method or Personal Nickname Method could lead to the creation of images for those words more easily with the usage of the substitution method and the steps might be-

1. Read a sentence
2. Convert the word of a concrete object into an image
3. If step 2 is not possible or is taking too much time then taking an abstract word, rememebering it’s synonym which partly consists of picturefull words and then taking a part of one of those words and converting them into an image,

For example-

Application of Step 1- “Welcome to the Montak(An imaginary place)”
Application of Step 3- Pick the word the, Use the synonym of the(Moncaraton) which can be broken down and turned into the word car for example which can be remembered by the substitute method by substituting the original word with its synomym, Which is something I think is possible),

Note-This is a mnemonic synonym the synonym of the word the in is not Moncaraton in the English dictionary however it is a mnemonic synonym(A synonym of a word which makes it easy to create mnemonic images for that word),

And also I do not have ideas related to these and I did not have real experience with your method however I had thought of sharing my idea,

And,

Have a Good Day.

[Mountainmystic]

I was thinking a lot about archetypes, which are essentially visually clear and meaning-proliferate images, and how these can be employed with memory palaces. Like your characters, a tarot card is an image with a general meaning intended to be employed differently in many contexts. Flower language also holds multiple meanings (usually non contradictory provided you aren’t borrowing meanings from multiple cultures) with a loose connections to them.

How these might be helpful in the first order, is that you have easy to reach for metaphors (continuing my example, knowledge of flowers and their meaning could be employed in the memorizing of poetry rich in those abstracts). But where it gets interesting is in the second order, that your use of that flower associates the flower with the poem, and other images in the same memory palace, creating even more associative power for the flower being employed in future palaces.

So I can definitely see the promise in what you are doing, thanks for the update and let me know how it is going with this project as you continue it!