Starting to get regular into the thirties now (on memocamp), >40s feels safe-ish. It’s moving forward! I’m having more and more of these moments where I’m trying to read a pair of cards but am actually seeing/feeling the image before subvocalizing. It’s not the norm yet and the feeling is too faint for me to dare trust it at this stage. But I guess that’s how it’s going to be in a year time, perhaps?!
Next steps:
making sure there aren’t outliers among my images, i.e. images that take too long to conjure up.
refining the images, add/change details, features, behaviors, …
be more regular training with real cards
I wonder how long it took people with similar systems to reach sub-30, sub-25, sub-20 … unsure if I should ask, as I might not like the answer
A few steps forward in the past few months. I had what felt like a long plateau centered around 35 seconds but finally managed to bust the 30-second barrier a few weeks ago. Part of the reason why I felt stuck was that I started training (and evaluating myself) on ML rather than memocamp, which means that I only get 4 minutes + 30 seconds (recall + free time during memo phase) after memorizing instead of 5 + 4,5 minutes!
Anyway, the reasons why I believe a big breakthrough is near are:
I know my system better than ever. No surprise there, it comes with training. I've tried different ways of reviewing the system (the entire system reviewed in my head everyday, a quarter of the system reviewed with actual cards everyday, focus on difficult images, etc.)
Thanks to the first point, I found a better balance between tension and relaxation when looking at card combinations. I used to be much too tense ("WHAT'S THIS IMAGE?!", "WHAT IF I CAN'T FIGURE NEXT ONE?!", ...), whereas now I trust that I know my system well enough or that in the worst case, I'll just waste one extra second on an image here and there.
working on chaining elements: I used to be nervous about needing to link more than 3-4 images in a row, 2 being the optimal case. Practicing to build and visualize such longer chains seems to do the trick.
Strenghtening the association between original and shadow images. I was afraid that creating too strong a link between them would mess up the memorization process, it doesn't! So in cases where the shadow image is not popping up immediately, I'm making both images interact, starting with the original doing something to (or evolving into) the shadow. This way the keyword links to the combined image and the original-shadow link (with an obvious direction) lets me easily pick whichever image I need to use
Hoping that the next post will be to celebrate breaking the 25-second barrier
This is an awesome system! Your result on memory league has gone as fast as sub-26s! May I know if you are still using this system or have you switched to perhaps a “full” shadow system?
P.S working on a Ben system at the moment, I can barely remember 10 cards with single card system at the moment D:
I don’t use the name “shadow system”, people mean very different things with it.
I have stopped using the system I described above, I’m no longer using shadows, so basically every keyword now always corresponds to a single image. That’s 1352 keywords and as many images. A more classic two-block system, with variable-length chains. I still have a bunch of optimization to make, but it’s faster than my previous system.
Don’t you think it’d make more sense to first be able to memorize a whole deck with just 52 images; before jumping straight into 1,000+ images? Gotta walk before you can crawl…
Your system (posted here) give me the idea to have a 4 digit system with only 2500 images, but instead of having another 2500 shadow image, I plan to just have the image coming out of the middle of the loci or image during memorization. Basically restricting the action of having the next image coming out of the current image during memorisation for all other general cases. Very experimental, might or might not work at all =)
Well, the single card system is waiting to be finished as it is imbeded in the Ben system.
( e.g Ace of spade equals the pair Ace of spade / Ace of spade)
