Recently I bought Memory Craft by Lynne Kelly after hearing her on the Magnetic Memory Method podcast. It is full of great ideas that I’ve been trying out. The idea that jumped out at me the most is The Bestiary which uses animals to remember the first two letters of words, like ardvark to remember “aa.”
Lynne says she uses it to remember names. As soon as I heard her talk about this I thought, “This is for me!” Remembering names has always been a challenge for me because it requires making up new images in a distracted environment. I think this is a great solution to a problem I’d never even thought about solving.
Anyway, I purchased her book The Bestiary and Visual Alphabet which I intended to use verbatim. However, I discovered that I already have a lot of animals in use in my memory language and it quickly became clear that I’d have to make my own list. I’ve started it and decided to use the Ben System principle of keeping the mnemonic as short as possible, and as phonetically similar as possible, and not limiting it to animals. I’m using the first thing to comes to mind when I see He, Ha, Ho, Hi, etc.
I’m currently compiling a list of 209 combinations of letters and then I’ll put them into a mirco-memory palace (a fence outside my house.) It should be really easy because they are just single, simple images.
I got the idea of micro-memory palaces from this forum this week. What a great idea! It has instantly opened up my options for creating MPs. I was running out of buildings.
Does anyone else here use The Bestiary or similar? Any tips for creating one before I finalise mine? A part of me thinks that maybe I should create the list on a purely phonetic basis - perhaps using the International Phonetic Alphabet. So if I meet someone called Aaron then I pull up an image for the first syllable rather than the first two letters.
You could also google “letter pair(s)” together with Rubik’s or BLD or 3BLD as this method is used a lot by people who solve the Rubik’s cube blindfolded using a letter scheme called speffz.
I use a “bestiary” but for other purposes, since they are not meant to be used with Latin characters, but Chinese characters. I posted this somewhere else in the forum, but I cannot find it now. I have three main “bestiaries”, if I can use that name, one with characters from Pixar’s movies, one from Disney’s and one from The Lord of the Rings (and related books).
First column: male character.
Second column: female.
Third column: evil (somehow)
Fourth column: big or fat.
Fifth column: small, young, cute.
Sixth column: sidekick or secondary character.
This system is used to remember sounds in Cantonese.
Each movie refers to a consonant. Each column to a tone. The vowels and endings of each syllable is represented by a job (does not appear here).
For intance, the syllable Leung1 (1st tone), would be Wall-e singing opera.
For Mandarin I use Disney instead of Pixar. I do exercises for each “scene”, for instance, Beauty and the Beast as Astronauts, and I study chinese characters that fit those sounds.
I also posted something about this somewhere else. It is very practical for me, because even in daily conversation, if I mispronounce a word, and I am corrected on the spot, I tend to forget. So, I easily say: this word is Donald Duck, or Pocahontas, and it stays longer, sometimes forever.
