Language and memory palaces...

[alexpgp]

One of the things I learned from Howard Eldridge, who owned the Gene Gordon Magic Shop in Buffalo back in the day, was the value of information. A $40 book that gives you a $50 idea is a clear win, even if that idea was taken from a single paragraph of that book. That said, most times, spending that kind of money is simply not practical.

The ebook revolution offers a greatly expanded range of sources, often at quite reasonable prices, but this information "ecosystem" is still subject to Sturgeon's Law (i.e., 90% of everything is crud). I still recall taking a chance with an ebook on memory techniques put together by a fellow with a Russian surname, who spent the first 75% of the book telling me how beneficial the book was going to be and describing all the techniques that were going to be presented later on, at which point my patience was exhausted and I turned to other things.

Don't get me wrong; on the average my experiences reading "unknown" ebook authors has been positive. And just recently, strange to say, I've come to reconsider a disappointment.

Some time ago, I found a Kindle ebook titled How to Learn & Memorize French Vocabulary, by one Anthony Metivier. From the sample that Amazon sent for free, I became intrigued with his notion of using memory palaces to learn vocabulary, and since the book was moderately priced (my tipping point is around $5), I sprang for a copy.

To be frank, my first impression upon reading the rest of the book was that of disappointment. In fact, I was absolutely convinced the idea of using memory palaces (and multiple memory palaces, at that) was absolutely of no use in learning foreign language vocabulary.

Then just recently, I sampled something called the Magnetic Memory Mondays Newsletter, and in an essay titled "Five Ways to Ruin a Perfectly Good Memory," I again ran into this idea of using a memory palace to "locate" words for later recollection. To be frank, I was intrigued until I found out that the newsletter was published by the same Anthony Metivier. (There's obviously nothing sinister with this, of course, but for a moment I thought there were two different people advocating this approach.)

My interest was cooling fast, but something caught my eye, under one of the aforementioned ways of ruining a perfectly good memory. The following is a paraphrase of Metivier's text:

Once upon a time, a client of mine (who was working on Spanish) said it wasn't necessary to "locate" his remembered words anywhere. He told me that when he wanted to remember something like "vaca" (meaning "cow"), he simply needed to see a cow vacuuming.

This basically reflected my view of Metivier's approach.

So a few weeks later, I asked him: "Say, what's the Spanish words for 'cow'?"

It took him about a minute to "find" it in his mind.

Not bad, but I know it can be better. By making the effort to place the letter in an "palace" in your mind, your brain pays attention to the word and does so in a very specific way.

I had to admit, I often suffer from the same problem of having devised a good mnemonic (sometimes even a great one), but I can't remember it!

Basically, what Metivier is saying is to "anchor" the images and actions that are used for remembering. Maybe this is the "missing link"?

It's interesting how a second exposure to an idea is sometimes necessary to break through one's assumptions (and I had a load of them with regard to learning vocabulary using the memory palace technique). In any event, I will give Metivier's approach a good workover in the next few weeks.

Cheers...

Comments

[halfshellvenus.livejournal.com]

The 'memory palace' thing comes up in the BBC Sherlock Holmes, and (to a lesser degree) in The Mentalist. It's trendy right now.

I hadn't thought about it as a template for languages. One of the single, biggest challenges for me (as a native English speaker) is the issue of gender in other languages-- particularly if you've learned more than one language, as gender is usually inconsistent.

German, with 3 genders, is the worst. Welsh? There's no leading word such as Der, Die, or Das, so they're harder to hang onto. In fact, the definite article in Welsh is just 'y' (all cases), and there is no indefinite article-- it is implied.

But even so, I probably remember more of the German genders from what I learned in 7th/8th grade (now 35 years ago!) than what I learned in college. And the bulk of the nouns? Hahahahaha!

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

You're right. I think I've heard more about "memory palaces" on the tube more in the past couple of years than I had ever otherwise encountered the term during my entire previous life.

Then again, that's not saying much, as the first time I recall hearing of a "memory palace" was near the end of Thomas Harris's Hannibal, at around the place where Lecter and Starling become lovers. A little digging found me reading Jonathan Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (far more about Ricci than about memory) and Frances Yates's The Art of Memory (which is, for me, not light reading).

Gender was a challenge for me as well until I learned the trick of incorporating a gender-specific (or stereotyped) feature in the mnemonic. I find it is really the only reliable way of remembering stuff like this, as so many of the "exceptions" to rules (e.g., "la mano") are a little too commonly encountered for my taste (and that's probably the reason for the exception, too!).

Cheers...