Memory tip for 30th of April 2011

Today my tip for improving your memory is: organize your daily routine. If your house is in disorder and you don’t plan anything your memory will suffer from this. There has to be some order in your life. Things should have their places in your house. If you put important things one day in one place, another day just drop them somewhere, the third day put in another place you will definitely experience memory problems. Why? Because memory is such part of the brain which likes patterns and structures. 

You should implement some structure into your daily life in order to improve your memory. You have to know which things you do every day and which things you use every day. Set a certain place for them. Set a special time for those activities. It does not mean that your life should lose spontaneity. It simply means that disorder has to get out of your life. Set timetable when you do shopping, paying taxes, having a rest, going out and etc. This will give a huge boost to your memory. And I think you will quickly get adjusted to this style. And I hope you will also like it.

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Formulate rhythmic sentences to remember better

Memory tip for 29th of April 2011

Today my memory tip is: formulate rhythmic sentences to remember information which is important to you. In fact, I could say that you should make short poems that would be based on sentences that rhyme and this rhyme will help you to absorb material you want to memorize. This idea might sound stupid for you, but I do not mean that you have to become a poet. It is just one of mnemonic techniques that help you to train your memory. If you looked back to school years you would probably remember some poem that you learned by heart and you could still say some of the verses from it. Why? Because of the rhyme, that helped to push those lines to your long term memory. 

Don’t worry if the sentences or small stanzas you create are funny. You are not obliged to show them to anyone if you don’t want to. They are for you to train your ‘memory muscle’. Let me give you a few examples that I made a few seconds ago.

“When I come to see you, we will stay together: Peter me and you.

If John wants to join he will have to consult it with Ron.

And if Kate decides to leave we are going to have a nice eve.” 

I hope you can see now what I mean by formulating rhythmic sentences to memorize things. Repeat the sentences you create and they will quickly sink into your long term memory. Again, this does not mean that the method has to become the main one how you memorize things. It is just one additional exercise to your arsenal of mnemonic techniques and I recommend practicing it for a few times, because various exercises help you to develop various parts of your brain and enable you to develop a ‘universal’ memory, which is not based on one or two mnemonic techniques. 

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Remember numbers by associating them with words of similar pronunciation

Memory tip for 28th of April 2011

Yesterday I wrote about acronyms and how you can use them to remember information better. Today I want to shortly come back to techniques of remembering numbers. I have already written about visual images of numbers, chunking and a few more things. Today my tip on how to memorize numbers is: find a word that would have a similar pronunciation for a number you want to remember. So, you would have to find vocal symbols to associate numbers from 1 to 10. Let me show you how you can do it.

1 – done

2 – blue

3 – tree

4 – floor

5 – knife

6 – fix

7 – devil

8 – wait

9 – pine

10 – pen

You see that each number has an equivalent of a word which has a very similar pronunciation as the number it represents. So, if you need to remember a combination of ten numbers (and maybe more) you can start creating a story with the words that represent the numbers. You will have to involve more characters as in the case I presented not all symbols are nouns. You can make your own list where all associated words would be nouns. It might be better for you to remember the combination of numbers then. I had already written how you can do that. 

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Use acronyms to remember information

Memory tip for 27th of April 2011

Yesterday I elaborated on how you can remember words while learning a foreign language. My memory tip for today is: use acronyms to remember better. What is an acronym? An acronym is a word which we form using the first letters of a word we want to remember. As you may understand by using acronym we want to remember a number of words that are encoded in an acronym. An acronym can be a word which may have a meaning of its own or it can be a mixture of letters and the word itself has no meaning. It would be good that you were able to easily pronounce the word that you have formed. 

Let me give you an example of an acronym, which I coined a few minutes ago. It is POWER and it stands for words: Peter Owes William Electric Radiator. I did not want to spend a lot of time on this, so whatever came to my mind I put down. If you need to remember some important information, which could be summarized in one short sentence, you could perfectly use an acronym to do that. Don’t be lazy, practice it by making some acronyms to help you remember dates, meetings, jobs you have to do, information you have to deliver to somebody and etc. 

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How to remember words while learning a foreign language

Memory tip for 26th of April 2011

Yesterday I told you how chewing a gum helps you to improve your memory. Today I want to write a few tips how you can memorize words of a language you want to learn. Vocabulary is probably the most important part of the language. At some point you have to switch from learning grammar and speaking (using the same basic vocabulary) and expand your vocabulary. When I teach the English language I see that my students find this part of learning process to be the most difficult. However, most of the mnemonic techniques that I have been writing about are good for learning language too.

Repetition of a word is probably the first stage in learning a word. Psychologists say that you have to see a word around thirty times in order to remember it. Of course, you have to see it over a period of a few days! So, you look at it and repeat it. 

Try to associate a word with some mental image. Let’s say a word duke can be associated with the word duck on the basis of similar pronunciation. You can imagine a duke patting a duck or a duck introducing itself to you as a duke, or you can imagine a duck wearing a t-shirt with a word ‘duke’ written on it. 

Another useful tip is to organize words into groups using various parameters: topic, synonyms-antonyms, parts of speech (verb, noun, adverbial modifier and etc.). 

If you find some words difficult to remember, write them in your notebook, repeat them a few two times a day and a few days in a row. Try to implement some other mnemonic technique. It is good to change techniques if you find that your favorite one is not working in this or that situation.

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Chew a gum to improve your memory