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English is weird
celticgeek:
Thirty days hath September,
All the rest, I can't remember.
Why bother me with this at all
When there is a calendar upon the wall.
Thrillho:
My ex pointed out to me that mnemonics take many forms and that I have inevitably used them, but the ones that are about memorising the order of something but swap the words out - the ones for the orders of the planets, say - never worked for me. Like, I am already trying to remember the order of what may as well be some random shit, why would replacing it with other even less related shit help?
It obviously works for some people but I never got it.
oddtail:
Mnemonics based on word-swapping (or swapping out anything) work if it's a striking mental image to you. "You" being the key component. It has to be personal and tailor-made for your way of thinking, otherwise it's near-useless.
Side note, not really related, but tangential and (I feel) fascinating: people who remember long sequences of numbers competitively associate an image with each number of 00 through 99 (and if they're really good, for each number of 000 through 999). So for example, you can memorize "25" as being a carrot, and "41" as being a table (or whatever), which allows you to remember 2541 as a carrot laying on a table. I'm oversimplifying, but from what I've heard, it's a common technique.
I once read an article explaining that it essentially shifts the legwork from remembering a long sequence of numbers in the moment to spending a considerable amount of time *once* to learn a hundred (or a thousand) images. The initial investment of time and effort pays off in that when you're supposed to remember a 30-digit number, now you don't have to remember 30 characters that don't mean anything, but instead 15 consecutive images that you can build a scene out of, which is meaningful and weird enough that it's not meaningless data.
Back to the topic: using other people's mnemonic systems is BS and you should never do it. You should come up with your *own* mnemonics that strike an emotional note for you, that are funny to you or associated with something that makes sense to you, personally. The trick is not to replace one meaningless memorisation with another. The trick is to come up with something that you can't help but remember.
I have a very good memory, I feel, but part of it is coming up with ridiculous stuff (usually involving a lot of vulgar and scatological phrasing and imagery) that sticks in my memory. It can work for anyone*, you just have to come up with your own brand of weird/funny/memorable/striking stuff. And that will HEAVILY vary from person to person.
* - the "sticking in memory" part, not the "scatological" part. The latter is just me being weird.
pwhodges:
I use lots of mnemonic systems. However, the problem is that I soon forget that there's anything I'm trying to remember!
hedgie:
The first time I ever set up KDE, I had created keybinds for pretty much everything. Of course, the ones I didn't use every day were soon forgotten, and it was actually faster to rely on the GUI than look through a cheat-sheet.
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