How do you memorize 500 pages quickly?
There are three keys to make memorization less “difficult”: the first key is to try to make the memorization process interesting, adding some vivid and interesting elements, only with eyes and mouth is a very boring form of memorization.
The second key is to make an effort to connect what looks scattered and irregular on the surface, turn the individual into the whole, and do regular whole block memorization.
The third key is to try to memorize new knowledge points with the help of what you are already familiar with and know, so as to bring in the new with the old.
Based on these three keys, I will explain the five major mnemonic methods that I am most accustomed to using.
Multi-sensory stimulation mnemonic method is to use our multiple senses, such as sight, hearing and smell, to memorize at the same time.
You may ask why we need to use our sense of hearing and even smell to memorize something.
What does it have to do with these senses?
In fact, when multiple senses are used together, the brain will be stimulated significantly more effectively and the memory center can be more fully mobilized.
Let’s make a “simple and crude” analogy: one summer afternoon, you are hot and sweaty.
If you were to drink a glass of iced Coke at this time, you would definitely feel thirst-quenching, but you would probably still feel hot.
If you were allowed to drink an iced Coke while sitting in a cool air-conditioned room, you would definitely feel more comfortable and more completely relieved of the heat, because at that time your skin (sense of touch) and taste buds (sense of taste) are feeling cool at the same time.
Similarly, back to the matter of memory, to memorize words as an example: if you just stare at the new words with your eyes to memorize, it is equivalent to only stimulate the visual area, can not form enough stimulation of the brain, can not achieve a good effect of memory.
When memorizing words, you must use your sense of hearing.
There are two specific ways to do this: one is to put on headphones and listen to the audio of the words in the fragmented time; the other is to try to find time to do word dictation exercises.
For example, if you want to memorize words for the fourth or sixth grade, please make sure to choose a word book (or other materials for memorizing words) with audio, and make sure to listen to the audio at least three times a day, and I suggest that you split these three times into “1+2 times”.
“The “1” in “1+2 times” means that you should listen to the audio on the same day you memorize the new word.
Before you start to memorize a new word, listen to the audio recording of the new word at least once in its entirety, and at the same time, browse the corresponding new word to build up your initial impression of the word.
When memorizing a specific word, listen to the corresponding audio recording again if time permits.
After you have memorized all the new words for the day, play the audio again in its entirety, listening to the words one at a time, trying not to look at the book as you listen, and forcing yourself to spell out the words quickly.
If you get stuck on a word, listen to the audio of that word again and try to memorize it again until you are proficient.
The “2” in “1+2 times” means that you should utilize at least two more fragments of time before the end of the day to listen to the audio of the day’s task words twice.
For example, you can listen to it once during lunch and again at night before bed.
While listening still force yourself to spell the words in sync, and when you come across a word you don’t remember go back to the text immediately and memorize it again until you have it memorized.
Dictation Practice Memorization Another great way to memorize is to do dictation practice.
If you have limited time, you can combine dictation with purely listening to the audio of the words, and have a small notebook ready to synchronize your dictation while you listen.
If you have enough time, you can also set aside 15-20 minutes a day to dedicate to a dictation exercise, and when you come across words you can’t spell, you can quickly go back to the book for secondary memorization and review.
Similar to memorizing words, you can also use multi-sensory stimulation to memorize ancient poems.
For example, when memorizing Su Shi’s Nian Nujiao (Nian Nu Jiao), we can download the song Nian Nu Jiao (Nian Nu Jiao) composed and sung by Jay Chou and listen to it: “Eastward the great river goes, and the waves have exhausted all the characters of the ancient winds and streams.
To the west of the old fortress, people say, “The Red Cliff of Zhou Lang of the Three Kingdoms”.
“Listening to the song and experiencing it at the same time, I can indeed remember it more clearly and firmly.
I still remember that when I memorized Su Shi’s “Song of Water” and Li Yu’s “Happiness of Meeting” in secondary school, I listened to the songs based on these two poems – “When Will the Moon Come Around” and “Alone on the West Tower” – sung by Faye Wong and Teresa Teng.
By setting ancient poems to modern pop music and stimulating the visual and auditory senses at the same time, we can memorize the poems much faster.
Besides hearing, we can also mobilize our sense of smell and taste.
For example, when memorizing the word “chocolate”, eat a small piece of chocolate at the same time, chewing and memorizing at the same time, so that when you eat chocolate again, it will be easier to recall the word, or when you see the word “chocolate”, you will remember the taste of the word at that time.
Funny enough, among all the words related to fruits, apart from common fruits such as apple and banana, I remember the word “durian” (durian) the most.
Why?
When I was in third grade, my father went to Malaysia on a business trip and brought home frozen durian.
While I was tasting the unique flavor of this fruit, my mother smiled and said, “Do you know how to say durian in English?
durian, durian, durian……” With the taste of the stinky and fragrant durian on one side, and my mom’s clear English repetition on the other, I have been impressed by durian ever since.
The second memorization method I often use is called “acronym memorization”, which is particularly useful whether it is for remembering words or reciting large passages of history, geography and politics.
Many students may be familiar with the acronym memorization method but have hardly ever used it, so you may want to try it after reading my introduction below.
When we need to memorize a series of knowledge points, instead of immediately starting to memorize the complete content from beginning to end, verbatim, we break the knowledge series down into a number of segments, or ‘key elements’, and then form a string of acronyms from the elements of these key segments.
We first familiarize and memorize the acronyms, and then, through this string of acronyms, we memorize the entire content in a point-by-point manner.
After that, whenever we see the string of acronyms, we will be able to recall all the contents one by one based on the key elements.
This may be a bit abstract, so let’s take an example that is familiar to almost all of my American classmates: North America has the famous Great Lakes, including Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, and Lake Erie. LakeErie.)
These five words don’t seem to have any connection or pattern at first glance, but what if we pull out their initials and look at them again?
S, M, H, O, E – still doesn’t seem to show any pattern.
What about switching the order of these letters again?
Doesn’t it become – H, O, M, E, S, which is the plural form of the English word home, homes?
At this point, we have turned the five words into a string of acronyms – homes – and then we can imagine that there are many houses (homes) on the lakes.
From there, memorizing the Great Lakes of North America becomes a matter of using the acronym HOMES as a clue, and then memorizing the name of its corresponding lake through each letter.
The memorization process is instantly much simpler, but the memorization effect is much stronger.
When I was studying for my MBA at Harvard Business School, I had to read a lot of business cases every day to memorize and understand complex business principles.
Fortunately, a lot of knowledge can be summarized into concise strings of keywords through the acronym mnemonic method, and the difficulty of memorization is reduced accordingly.
For example, the “4P Theory” proposed by marketing professor Jerry McCarthy summarizes the four key factors that need to be considered when promoting a product into four words starting with “P”, including people (who are the core user group), place (where should the promotion be carried out), price (how should the product be priced in order to be most appealing to the consumers), and product (the product itself should have the most appealing features). product (what attributes the product itself should have in order to be competitive).
There are many more business principles of acronyms such as the ‘4Ps’ theory that I learn and use almost every day at Harvard.
I have to say that it is very effective to memorize abstract and complicated knowledge points through the acronym method.
Also, those of you who have studied financial accounting may be familiar with this concept – several methods that can be used in calculating the cost of material inventory include FIFO, weighted average, moving weighted average, individual valuation, and LIFO.
While it is not impossible to memorize each one, it is laborious to remember and also easy to forget.
What if we select the first word of these five terms and form an acronym string – “first plus move a posterior” – and then memorize them accordingly?
Wouldn’t it be easier?
In the future, whenever you need to repeat these five methods, you can start with “先加移个后” and it will go much more smoothly.
You should try it too.
The third memorization method I am going to explain is called “associative mnemonics”, which, like acronym mnemonics, is a method that many people have heard of but have never really used.
Associative mnemonics include the following most important categories and uses.
Proximity association “Proximity association” is the use of things that are close to each other for association and memorization.
When memorizing a point, we naturally associate it with another similar point that has the same or similar properties.
In this way, we turn the single memory of one-sided knowledge into the three-dimensional memory of multiple knowledge, thus significantly improving the scope and efficiency of memory.
Ms. Xin Yue, a memory V on the Zhihu platform, has shared “remembering historical events with proximity-association memory”, which I have since been referring to and using.
For example, when you study the history of China’s Han Dynasty and learn about the strength of the Han Dynasty, you can think about whether there were powerful countries in other parts of the world that were comparable to the Han Dynasty during the same period.
That’s when you can associate it with the Roman Empire.
Thinking of Rome through the Han Dynasty, which were both great dynastic empires, is an important attribute of similarity.
The association from the Han Dynasty to the Roman Empire isn’t finished, we can continue to extend it, think about how these two countries became so powerful at almost the same time?
What was the context for the development and rise of each at that time?
What were some of the big events that happened in both countries?
What were the common factors in their prosperity?
And so on.
From this example, we can see that proximity association can not only bring out the whole picture across time and space, but also help to broaden the knowledge base and extract the common basic features and attributes from the overall memorization process, thus increasing the breadth and depth of learning.
Similarity association “Similar association” and proximity association, although sounding similar, have essential differences in use.
Similarity associations are used to memorize a new point by associating it with a specific image that looks similar.
Take a very common example: when you memorize a map of China, it may not be easy to remember which mountain is in which region of China or which river flows through what province if you do it rigidly.
But if you imagine the map of China as a rooster, what is the crown of the rooster, corresponding to what provinces, what are the mountains and rivers; what is the tail of the rooster, what are the provinces, and what are the important cities and places of interest, it will be much easier to memorize.
Similarly, you can also imagine the shape of the territory of Italy as a boot, Japan as a silkworm or a seahorse, the outline of Iran as a straw hat …… So, the essence of similar association is to make the abstract unfamiliar new things vivid, figurative, through the association of their own familiar shapes, images to achieve the goal of reducing the difficulty of memory The purpose of this is to reduce the difficulty of memorization by associating familiar shapes and images.
The third method of associative memory is called “categorization association”, which is actually not difficult to understand.
As the saying goes, “things gather in categories”, when we memorize something new, we can bundle it up with things of the same category and memorize them in a unified way.
To cite a few very simple examples: for example, when you are eating an avocado, you can think of the fact that avocado is a kind of tropical fruit native to overseas, and then associate it with the memory of tropical fruits with similar attributes by the way, such as passion fruit, durian, mangosteen, and so on.
Another example is that in the history of Chinese literature, poets and lyricists are as numerous as stars, and we can categorize them into specific genres based on similar styles or eras and memorize them in a unified way.
For example, Tao Yuanming of the Jin Dynasty, Du Fu and Bai Juyi of the Tang Dynasty, and Lu You of the Song Dynasty can all be categorized into the “Realism School”, and the common characteristic of poems of this school is their ability to reflect social life in a realistic and graphic manner.
I took a very interesting history course at Yale on the history of the Japanese islands.
However, as interesting as it was, it was also quite difficult – a semester-long journey through the thirty years of the Meiji Restoration, spanning more than 2,500 years, and involving a large amount of knowledge and fragmented knowledge.
To get good grades on the big exams and final papers, you had to have a solid grasp of the class content.
For that entire semester, I used the morning wake-up/bedtime mnemonic method to deal with the tedious knowledge points in the course.
I woke up at 7:00 a.m., quickly washed up, and went to the college cafeteria to eat breakfast while spending ten minutes memorizing the key points of Japanese history that I had just recently learned – how did the Yamato-Koku in the 4th century A.D. become the first unified regime in Japan?
What were the “real scriptures” that the Japanese monks who traveled to the Tang Dynasty (遣唐使) took?
Who did Tokugawa Ieyasu trust the most?
Late at night before going to sleep, I also often take out my reading materials and class notes on the history of the Japanese islands to review and recite the various nuances again.
Memorizing in the morning and before going to bed surprisingly helped me to gain the experience of not forgetting – I remembered the points of this class solidly and ended the class with a good grade.
Even at this very moment of writing this article, I can still recall many details that I memorized when I took History of the Japanese Islands eight or nine years ago.
The last memorization method I would like to introduce is called “Story String Memory”, which I often use when I need to memorize scattered knowledge points for a short period of time.
As I said before, it is difficult to mechanically memorize independent knowledge points, and the rate of forgetting is also high, because independent knowledge points lack contextual background information.
However, if we connect each knowledge point “part” into a small story, and put them into context, it is like giving life to these knowledge points, making them more vivid and concrete, and better memorized.
Here I would like to share with you a typical case of “Story Tandem Memorization”: Natsume Soseki is a famous Japanese writer, and his main works include “I am a cat”, “Grass Pillow”, “Yumi Grass”, “Sanshirou”, “From now on”, “Door”, “Pedestrians”, “Tao Grass”, “Light and Darkness”, etc. If you want to memorize so many works in order, you have to make them into a short story and put them into a context.
It’s not easy to memorize so many works one by one in order.
However, the famous Japanese memory master, Teruo Sakai, easily memorized all these works in order by using the “Story String Memory Method”.
This is how he tells the story: “We are the cats in this house, sleeping on grass pillows, with Yumei grass painted on the pillows, Sanshiro entering the house through this door, with pedestrians squatting in front of the door, and pedestrians picking grass, which is a road with a difference between light and darkness.
“Maybe some students will think that the plot of this short story sounds strange, individual places a little bit does not make sense ah?
However, you don’t have to worry too much about whether the story is well-written or not, and it doesn’t matter even if the plot is weird. As long as you can connect all the information you need to memorize through this story, and make them more vivid and memorable in context, then the purpose of reducing the difficulty of memorization and improving the quality of memorization will be achieved.
By now, I’ve finished introducing the five memorization methods that I’ve personally tested and used.
It must be said that the method will certainly help, but there is really no shortcut to memorization.
Regardless of which superior method you use, you first need to be highly focused and willing to put in the hard work.
When tackling a memorization task, you can never take a chance, and you must not be lazy or slack off.
Below, I’ll share with you my own “desperate experience” of memorizing 4,000 GRE words in 10 days when I took a leave of absence to prepare for Yale University in the first semester of my senior year of high school, and I hope that I can give you a shot of potent chicken blood through this story.
When I was in high school, my goal was Yale University, and to apply for an undergraduate degree in the U.S., I had to take the SAT, which is commonly known in China as the “U.S. Advanced Placement Test”.
At that time, due to time constraints, I had to get a high score on the SAT in one go, and I needed to focus on the difficult GRE vocabulary in 10 days.
The GRE is the U.S. Graduate Record Examination, how difficult are the words in it?
I can tell you that there are a considerable number of GRE words that even many Americans have never seen, heard, or conceptualized in their lives.
At that time, I bought back the “GRE Vocabulary Ruby Book”, which covered 9,000 GRE vocabulary words, and in addition to the 5,000 TOEFL words that I had already mastered, I still needed to deal with the remaining 4,000 or so new words.
The 10-day plan meant that I had to kill an average of 400 words a day.
Once I had set my goal, I immediately began 240 hours of crazy word memorization while holding the Red Book.
To be honest, this amount of memorization was really “awesome”, and when I talked about this experience with my American classmates afterward, they were so surprised that their jaws dropped and they even said – Leo, noway, thatwasimpossible! In fact, when I look back on those 10 days of madness now, I find it a little hard to believe.
It was really just a surge of energy that sustained me at the time, and I gritted my teeth every single day.
During those days, I was inseparable from my Ruby book; it was next to my pillow, under the covers, on my keyboard, and still by the bathtub.
How exactly did I quickly memorize those 4,000 vocabulary words?
Frankly speaking, I didn’t take any shortcuts at that time, only try to use efficient and scientific memorization methods.
I summarized my method of memorizing words as “Six Steps to Memorize Vocabulary in Chicken Blood” (as shown below).
Simply put, it is multi-sensory stimulation, repeated ear grinding, combining syllables and explanations to do word splitting, and paying special attention to putting words in example sentences for contextual understanding and memorization.
-Step 1: Spell the word directly and read the word and its meaning aloud – Step 2: Split the word and spell the syllables Step 3: Spell each letter of each syllable one by one – Step 4: Read the word aloud with three different tones of elevation (simulating the different tones of the word in the real context) – Step 5: Split and spell each letter of the word one by one and read the word and its meaning aloud again at last – Step 6: Put the word in an example sentence to reinforce the memorization , read the sentence again to reinforce the memory Example: 1) global [ˈɡloʊbl] global, worldwide 2) glo-bal 3) g-l-o-glo,b-a-l-bal 4) global,global,global 5) g-l-o-b-a-lglobal global, worldwide 6) Airpollutionisaglobalproblem.
I also actively “learn by example” when memorizing vocabulary: after memorizing the words once in alphabetical order, I downloaded a categorized thesaurus from the Internet, and when I saw the word “fastidious” (挑剔的), I immediately thought of the near-synonyms of “picky” (picky), “critical” (critical), and “stringent” (ringent), so I could memorize a single word and at the same time review five or six words, which is twice as effective as the other way around.
In addition, I insist on “listening to words to sleep”, which is the “multi-sensory stimulation memory method” and “bedtime memory method” introduced above.
I would put the MP3 on my bedside table and play the vocabulary audio on a loop, letting the pronunciation of each word stimulate the brain’s memory center through the sense of hearing, until I fell asleep from exhaustion.
When I woke up the next morning, the MP3 was often dead and turned off.
When reviewing, you often find that you have memorized all the words you ‘listened to and memorized’ the night before.
And then there is the unconvincing energy, a kind of obsessive state.
When I was talking to my mom, I would suddenly get lost in my thoughts and recite the words that had just settled in my head; I would force my mom to test me on the difficult words that I had memorized in my little notebook at any time, so much so that she wanted to hide from me when she saw me in those days; when I watched the news on TV, I would unconsciously translate the Chinese words that were being read out by the broadcasters into English in real time; and even in my sleep, I would sometimes use the vocabulary in the book of red treasures.
This 10-day vocabulary memorization purgatory not only helped me get a high SAT score in one go, but also enabled me to read large volumes of English books without difficulty in the following years of my studies at Yale; it also enabled me to use all kinds of words and usages freely when writing any kind of papers to accurately describe my own views. I realized that there is nothing I can’t memorize if I am willing to work hard.
I am not trying to brag about myself by sharing this “4000 Words in 10 Days Challenge” experience with you, but I would like to give you a shot in the arm after I have introduced so many methods and case studies.
There is nothing difficult in the world, but only those who have the will.
Like most of my classmates, I am not a genius, there is a formula that is common in us, that is – efficient methods + unremitting efforts = success and joy.
So students, push yourself and start trying my recommended memorization methods now.
I believe that you will harvest surprises.
Summarize: three keys to efficient memorization- The first key: try to make the memorization process fun, add lively and interesting elements.
- The second key is to connect the pieces of information to be memorized into a whole, and to memorize them in regular chunks.
- The third key is to memorize new knowledge points with the help of familiar content, so as to bring in new knowledge with the old.
LEO personally tested and used the five memory efficiency improvement methods – multi-sensory stimulation memory method: fully mobilize the visual, tactile, olfactory, taste and other different senses to improve the efficiency of memory.
- Abbreviation memory method: summarize and integrate redundant information with key words and abbreviations to improve memory.
- Associative Mnemonics: Use relationships such as proximity, similarity, comparison, cause and effect, etc. for associative memorization.
- Wake up in the morning / bedtime mnemonics: choose the best time to memorize new things to improve the memory effect.
- Story linking mnemonics: link the fragmented information to be memorized through self-made stories to reduce the difficulty of memorization.
