Page book? There are three keys
to memorizing things that are not so “difficult.” The first key is to try to make the process of memorizing interesting, adding some vivid and interesting elements. Just seeing with your eyes and reading with your mouth is a very boring form of memorizing.
The second key is to try to connect the seemingly scattered and irregular things, change the individual into a whole, and make a regular whole memory.
The third key is to try to memorize new knowledge points with the help of the content you are already familiar with and know, so as to bring the old with the new.
Next, based on these “three keys”, I will explain the five memory methods that I am most accustomed to using one by one.
Multi-sensory stimulation memory method is to use our multiple senses at the same time, such as vision, hearing and smell, to memorize. You
may ask, why do you need to hear or even smell to remember things? What does it have to do
with these senses?
In fact, when a variety of senses occur together, the effect of brain stimulation will be significantly enhanced, and the memory center can be more fully mobilized.
To make a “crude” analogy: One summer afternoon, you’re hot and sweaty.
If you drink a cold coke at this time, you will certainly feel thirsty, but you may still feel hot.
If you sit in a cool air-conditioned room while drinking cold cola, you will feel more comfortable and relieve the heat more thoroughly, because your skin (touch) and taste buds (taste) are feeling cool at the same time.
Similarly, back to the matter of memory, take memorizing words as an example: if you just stare at the new word memory with your eyes, it is equivalent to stimulating only the visual area, which can not stimulate the brain enough to achieve a good memory effect.
When reciting words, be sure to use your hearing. There are two
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 dictation exercises.
For example, if you want to recite the words of CET-4 and CET-6 now, please choose a word book (or other recitation materials) with audio. Make sure to listen to the audio at least three times a day, and I suggest that you divide the three times into “1 + 2 times”. The “1”
in “1 + 2” refers to listening to the recording simultaneously on the day of reciting the new word. Before you
begin to recite the new words, listen to the audio of the new words at least once in full, and scan corresponding new words while listening to them to establish the initial impression of these words.
When reciting a specific word, if time permits, you can listen to the corresponding recording again. After reciting all the new words of
the day, play the audio again completely, listen to them word by word, try not to read when listening, and force yourself to spell out the words quickly.
If a word gets stuck, listen to the audio of the word again and try to memorize it again until you are proficient. The “2” in
“1 + 2 times” means that at least two more fragments of time are used to listen to the audio of the day’s task words twice before the end of the day.
For example, you can listen to it once at lunch and again at night before going to bed. When
listening, you still have to force yourself to spell words synchronously, and when you encounter words that you don’t remember, you immediately go back to the text and recite them again until you remember them.
Dictation Practice Memory Method Another good way to memorize is to do dictation practice.
If time is limited, you can combine dictation with pure listening to word audio. When listening, prepare a small book and synchronize dictation.
If you have enough time, you can also spare 15-20 minutes a day to do a dictation exercise, and quickly return to the book for a second memory and review when you can’t spell the words. Similar
to memorizing words, ancient poetry memory can also use multi-sensory stimulation memory method.
For example, when reciting Su Shi’s “Nian Nu Jiao: Nostalgia at the Red Cliff,” we can download the song “Nian Nu Jiao,” composed and sung by Jay Chou, and listen to it: “The great river goes east, the waves wash away, and the romantic figures through the ages.
So the west side of the base, humanity is, the three kingdoms Zhou Lang Chibi.
While listening to the song and experiencing it, you can really remember it more clearly and firmly.
I still remember that when I was reciting Su Shi’s “Water Melody Song Head” and Li Yu’s “Happy Meeting” in middle school, I listened to the songs based on these two poems sung by Faye Wong and Teresa Teng- “When Will the Bright Moon Come” and “Alone on the West Tower”. With
poems and songs, ancient poems and lyrics are matched with modern pop music, which stimulates vision and hearing at the same time, and it is much faster to remember.
Besides hearing, we can also use smell and taste.
For example, if you recite the word “chocolate” and eat a small piece of chocolate at the same time, it will be easier to recall the word when you eat chocolate again, or remember the taste when you see the word “chocolate”.
It’s interesting to note that of all the words associated with fruit, aside from common fruits like apple and banana, the one I remember the most is “durian.”.
Why is that? When
I was in the third grade of primary school, my father went to Malaysia on a business trip and brought home the local frozen durian. When
I tasted this unique fruit, my mother smiled and said, “Do you know how to say durian in English?”?
durian，durian，durian……」 One side was the smelly and fragrant taste of durian, and the other side was my mother’s clear English repetition. From then on, I was deeply impressed by durian. The second memory method
I often use is called the “abbreviation memory method.” Whether it’s memorizing words or reciting long passages of history, geography, or politics, this method is particularly practical.
Maybe many students are familiar with the method of memorizing abbreviations, but they have hardly used it, so they might as well try it after reading my introduction below.
When we need to memorize a series of knowledge points, we should not immediately start to memorize the complete content word by word from beginning to end. Instead, we should divide the knowledge series into several fragments, or “key elements”, and then form a series of abbreviations with the elements of these key fragments. First of all,
we should memorize and memorize the abbreviations, and then through these abbreviations, we can memorize all the contents from point to area.
After that, every time we see this string of abbreviations, we can recall all the contents one by one according to the key elements.
It may be a little abstract to say so, but let’s take an example that almost all my American classmates are familiar with: North America has the famous Great Lakes. Including Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, and Lake Erie. At first glance,
these five words have no connection and regularity, but what if we take out their first letters and look at them again?
S, M, H, O, E-still don’t seem to see anything.
And reverse the order of the letters?
Does it become H, O, M, E, S, which is the plural of the English word home?
At this point, we turn the five words into a string of abbreviations-homes, and then we can imagine that there are many homes on the lake.
As a result, the memory of the Great Lakes of North America has become a clue to the acronym HOMES, and then through each letter to write down the corresponding name of the lake. The
memory process is much simpler in an instant, but the memory effect is more solid. When I was studying for an MBA
at Harvard Business School, I had to read a lot of business cases every day to memorize and understand the complex principles of business.
Fortunately, many knowledge points can be summarized into concise keyword strings through the abbreviation memory method, and the difficulty of memory is reduced accordingly.
For example, Jerry McCarthy, a professor of marketing, put forward the “4p theory”, which summarizes the four key factors that need to be considered in product promotion into four words beginning with “P”, including people (who is the core user group), place (where is the core user group). Which areas should be promoted), price (price, how should the product be priced to attract consumers) and product (what attributes should the product itself have to be competitive). There are many other business principles,
such as the acronym of “4p” theory, which I learn and use almost every day at Harvard.
It has to be said that it is really very effective to memorize abstract and complicated knowledge points through abbreviations.
In addition, students who have studied financial accounting may be familiar with this concept-several methods can be used to calculate the cost of material inventory, including first-in first-out method, weighted average method, moving weighted average method, specific pricing method and last-in first-out method.
Although it is not impossible to recite one by one, it is more laborious to remember and easy to forget.
What if we pick out the first word of each of these five nouns and form a string of abbreviations — “first add and then move” — and then memorize them accordingly?
Is it easier?
In the future, every time you need to repeat these five methods, you can start with “adding and moving first,” and it will be much smoother.
You start to try it. The third memory method
I’m going to talk about is called the associative memory method. Like the acronym memory method, it’s also a method that many people have heard of but haven’t really used. The
associative memory method mainly includes the following most important classifications and usages.
Approaching association “Approaching association” is the use of things that are close to each other for association and memory.
When memorizing a knowledge point, it naturally associates with another similar knowledge point with the same or similar attributes.
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. Teacher Xinyue, a big memory teacher on
the Zhihu platform, shared the idea of “using the approximate associative memory method to remember historical events,” which I later used for reference.
For example, when you study the history of the Han Dynasty and understand the prosperity of the Han Dynasty, you can think about whether there are powerful countries comparable to the Han Dynasty in other parts of the world at the same time?
At this time, you can think of the Roman Empire. Think of Rome
through the Han Dynasty, they are great Dynasties and empires, which is an important attribute of similarity.
From the Han Dynasty to the Roman Empire is not over, we can continue to extend, think about why the two countries became so powerful almost at the same time? What was the background of their respective development and rise
at that time? What major events have taken place in
both countries? What are the common factors for
their prosperity?
Wait.
From this example, we can see that close association can not only cross time and space, but also help to broaden the scope of knowledge, extract common basic characteristics and attributes from the process of overall memory, thus increasing the breadth and depth of learning. Although
“similar association” and “close association” sound alike, there is an essential difference in their use.
Similar association is mainly to memorize a new knowledge point by associating a specific image that looks similar.
To take a very popular example, when you memorize a map of China, it may not be easy to remember which mountain is in which part of China and which river flows through which province.
But if you imagine the map of China as a rooster, it will be much easier to remember where the comb is, what provinces it corresponds to, and what mountains and rivers it has; what provinces the tail is, and what important cities and places of interest it has.
Similarly, you can think of Italy’s territorial shape as a boot, Japan as a silkworm or a seahorse, and Iran’s outline as a straw hat.. Therefore, the essence of similar association is to make abstract and unfamiliar new things vivid and concrete, and to reduce the difficulty of memory by associating familiar shapes and images.
Classified Association The third method of associative memory is called “classified association.” This is actually not difficult to understand.
As the saying goes, “Birds of a feather flock together.” When we memorize a new thing, we can tie it up with the same category of things and unify our memory.
Take a few very simple examples: for example, when you eat avocado, you can think that avocado is a tropical fruit native to overseas, and then associate with tropical fruits with similar properties, such as Passion Fruit, durian, mangosteen and so on. For
another example, in the history of Chinese literature, poets are as numerous as stars, and we can classify them into specific schools and unify their memory according to similar styles or times.
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 classified as “realistic schools,” and the common feature of this school of poetry is that it can truly and vividly reflect social life.
I took a very interesting history course at Yale on the subject of the history of the Japanese archipelago.
However, as interesting as it is, the difficulty is also quite high-through a semester of 30 years of Meiji Restoration, the time span is more than 2500 years, involving a large amount of knowledge and fragmentary knowledge.
If you want to get good grades in the big exam and final paper, you must have a solid grasp of the content of the class.
That whole semester, I used the morning/bedtime mnemonic method to deal with the complicated knowledge points in the course. After getting up at seven o’clock
in the morning, I washed quickly, went to the college canteen to have breakfast, and spent ten minutes memorizing the main points of Japanese history that I had just learned recently-why did Yamato become the first unified regime in Japan in the 4th century AD? What “sutras” did the Japanese monks who
went to the Tang Dynasty to study abroad (as envoys to the Tang Dynasty) take? Who
does Tokugawa Ieyasu trust most? Before going to bed
late at night, I often take out the reading materials and class notes of the history of the Japanese islands, and review and memorize all kinds of detailed knowledge again. Memory
in the morning and before going to bed helped me get a photographic memory experience-I remember the knowledge points of this course well, and my grades at the end of the course were also very good.
Even at the moment of writing this article, I can still recall many details that I recited when I took the history of the Japanese archipelago eight or nine years ago. The
last memory method I want to introduce is called “story series memory method”, which I often use when I need to memorize scattered knowledge points in a short time. As mentioned
earlier, it is difficult to memorize independent knowledge points mechanically, and the forgetting rate is also high, because independent knowledge points lack contextual background information reference.
But if we connect the “parts” of each knowledge point, weave them into a short story, and put them into a contextual context, it seems to give life to these knowledge points, making them more vivid and concrete, and easier to recite.
Here I would like to share with you a typical example of the “story series memory method”: Natsume Soseki is a famous Japanese writer. His main works include “I Am a Cat”, “Grass Pillow”, “Yumeiren Grass”, “Sanshiro”, “From Now On”, “Door”, “Pedestrian”, “Road Grass”, “Light and Dark” and so on. It is not so easy to remember
so many works one by one in order.
But Teruo Sakai, a famous Japanese memory master, used the “story series memory method” to easily write down these works in turn. This is how
he “tells the story”: “We are the cats in this room. We sleep on a straw pillow with a picture of corn poppy grass painted on it. From here Sanshiro enters the house. In front of the door, there are people squatting and passing by. Pedestrians are picking the grass. The grass is a road with a difference between light and shade.
Perhaps some students will feel that the plot of this little story sounds strange, and some places are a little unreasonable?
However, there is no need to worry too much about whether the story is good or not, even if the plot is weird, as long as you can connect all the information that needs to be remembered through the story, so that they become more vivid and easy to remember in the context, then the goal of reducing the difficulty of memory and improving the quality of memory will be achieved.
At this point, I have introduced the five memory methods that I have personally tested and used.
It must be said that the method will certainly help, but there is really no shortcut to memory.
No matter what kind of superb method you use, first of all, you need to be highly focused and willing to work hard.
When dealing with a memory task, we should never take chances, be lazy or slack.
Next, I would like to share with my classmates my “desperate experience” of reciting 4000 GRE words in 10 days when I asked for leave to prepare for Yale University in the last semester of my senior year. I hope that through this story, I can give you a powerful injection of chicken blood. When I
was in high school, my goal was to go to Yale University, and when I applied for an undergraduate course in the United States, I had to take the SAT, which is commonly known in our country as the “American College Entrance Examination.”.
At that time, because of the limited time, I had to get a high sat score at one time, and I needed to concentrate on the difficult GRE words in 10 days.
The GRE is the American Graduate Record Examination. How difficult are the words?
I can tell you that there are quite a number of GRE words that many Americans have never seen, heard or understood in their lives.
At that time, I bought the “Little Red Book of GRE Vocabulary”, which covered 9000 GRE vocabulary. In addition to the 5000 TOEFL vocabulary I had already mastered, I still needed to get rid of the remaining 4000 new words.
The 10-day concentrated assault plan meant that I had to kill an average of 400 words a day. Having
set a goal, I immediately began to memorize words crazily for 240 hours with the Little Red Book.
To be honest, this memory is really “strong.” Later, when I talked about this experience with my American classmates, they were so surprised that their jaws almost dropped. They even said, “Leo, noway, that wasimpossible!.”! Leo, it’s impossible, it’s impossible! In fact, looking back on those 10 days of craziness, I feel a little unbelievable.
At that time, I was really supporting myself, and I gritted my teeth every day.
In those days, the Little Red Book and I were inseparable, the Little Red Book beside the pillow, the Little Red Book in the quilt, the Little Red Book on the keyboard, and the Little Red Book beside the bathtub. How exactly do
I write down these 4000 new words quickly?
Frankly speaking, I didn’t take any shortcuts at that time, but tried to use efficient and scientific memory methods.
I sum up my method of reciting words as the “six-step method of reciting words with chicken blood” (as shown below).
Simply put, it is multi-sensory stimulation, repeated ear grinding, combining syllables and definitions to split words, and paying special attention to putting words in example sentences for context understanding and memory.
The first step is to spell directly and read the word and the Chinese meaning completely. The second step is to split the word. The fourth step is to read the word with three different rising and falling intonations (simulating the different tones of the word in the real context). The fifth step is to split and spell each letter in the word one by one, and finally read the word and the Chinese meaning again. The sixth step is to put the word in the example sentence and read the sentence once. Reinforcement memory example: 1) global [lo lobl] global, worldwide 2) glo-bal3) g-l-o-glo, b-a-l-bal4) global, global, global5) g-l-o-b-a-lglobal, 6) Airpollutionisaglobal problem. Of the world Air pollution is a global problem.
I also actively “draw inferences about other cases from one instance” when reciting words: after reciting them in alphabetical order, I downloaded the classified thesaurus from the Internet, and when I saw the word “fastidious,” I immediately associated the Synonyms picky, critical, and stringent with my eyes and mind. Recite a word while reviewing five or six words, get twice the result with half the effort.
In addition, I insist on “listening to words to sleep”, that is, the “multi-sensory stimulation memory method” and “bedtime memory method” introduced above.
I would put the MP3 on the bedside table, play the vocabulary audio in a loop, and let the pronunciation of each word stimulate the memory center of the brain through hearing until I was tired and fell asleep. When I woke up
the next morning, the MP3 was often out of power and turned off.
When reviewing, they often find that they have memorized the words they “listened to and recited” the night before.
Then there is the strength of refusing to admit defeat, a state of being possessed by the devil. When chatting
with my mother, I would suddenly lose my mind and recite the words that had just settled down in my mind. I would force my mother to test the difficult words I wrote down in the small book at any time and anywhere, so that she wanted to hide when she saw me for a few days. When watching TV news, I would unconsciously translate the Chinese words read out by the announcer into English in real time; Even when they talk in their sleep, they use words from the Little Red Book.
The 10-day purgatory trip of reciting words not only helped me get a high sat score at one time, but also made it almost impossible for me to read a large number of English books in Yale in the next few years; It gave me the ability to write any kind of paper with a wide range of words and usages to accurately describe my point of view. Equally important, this experience also refreshed my understanding of my memory potential and made me realize that if I am willing to endure hardships, there is nothing I can’t remember. To share with
you the soul-stirring experience of the “10 Days 4000 Words Challenge” is not to boast about myself, but to give the students a shot in the arm after introducing so many methods and cases. Nothing
in the world is difficult if you put your heart into it.
Like most of my classmates, I am not a genius. There is a formula that we have in common, that is, efficient methods + unremitting efforts = success and joy.
So students, push yourself and start trying the memory method I recommend now.
I believe you will be surprised.
Summary: Three key points of efficient memory. The first key is to make the memory process interesting and add lively and interesting elements.
The second key is to connect the fragments of information to be memorized into a whole and make a regular whole memory.
The third key is to memorize new knowledge points with the help of familiar content and bring the new with the old.
LEO tests five useful methods to improve memory efficiency. Multi-sensory stimulation memory method: fully mobilize different senses such as vision, touch, smell and taste to improve memory efficiency.
· Abbreviation memory method: Summarize and integrate miscellaneous information with key words and abbreviations to improve memory.
· Associative memory method: associative memory is carried out by using proximity, similarity, contrast, causality and other relationships.
· Morning/bedtime mnemonics: Choose the best time to remember new things to improve your memory.
· Story series memory method: Connect the fragmentary information to be memorized by making up stories to reduce the difficulty of memory.
. Focus on not getting lost ~
