Students sometimes will say "I have a lousy memory - I just can't memorize anything." Nonsense! Most people who make this complaint give much evidence that they can memorize many, many details if they are interested in the material and give it their attention. Some people who claim they have poor memories can recall almost every detail of the changes in the current crop of new model cars. They can also give incredibly detailed data about the lifetime batting averages of their favorite baseball players. It takes a very good memory to do this. Others who feel that they have poor memories can recite point after point of information about their favorite recording artists and all of the arrangements those artists have ever recorded. Frequently, they can tell you every card that has been shown in a card game, or if they are interested in cooking, they may have 100 recipes at their fingertips. It takes an excellent memory to remember these many items. Any person who can remember these details can also memorize ideas, information and concepts for their college courses. All they have to do is keep their motivation and interest up and use some of the simple patterns of learning and memorizing given in this chapter.
How You Can Memorize a Large Group of Definitions
Suppose that you are learning 20 definitions for a test and there are 6 of the 20 which you feel are very useful words to know permanently. You put all 20 of the words on flash cards. Then divide the 20 into 5 subpacks of 4 each. As you look at each card in the first subpack ask yourself first “What does this mean in my own words?” and then “What is the exact wording of the definition?” Then recite orally. Go over one card five or ten times until you have the definition repeated correctly one time, then go on to the second card and repeat the process. Now go back to the first card and see if you still know it. If you don't, then practice reciting the definition until you can correctly give the definition three times in a row. Then go over card two again several times, trying to get the exact wording but always keeping the meaning in mind. When you are able to recite the definition exactly as it is on the back of the cards for three times in a row, go on to card three, doing the same thing you did with card two. After you have card three memorized, go back and review all three cards before you tackle card four. Do card four as you did the other cards and then review your definitions for all four cards. If you miss one of the four, pick it out of the pack and recite it until you again have the meaning in mind.
How Taking a Break Can Help Your Memorizing
By this time you may have spent from 20 to 40 more minutes on the first four words, so do something different. Read a few pages of a different textbook or review your notes for a different course for 15 or 30 more minutes; then come back to the first four flash cards and spend 10 minutes or so reviewing them to see if you still remember them. If you can't repeat all four definitions correctly, spend more time reciting the ones that are giving you trouble. Then pick up a second set of four more new cards and repeat the process you did with the first set of four. After you have done this, review all eight of the cards you have worked with so far. Then take a break from the cards and study some other course material for about an hour. After a ten-minute break, review the first eight of the first two subsets and go on to the third subset of four. Then call it a day and do some other studying until just before you go to sleep. At that time, review the first twelve cards you have been working with. Next morning again review all twelve and go on to the next set of four. Then review all sixteen and begin to tackle the final set of 4. In two or three days of this spaced practice and review you will have memorized all twenty cards for the test. After you have them memorized, change their order. Instead of going through your pack I, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc., jumble them so that you go through them 1, 20, 6, 17, 9, 2, etc. If you know them out of the original order, you are ready for the test.
What Steps to Take to Permanently Remember Something
So far you have learned the twenty definitions, but suppose you wanted to be able to always remember six particularly important words of the twenty. After the test, most of the definitions will eventually be blocked out by other new learning. So how do you go about remembering those six that you want to retain permanently? It's simple. All you have to do is to continue to review those six twice a week for two weeks then once a week for another month and then once every two weeks for the following three months. Then once a month for another four months. By that time they will be pretty much a part of you and you are not likely to forget them unless you never again look at them. If you can actually use these words and definitions in your writing, thinking and conversation, you will find that this in itself is something of a review and will aid your learning and remembering them. In summary, the way to remember is to review and continue to review information you have already learned.
How Can You Memorize Your Note and Textbook Underlining
Suppose that either your history notes or your text has a list of ten major causes of World War II. You feel that the "causes" may be an essay question on your history mid-term exam so you decide to memorize the ten.
How to Check Your Understanding of Things to be Memorized
The first thing to do is to read the ten causes over again and ask yourself, "Do I clearly understand what each of these causes means as it is written? " If you find that one of the causes is not perfectly clear, check with a friend in your class or with your instructor for the true meaning. It's important to have a clear understanding of the meaning of any material that you plan to memorize because it is much easier to memorize meaningful material than it is to memorize material which has cloudy or doubtful meaning.
How You Can Subgroup and Simplify Your List of Things to Memorize
After you are satisfied that you have a clear understanding, see if you can simplify the list by subgrouping the ten causes. Look for some similarities that some of the causes have in common. For example, you may decide that four of the causes can be grouped together under a subgroup heading called economic causes. Another three can be called political causes and the final three appear to be military causes. Frequently, you will find that you can subgroup lists of ideas by looking for similarities and differences which even your instructor may not have bothered to point out. The value of subgrouping is that you can memorize the three subgroups much more easily than you can memorize a long list of ten items which has not been broken into subgroups. Dividing a list into sublists or subgroups always makes the list easier to memorize.
Now that you have put the ten causes into subgroups, the next thing to do is to simplify and shorten each of them. For example, if each of the ten causes is a full sentence, simplify it by picking out the four or five words in each sentence which carry the meaning of the sentence. These words should enable you to recall the thought of the entire sentence. For example, you can shorten the sentence “A cause of World War II was the German and Japanese felt need to expand beyond their borders into nearby territories
and the resultant military arms buildup to make this expansion possible,” by using only the underlined words: German Japanese Expand Territories Arms
Following this same pattern of simplifying you should write out a shortened version of each of the ten causes. The next step is to write out these ten shortened versions in the three subgroupings of Political, Economic, and Military on the back of a 4" x 6" or 5" x 8" card, leaving a small margin at one end of the card.
How Nonsense Words Can Help You Memorize
The next thing to do to aid your memory even more is to take the first letters of the key words and make a new real word or a nonsense word out of it. For example taking the first letter of each word in our shortened cause we get GJETA, which is meaningless but is not too hard to remember because it has the word JET in it. Another possibility would be to interchange the G and J so that it would be JGETA, which has the word GET in it and is appropriate because it can trigger the idea of getting more land with arms. Yet another possibility would be change the last two letters around so that you have GJEAT, which contains the word EAT in it.
If you use your ingenuity you can come up with abbreviated nonsense words for all ten causes in a matter of minutes. The next thing to do is to put each of the nonsense words in the margin of the card with the 4 to 5 letter shortened causes in it. Then take the first cause, look at the nonsense word (GJETA) and cover the five words it came from and see if you can accurately repeat these five words: "German Japanese Expand Territories Arms.
Repeat this several times until you can quickly come up with the five words. Next refresh your memory by trying to recall the full sentence for which the five words stand. Check your answer against the full sentence by rereading the full sentence. After you have done this about a dozen times and feel that you know the complete sentence which the nonsense words stand for, then go on to the other nonsense words that stand for causes and learn them the same way one at a time. Then cover the three military causes nonsense words and see if you can write them out. If you miss one, practice reciting it, the words it stands for, and the sentence the words stand for until you know it Then cover the three political causes nonsense words and practice writing them out and reciting what they mean Finally, repeat the process with the four economic causes. Thereafter, review this material for a few minutes about two or three times a week before the test so that you won’t forget it. You can do this by referring back to the 4” by 6” card, which has the causes and abbreviations on it.
How You Can Use Your Memorization Patterns at Test-Time
When you get into the test and if this “causes” question comes up, you should quickly jot down all ten nonsense words into three subgroups on the margin of the first page. Then take your time in changing these abbreviation signals into the listing of the causes of World War II. Once you give yourself some practice in building these first letter abbreviation words, you will find that they become easier and easier to make and use. In a short time you will find that using this method you can literally remember pages and pages of material which will be helpful to you at test time. When you are memorizing each nonsense word, be certain to go back to the full sentence to which it refers. This makes the memorization meaningful and useful and will prevent you from falling into the trap of remembering the nonsense abbreviations but not remembering what they stand for.
How You Can Memorize a List of Things Which Are in Unchangeable Order
If you want to remember a series of ideas which are in a given order and cannot be changed, you can still use the first letter abbreviation words, but you should be careful not to change the order of any of the letters to make real words as we did with GET and EAT. Let's look at an example where the order is important. A classification system in your biology class might be as follows: Kingdom, Phylum, Subphylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species, Variety, Subvariety. I will assume that you had studied some examples and have a clear understanding of the meaning of each of these classifications.
Making Sense out of Nonsense Memorization Words
Your job now is to memorize these classifications in the order in which they have been presented. If you use the first letter abbreviations you get something rather unpronounceable and somewhat difficult to remember: KPSCOFGSVS. The first thing you should think of is "How can I simplify this so I can remember it?” One way is to group the first four letters, which look like a fictitious Southern California radio station, KPSC; the next two letters - OF - spell “of”; and the last four have a rhythmic GS, VS sound to them with the repeated S. Another way of making it easier to memorize is to add a vowel (a, e, i, o, u) to several different places in the string of letters. If you add a to four different places you get something which is pronounceable KaPaSCO-FaG-SaVS. Similarly, adding i to three different places makes it more pronounceable KiPS CO-FiG-SiVS. You may then conjure up a silly idea of a man named KIPS having a company (CO) which makes fig sieves (SIVS). This is really a very silly mental picture of a sign outside of a company which reads KIPSCO FIG SIVS, but don't worry about it being silly. When you remove those three "i's" you have the first letters of the biological classification at your fingertips and this is what you want. Often the sillier the mental pictures or associations you make up for your first letter abbreviation combinations, the easier it will be for you to remember them. With a little practice you can become quite good at it and it can be an entertaining sidelight to studying. The crucial thing to remember is that it's necessary to go through several repetitions and recitations, tying your first letters in with the biological classification words for which they stand. You should also remember to ask yourself three questions as you recite the heading of any classification system: "Can I repeat each of them accurately and in order?" and "What are some examples of each of these?" and “What do they mean?" If you do this you will have learned the classification, not merely memorized it.
As you practice setting up abbreviations, forming them into imaginary words, associating them with other ideas and remembering them, you will become more relaxed and confident in your ability to memorize material. As you become more confident, you will find that you will become better at memorizing new material.
What Patterns You Can Use to Memorize Numbers
In memorizing numbers, the same rules follow. Simply divide, shorten and group the numbers. Look for patterns. The following number 345183876 is easy to memorize because it has two series in it. 345 is part of the normal counting I, 2, 345, so you can easily group those three. The last three numbers can also be considered a group because 876 is the same pattern you would get if you began counting backwards from 8, i.e., 876 54321. The 183 in the middle may not trigger any association but it's short so you can memorize it as it stands. It's important to recite numbers aloud when you are repeating them for your memory. Often the sound pattern with a short pause where you have broken them up into subparts is useful so that you are saying aloud 345 (short pause) 183 (short pause like a short breath) 876. Sequences of numbers sometimes lack meaning. By associating the numbers with a visual picture we can sometimes give them meaning. The visual pictures possible are many. Any of the things that we think of as having numbers can be used. You can visualize a license plate on a car parked behind a house with the address showing. The address is 345 - 18th St. The license is 3876. Another clue is that 38 is half of 76. Sometimes coming up with a visual picture of a number in a sporting event can help you to memorize the numbers. "Number 34 passed to number 51 with eight minutes and 38 seconds left in the game and won it 7 to 6." If you can visualize a quarterback with 34 on his jersey passing to an end with a 51 on his jersey and a clock reading 838 and two scores 7 and 6 you have got it memorized. Another different image would be a population sign of a town reading 345 founded in 1838 and a 76-year-old man standing next to the sign. The possibilities are limitless. All it takes is a vivid imagination and practice.
If you are learning numbers for a recognition multiple choice quiz, you ordinarily do not need to recall the exact number. Having a rounded off approximation is sufficient to get the item right on the test, so don't bother remembering the exact number. For example, if a research sample of 24,793 people was used in a particular study and you feel that the number is important for a multiple choice quiz, remember it rounded off at 25,000, or 24,000+ rather than wasting your memorizing time with the exact number. Similarly, if percentages are given, round them off. If 83.2 per cent of a researched group did such and such, round it off in your memory as 80 per cent or think of it generally as 4 out of 5 of the research group. Memorizing these rounded approximations can save you much time and energy.
Summary of Steps Involved in Memorizing
First, by to hate a clear understanding of the material which you are about to memorize. If you have a clear overview of the whole of the material to be learned and understand its meaning, it will be much easier for you to memorize.
Second, reorganize and restructure the material to be learned. Look for the main features of the material, the main ideas which stand out. In some cases try to simplify these ideas without changing their meaning. Whether you are memorizing vocabulary using flash cards or memorizing a complicated diagram or a series of steps in a complex process, look for the main words in the definitions. Look for the broad outline and key features of the diagram. Look for the main ideas in the complex process. Seeing the main features and ideas may give you some clues as to how to divide the material into meaningful smaller units.
Third, change the long chains of material to be learned into short groupings or blocks of material. Plan and memorize each subgroup separately, putting them together as you learn them subgroup by subgroup.
Fourth, try to form some tie-ins or associations between the parts of a subgroup so that they will hold together as a group in your memory. To help you do this, use the abbreviation code along with the mental pictures or imagery of the pattern of ideas or facts that the abbreviation conjures up for you. Once you have made some clear associations, even very silly ones, you are ready to begin the repeated self-questioning and reciting.
Fifth, practice by repeatedly reciting the answers to questions you ask about the material. If possible, do that aloud. Sometimes the natural pattern or rhyming of the sounds makes it even easier for you to remember the associations. Remember to also ask yourself an occasional question about the real meaning of the abbreviation or the mental picture associations you have made.
Sixth, overlearn the material. Learn it to the point t you can repeat it with full knowledge of its meaning four or five times in a row without error.
Seventh, review the material and the associations and the meanings frequently so that you don't forget what you have learned.
