I've got to memorise and deliver a 2 minute Japanese speech (dealing with 'my university life') by Wednesday. I typed it up and got corrections from lang-8 (brilliant resource!) and now I'm trying to figure out the best way to remember it.

Have any of you had experience using Anki to memorise a speech? I was planning on creating a basic deck, with the sentence number (eg #1, #2, #3 or 'Intro', 'Conclusion' etc) on the front and the corresponding sentence on the back. Or perhaps a representative word (from the sentence) as the question. Then I can bring a slip of paper into class with the cues on it to jog my memory if needed.

Can anyone think of a better way to memorise a speech, using Anki or otherwise?

Anki for memorising a speech? I think you are hooked on anki dude.

Just memorise the god damn thing? How hard could it be? It's only two minutes.
Write it out by hand thousands of times, and keep practicing in front of a mirror, just like how you did it in your native language in prep for speeches at high school.

There is no other way for memorising a speech, get off the computer and do it on your own.

The traditional way to do it is to put the sentences in pairs.

The question is the first sentence and the answer is the following sentence. So if you have this speech to remember:

A. B. C. D. E. F.

You'll need the cards:

A/B, B/C, C/D, D/E, E/F.

I think Anki works if it is something you don't want ever forget. If your speech is for the next week, there's not much reason to do it.
The best tool for the job is probably a mirror. Stand in front of it and practice your speech.

liosama Wrote:Anki for memorising a speech? I think you are hooked on anki dude.

Just memorise the god damn thing? How hard could it be? It's only two minutes.
Write it out by hand thousands of times, and keep practicing in front of a mirror, just like how you did it in your native language in prep for speeches at high school.

There is no other way for memorising a speech, get off the computer and do it on your own.

Haha yeah fair enough!

A few people have mentioned that Anki isn't really much help in learning something (only for retaining memory) so I have a feeling that using it to learn a speech probably isn't going to work very well anyway. But I'm kind of worried about this speech, so I wanted to know what methods people have used to memorise a speech before.

mentat_kgs Wrote:The traditional way to do it is to put the sentences in pairs.

The question is the first sentence and the answer is the following sentence. So if you have this speech to remember:

A. B. C. D. E. F.

You'll need the cards:

A/B, B/C, C/D, D/E, E/F.

I think Anki works if it is something you don't want ever forget. If your speech is for the next week, there's not much reason to do it.
The best tool for the job is probably a mirror. Stand in front of it and practice your speech.

Oh, hey thanks a lot! That makes a lot of sense actually. I will change my cards to this format. Actually I will probably end up making hand held cards and practicing in front of the mirror, as has been advised ;-)

liosama Wrote:There is no other way for memorising a speech, get off the computer and do it on your own.

That made my remind of Ken Robinson's presentation on "Do schools kill creativity" for TED...

Actually, there are lots of ways of memorizing things. Please check Wikipedia's articles on Mnemonic, and specially the article about Method of loci and Link system. It calls my attention seeing a RTK -which is actually a mnemonic approach to kanji- follower uttering such an aseveration...

あのう、ええと…regarding to the speech, some simple advices I would give you would be something like: divide it into paragraphs and sentences, mark the main ideas of each one and create a mind map or a simple outline with only those main ideas. Then use some mnemonic resource to memorize that outline or mind map.

When you give a speech, it isn't that important to remember the exact wording, but the main ideas you want to transmit and showing self-confidence when you speak.

Good luck.

I had to memorize a 3 minute speech in Japanese in February. My method was just to record myself reading it and listen to it again and again. Then just start memorizing. Start with the first line. Then memorize the first and the second line. Never do sections out of context. Start from the beginning every time. You'll be glad the beginning is nailed into your head when you're giving the speech. Just keep doing this until you've got the whole thing down. It's really just a matter of repetition, listening, and knowing what you're saying.

Most importantly though, say it as if you're making it up on the spot. Smile. Pause. Act like the audience is on your side (because they most likely are). The real key to giving a good speech, after memorizing it, is relaxing and simultaneously entertaining your audience.

This was good enough for me, and I won 1st place in the speech competition Good luck!

Sebastian Wrote:

liosama Wrote:There is no other way for memorising a speech, get off the computer and do it on your own.

That made my remind of Ken Robinson's presentation on "Do schools kill creativity" for TED...

Yes I've seen this, too bad it has nothing to do with memorising a two minute speech at a very elementary level in language.

Sebastian Wrote:When you give a speech, it isn't that important to remember the exact wording, but the main ideas you want to transmit and showing self-confidence when you speak.

Do remember that he is still at an early level in the language, you can't merely remember key points then expect your language ability to carry you through, I could barely do that in English.
Clearly you haven't done many speeches. In order to sound confident (especially at a very early stage in a language) you need to memorise. I memorised all my speeches early in primary school and early high school.

Then I got to a point where flow and speed and what not were not a problem anymore, and I became confident enough in my language ability to speak off the top of my head. It's a matter of maturing in your language ability. If you can't speak fluently there is no way you'd be able to conduct a proper speech. You can't speak confidently about particle physics in front of a Japanese class if you barely know Japanese even though you may be a Prof. in particle physics.

So yes, look at the mirror observe how your body moves in response to you practicing, learn about yourself in doing so. Gradually go through different speeches and you'll find yourself working off simple topic markers, with you chucking in your own words as you go on.

I think the problem is that most people here living in RTK get some delusion that *everything* needs some unique memorisation system, and that memorisation is the devil.
Wrong.

I think you've all got valid points, and you need to strike a balance between memorizing the speech and knowing your core concepts and being able to speak naturally. Normally when doing a speech (in English) I wouldn't actually write anything out. I would just jot out my key concepts, think about what I wanted to talk about and speak it on the day. That's because I love public speaking, have had a *lot* of speaking experience, and am confident in my ability to ad lib.

But I can't really do that for Japanese; my ability is definitely not high enough to be able to ad lib with any degree of confidence. That's why I asked here for any tips on remembering a speech- and Mentat's advice about cue card structure was really helpful there. Despite public speaking for years I had never actually encountered that suggestion 0_0! haha.