Hey there,

at the moment I have to memorize a lot of text, but unfortunately, I completely fail at it. I don't know how to get it into my brain. Usually, I can memorize quite well, but this is not for "usual" text, but more for poems and vocabulary and stuff. Do you know if there are strategies I could use to help me along? When I say "text" I mean stuff like such:
"The principle of legality is the legal ideal that requires all law to be clear, ascertainable and non-retrospective. It requires decision makers to resolve disputes by applying legal rules that have been declared beforehand, and not to alter the legal situation retrospectively by discretionary departures from established law. It is closely related to legal formalism and the rule of law and can be traced from the writings of Feuerbach, Dicey and Montesquieu."
(taken completely at random from wikipedia. It's just an example - actually I have to memorize german legal decision phrasing. The judges expect us to know this stuff by heart as they do without realizing that this is what they write since 30 years every single day and we... don't.)

At the moment, I'm completely lost. Ack... I stuffed it into Anki, but of course Anki fails for so much text at once. Then I tried it with brute force, writing it again and again but that takes too much time I don't really have and it still doesn't seem to stick.

Any help is appreciated, I'm getting quite desperate.

I used to rote learn German sentences like this:

1) Memorized the first sentence. and repeated it.
2) learned the 2nd sentence and repeated the 1st one and the second one.
3) learned the 3rd sentence and repeated all 3

And so on...

While I haven't tried it in another language yet, my English process goes a lot like Jettyke's.

1) Read the whole thing. Again. And again. Until it's fairly comfortable.
2) Look up any words I'm not sure the meaning of, or do my best to intuit them from the context if necessary. (Jabberwocky, I'm looking at you!)
3) Memorize sentences (or bits of sentences).
4) String them together and repeat. And again. And again. Until I can remember the whole thing without too much stumbling.
5) Time...
6) Come back another day and start from 1, but with less repetition.

I learned a few paragraphs this was, like the first part of the Jabberwocky and a couple paragraphs from the Walrus and Carpenter, as well as the beginning of the declaration of independence.

I'm not real strict on always repeating everything, mind. Or for that matter, strict on anything. The above is more of a replay of how it happened, than a plan for making it happen. And it worked. The Alice quotes are still in my head 10-15 years later. (Not so much the declaration, though. Oops. But then, I never repeated it back in my head after I passed the test. Alice was for fun.)

http://wiki.supermemo.org/index.php?titl...ong_lyrics

While your not learning lyrics, you can SRS with the same method.

You can do something like this:
Have the prior 5 lines, a blank for the current sentence and then next 5 lines. And you just have to fill in the current sentence.

It's actually not that hard to do this type of thing. I play guitar, and it's very similar to memorize a song and to memorize a text.

It all comes down to memorizing it in small chunks and constantly quizzing yourself, basically in the way that jettyke said.

It's really important to always start from the beginning, because if you do it in chunks you won't be able to connect them. (You notice this when you try to sing songs with many verses. If you hear the beginning of a verse, it's very easy to finish singing the verse. But it's very difficult to remember the first line of the next verse. The chorus broke the two apart, so they're separate in your brain and they are difficult to connect. Try singing 'American Pie' or 'Tangled up in Blue' from beginning to end, and you'll notice how this happens)

Try to get over the feeling that this is a stupid thing that they're making you do. Memorizing takes a lot of concentration, so if you're frustrated it's very difficult to memorize anything.