I read an article in the newspaper by that guy, and like you I became interested in the techniques he used and whether they were applicable to learning vocabulary. I initially decided that the memory palace method as he described it in the article probably wasn't particularly useful because it relied on the order of the items, but now I think about it, I'm not sure that is the case. I did take a couple of useful things from it though:
Firstly, what he said about increasing the speed of memorisation seems very useful. For those that don't know, what he said was basically that you just need to force yourself to do it faster; if you need ten seconds to memorise each fact then set a timer for 9 seconds on each one, and eventually you'll get used to doing it at that speed. This also seems to answer the question of quality vs quantity in memorising things.
The second thing that caught my attention was the use of pre memorised images to represent numbers or combinations of cards. This is pretty much exactly what we're already doing with Heisig, but it really brought home to me how widely applicable these techniques are. I haven't actually done it yet, but I figured it would be worth creating images to match the sounds in the Japanese language, since we're going to be memorising thousands of words. It would be easy to build it up Heisig style and start off with images for individual sounds like か, and then combine them in to compound images, eventually creating a single image for strings of sounds, like あたま。 You could then combine them with the images you have for the kanji to make a single image for the word.
As I said, I haven't done that yet. In fact, I've been really lazy and only occasionally done anything more than repeat words until they stick; as Javizy said, you don't really need to do this if your using an SRS, but I've found that sessions in which I make an effort to use mnemonic techiques have always been more productive. It is important, though, to make sure that you're using the mnemonics to speed up your learning, rather than "taking the time" to make a mnemonic for each word. Edit: The lazyness refers to the exta brainpower involved in creating images, not the amount of time spent on each word.
As I haven't gotten around to makeing images for the sounds yet I use another method for memorising them; just think of a word that the japanese reminds you of and use that a bit like a stepping stone to reach the Japanese. For example, 石炭, the word for coal, is pronounced せきたん. This sounds a bit like "sexy tan" to me, which works perfectly with the kanji to reveal that a pice of coal is a stone that's got a really dark sexy tan, and I have a really strong image to go with that.
Edit: While reviewing I remembered why I didn't bother making images for all the sounds; the limited number of readings for each kanji kind of take care of this for you.
Last edited by Splatted (2011 May 27, 6:20 pm)
