Writing Your Own Book
Posted by Chris Pimmer
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How about omaha ranges? :)
Great suggestions, I will see if I can incorporate that into one of the next videos, thank you very much!
do not smoke weed before watching.
Haha.... maybe it will enhance things if you watch it twice... I could see some wild imaginations happening.. And as I said in the video, it does help to go crazy with those.. That is one of the reasons children learn very fast.
It is in part also because they have fewer rules or constrictions in their minds and can leap freely into anything, whereas, the old we get, we tend to live by many more rules and some training to go beyond them is needed. They are not yet in the so called box
How would you implement this Car Method in learning new languages? Would you just create images for the new words in similar way using your own language and place them on/in the car?
Great question, and you answered it in part yourself.
You can be very creative here, try a few different things and compare what worked better for you.
For example, in ZULU, the word Snake means: Inyoka
So you could imagine a (Rattle) Snake sitting on the backseat of your car, add some detail to it and done. In fact, I just recalled that word, without having ever studied it and the last time I read it was about 1 year ago.
Or the word Door means To... so you imagine you are slamming your big toe in the car door and it swells like in one of those comics.
Now you learned two words in Zulu, which you probably still remember one year from now.
This was one way. Here comes another.
German, say you want to learn 3 verbs.
To be = Sein
To do = Tun
To see = sehen
if you were to go with the same concept of using the sound of the word, you could imagine a large traffic SIGN, BEING thrusted into the grill.
for to do, lets take a different approach for some variation.
under the hood, I could see how there is a mechanic in a fast forward mode that has a lot to do...in lightning speed he goes from one side of the car to the other. like a Car-Toon (the word TUN is pronounced: TOON).
Some things lend themselves easily to some interpretation and imagination, while others less so, but if you spend a few moments with the term or sometimes maybe a sleep over it, you will find a cool connection that works very well for you.
The key is not to find the most logical thing, but the thing that is easily memorable to you.
Coming up with the word CARTOON, came only after maybe 2 minutes of thinking, I was kind of stuck on the word THUNA and was having the mechanic eating a can of thuna, but I also saw him as one of those cartoons in hyperspeed... the word catoon had not yet presented itself to me, at that moment he was a looney-toon, only when I started writing I saw the irony of CAR-TOON.... but again, like I said it took me maybe at max, 2 minutes.
now to see = SEHEN
now we conveniently (unplanned) are at the front windshield.
We want to see throught it and what we see is a SANE person (the pronounciation is not 100% the same, but it is relatively close that, once you know the actual pronounciation of a word, this little reminder will always bring forward the correct thing.
I would probably add a specific image to the SANE person... like I remember a quote from Albert Einstein who once asked himself, either it is me who is crazy or everyone else. So no I see a SANE Albert Einstein in front of my windshield and I remember "Sane" to stand for the word "sehen".
On the roof we want to learn the french word for dreaming: Rêve
and we got the ROOF of the car now.
So right now I am trying to come up with some english sounding word that sounds like Rêve. for example, revelation.... but you leave out the lation.... So you could try and think of some revelation that you have once had and that only dreamers lying on a car roof looking at the sky can have revelations, or go to the book of revelations and have it fall from the sky onto your head while you are lying on the roof dreaming.
If you give it a few moments and really try and see the scene in your mind, you will start preaching to everyone you know how this is the sickest method to learn any facts that you have ever encountered.
PS: To raise you one, I would try and create a few small and simple memory palaces, which is nothing else but you putting an order to certain spots in a place you know well.
Say you want to learn in a language all the stuff from a restaurant, you go to your favorite restaurant or cafe, write down the order in which to go through the place..
For example in a cafe I have been to twice. I enter in my mind now, on the right side i see a window ledge, then I see a little stand that holds some coffee cream, sugar and salt. then a little place to put your dirty plates.... and so on... Now if I wanted to learn those words in any language, I will simply combine the place with all the right named items and add some helper that reminds me of how to pronounce the word and potentially hot to conjugate the verbs.
Sorry for the lenghty answer, I just loved your question so much and love this topic that I could not help myself going nuts :)
PS: also if you are trying to learn a language, come up with the highest frequency words that you will need and start with those, use them in any way you like, using them will teach you much much faster than any redundant writing them down and when you use for example the car method, you are in fact using them and you form connections to them. Another obvious way of using them is form sentences. Maybe prepare a few sentences that you might need, using different variations of that word.
Thanks for the long answer! So I read a bit about the memory palace technique and tried to implement it in Spanish verbs, I created 3x6 objects in the living room, first set being my speakers + the subwoofer (present), second set being the electrical equipment (imperfect), and the last being things to sit/lay on (future). I have two more groups for the preterite and conditional but I will study these later.
What I noticed was that for this techinque it was hard to use any wild imagination, I just tried placing the words in each object and kind of forming an arrow/line through the room to connect them in my mind. I did find some trouble in few of the forms, for example verb "ser" = to be something indefinete the imperfect for we is "Nosotros eramos" and the future is "Nosotros seremos". I found it difficult to remember this even if I repeated it many times.
Would it be better to learn the rules of the regular verbs first? And what I was thinking also is can I just start mashing all the 100 most used verbs in these 18 different places and be able to meorize them all this way?
You did a lot well already..
Some minor things might be that instead of having themes, you want to have a squence of stations that always goes in the same order and potentially for the key verbs, you could have seperate rooms to store them with their most frequent conjugations.
When I taught myself portugues, something that helped me was writing poems and music lyrics in the language. Very often I would write down the lyrics and meanings from a song and then just sing along. I would also learn what the key tenses were with that verb and immediately use it.
Repeating conjugations in a meaningless fashion is almost completely worthless.
If you however, use it and engage with it in some way, even if it is not making a ton of sense, you will learn infinitely faster !
In a video to be released soon, i created a virtual memory palace that you can even use. After creating it, it was so clear to me, that I now even use it to store stuff I want.
What you imagine with the vocabulary does not need to be grandios, just a little memorable and a reminder so that you can get to the right thing.
Don't go searching for the big connection, often times the simplest one is the best...
Nosotros eramos
Nosferatu lived in the ERA of MOSS... it can be anything... if you test this out a little you will notice that over time you come up with many things and then just choose between them.
In the case of spanish, I would also recommend to listen to a lot of spanish music, I love Salsa and Bachata, but there are many others out there. Bolero I also like. Doing that, in time you will develop a more interalized base. Maybe create little labels in your house of what the things are called and what is done with them and then when you use it, you first have to say something about it in spanish.. like brushing your teeth... You say in spanish: I brush my teeth every morning (or insert time of day that it is in that moment), with my toothbrush, using toothpaste.
I would stay away from sitting down and writing the word: Eramos 1000 times
Or just simply conjugating SER into all forms.. create meaning
When I work with my students, that is usually what we work on, that they get into the habit of making things a natural part of their life, forming multiple connections and when the head is fuming to take a break.
Really enjoyed this video. Got all 12 right the first time just like you said, and the smile on my face grew with each passing number as I realized it was working.
Hey AlexinTraining that is so awesome !!
I remember my first time, just really fun and then finding applications in your life for it or in poker.
This is absolutely brilliant ! Got 11/12 on the rhyming pegs (had a sudden brain freeze on the five hive rhyme, maybe cuz Im not a native english speaker or just momentary freeze who knows, but I did get everything right when we got back to the car at the end !)
I am catching up on all your videos here Chris and this one really hit home, I've been familiar with mnemonics and memory palaces and was looking to get more into them and this video is really insightful both on how they work as well as practical applications - I feel inspired ! Thank You !!
(btw I didnt get how James Bond with a pistol is all suited cards and all pairs, I guess that 007 is ssk so that means suited cards but didn't get how the pistol is all pairs)
So happy to read your comment... Well, James Bond... has a suit... and a pistol... a pistol you can shoot with right away, it is a direct weapon, not a drawing hand.. haha
but also starts with a P... pockete pair.
Awesome ! Thanks :)
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