Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0321: How to memorize Psalm 119

Episode Date: June 1, 2015

Alekx asks about memorizing Psalm 119, both in Hebrew and in English. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Yes, I'm back and fighting fit today with Master of Memory, episode 321. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day, and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. First of all, yes, I'm back in the States after Argentina and the Philippines. And besides working on releasing our poetry course and making enormous improvements to the Spanish course, I'm so ready to get back to giving you all some new Master of Memory episodes right here on the show on whatever topics you want to hear about. So please leave your requests at masterofmemory.com slash question

and especially leave a voicemail message if you can, because I'll get to those the fastest. Also today, you'll want to hear about a special announcement at the end of the episode. For today's episode, Alex left a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Alex says, I would like to memorize Psalm 119 in both English and Hebrew. It's very long, 150 verses or so. Do you think I should break it into more than one memory palace, or would a single very large one be better? Also, any advice you have about how to efficiently do this would help.

I think I read that you've changed some of your tactics after you built the James course. Can you explain some of those changes that might help memorizing the psalm? So yeah, Alex, the changes that we made will definitely help you with the psalm. And basically the way that it works is best practice is really to have just one item in any given location. So if you have a memory palace of, say, 150 locations, you don't reuse any of those locations. Instead, there's something completely unique in each of those spots. In response to your first question, whether you would use a multiple, you know, multiple memory palaces or just a single palace, well, the fact is, it would be a single palace no matter what you do, even if it's a broken up palace. Let's say you used your home

for the first, just hypothetically, your home for the first 10 verses, and then a restaurant for the next 20 verses, and then the surface of Mars for the next 50 verses. It doesn't really matter. That's still theoretically one memory palace because you're going through it in sequence. So it's still considered one palace technically, although I kind of see where you're coming from. But that said, my suggestion is that you should use just one building. All right, just keep it all in one place. So keep that memory palace for this psalm all together in one place and use a building that you've been in, probably one for something with this many locations, one that you know well enough. Maybe it's something that you've lived in, probably one for something with this many locations, one that you know well enough, maybe it's something that you've lived in, you know, the house you currently live in,

or a house that you've lived in, you know, for several years, whatever it is, what you want to do is use one building, but then for the different letters, the different Hebrew letters, you'll use different rooms. So the way that Psalm 119 works is it's an acrostic, you know, psalm, like many of the psalms are, and it groups verses together by starting with a particular Hebrew letter. So what you'll do is you'll put all the first ones in one room, all the next ones in the next room, and so on. So you have a convenient way that you're kind of, you know, forcing yourself to organize it in a particular way. Now that said, it's still a linear memory palace, even if it's organized by Hebrew letters, because you're still going to go around each of

these rooms in order from the first verse to the last verse. Now you're asking about memorizing it in both English and Hebrew, and for the purpose of this question, I'm going to assume that you already know Hebrew. So what you're going to do is, I would suggest choosing a total of probably two keywords per verse, maybe three or four, but try to use as few as possible. You want to learn this through auditory and spoken memory as far as the details of the poetry go, the details of the psalm. So you're not creating mnemonics for every single word. You're just choosing as few keywords as possible. And I would suggest trying to aim for two per verse. But what you're going to do is you're going to choose two Hebrew words.

And so you'll choose two Hebrew words from each verse, and you'll place those around your palace. And what's going to happen is those Hebrew words will prompt both the Hebrew and the English versions of the verse, of the passage. So you're going to have recordings of this psalm. This is really important. You're going to have recordings of this psalm, both in Hebrew and in English, and listen to them frequently and repeat along or repeat after them however you want to do it or however you can do it based on how well you've memorized it at a given point. So you'll keep listening to it and speaking through it, but still use a technique like we used in the James course by finding a key verse from each section and starting with those and, you know, just proceeding a few verses at a time throughout the chapter until you have all of those verses memorized.

But really, it's the auditory memory and the, you know, oral memory of speaking these verses that's going to help you memorize really fast. The choosing a couple of keywords per verse is there to help give you references so that you never get stuck and you always know where you are. That's the purpose of the memory palace. So I hope that helps you, Alex, and I'd be happy to collaborate you

with anything else on this. I'm looking forward to getting into more learning and memorization projects now that I'm back in the States and ready to crank out more content. Now, listeners have asked about how they can support Master of Memory and keep this show free for the world, particularly if you don't have a lot of time or any money to spend. So right now, I'm going to tell you that, believe it or not, right now, at this moment,

the number one way that you can support the show doesn't require any money of you, is very easy, and will only take a few seconds, and it requires nothing but your smartphone in your hand right now. So listen, if you've enjoyed listening to this show and you have a smartphone right now with an internet connection, there's no excuse for you not to do this. Here's how you can give this show immense support without even having to type more than two words in your phone. So guys, this is really easy. You'll be done before this episode even ends. So here's step one. If your

phone's between your fingers, in your podcast app, go to the search function to search the podcast store and type the word accelerated, A-C-C-E-L-E-R-A-T-E-D. And then the word Spanish. So have you done that? So you've searched for accelerated Spanish. Now step two, here's the surprise. Click on the new show, not the old one that has a big ugly red word across the artwork,

but the fresh new one. And then step three, just hit the subscribe button and you're done. That's it. By subscribing to the all-new, freshly released Spanish podcast, you're helping support Master of Memory in more enormous ways than you might imagine. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn?

The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you all again soon.