Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0333: Learn the Greek alphabet

Episode Date: June 17, 2015

Gina asks about memorizing the Greek alphabet. I describe a mnemonic method for quickly an easily learning the characters, their names, and their sounds, simultaneously. 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.

Master of Memory, episode mamma mia, 333. 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. This is Timothy. Thanks for being with me on the show. If you understood that little joke at the beginning of the show, send me an email at timothyatmasterofmemory.com and I'll give you a little something, maybe an entry in a giveaway contest for our Spanish course. Meanwhile, let's just get on to today's question. Gina asked a

question in an email about memorizing the Greek alphabet. So I'm going to describe a mnemonic method here for quickly and easily learning the characters along with their names and their sounds all simultaneously. What I present is actually going to be based on some materials I was developing for a Greek course which I was going to put together and I'd still like to put together. I've just been delayed on it because I was, you know, trying to create all these mnemonics but I was also doing the Spanish course, and it's just a little too much for me to do all at once. I will be getting back

to it, and I'll get back to it faster if you guys send me an email and maybe help collaborate with me on making it happen, you know, learning New Testament Greek. So how is it that you can learn the alphabet and all of the letters with their phonetics all at once. Well, all that I would really do is just have a memory palace with enough stations for all the letters, and then learn the letters both in their capital form and in their lowercase form, with the capital form above and the lowercase form below. So for example, sigma could be on top of an armchair if that's where it lies in your memory palace. But right behind the armchair, after it falls off the top, it turns into something else when it's smaller.

So the sigma looks one way when it's on top, but when it falls down, it rolls up into a little piece of paper instead of being folded the way it was at the top. So you're going to relate those two to each other and recognize that they're the same letter, but in different forms, with an upper form and a lower form. As another example, with gamma, you have the way that it looks when it's, when it's, you know, large and up on top of a desk, maybe you have it standing up there, but then it falls and in the air as it falls it becomes streamlined and when it lands on the ground it looks the way that it does on the ground. Or Delta, while it falls it gets rounded and stretched so you have the form on top

and you have the form below. Upsilon is very fun when you do this because it looks the way that it does when it's on top but when it lands it smashes a little bit and you And so you can easily relate them to each other, but you can remember which is which because one is the form in its natural capital form, and the other is the more common form on the ground when it's been, you know, when it's fallen through the air and smashed on the ground. Now, in order to learn the names at the same time, you just relate the action that happens in their falling to the way that the word sounds like upsilon, the stressed syllable is oops, or gamma. You might

relate the action of falling with a ham or something like that. So that's what you do to learn the name. Now how about the phonetic sound of the letter? That's a little bit tricky but I would make sure to base that on something different from the action of falling because you don't want the action of falling to trigger more than one thing. You only want it to trigger the name of the letter. To trigger the sound that the letter makes, you might just use the way that it looks when it's on the ground, and imagine that it's come up to a microphone and has to say something. For Upsilon, that would just be an athlete in a triumphant pose. So it walks up to the microphone and it tries to make a big triumphant

pose and that's what Upsilon looks like. And it might say something like uh or ooh to represent its triumphant pose. For the letter Phi, it would walk up to the microphone and it would blow on it. And you can see that the letter kind of looks like blowing on something. And then C would walk up to the microphone and try to snuff out some candles. So you can see how P looks like that. You have the little sound that a candle being snuffed out might make. And then using ro as an example, it's a very awkward letter. It walks up to the microphone, but all it says is rrrr because it's nervous.

That reminds you that ro is an r, but it's an awkward r because it's lost one of its arms. So you just fill your palace with these mnemonics, the capital letter on top, the lowercase letter below, and then that letter walking up to a microphone and saying something for the sound that it makes. Thanks so much for the question, Gina. I had a lot of fun with this episode. And for anyone listening, if you've had any benefit from this show, please leave us a review in iTunes. These reviews have a multiplying effect. Every individual one has the potential to put us in front of hundreds of more listeners. Just one review. So leave your review in iTunes

and I'll talk to you again soon. Thank you.