Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0337: Learn the Latin alphabet

Episode Date: June 23, 2015

Gina asks about learning the Latin alphabet. I describe how to apply the techniques we presented in episode 333 (about the Greek alphabet) to any other phonetic alphabet. 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 337. 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. Gina asked a question in an email about learning the Latin alphabet. So what we're going to do is we're going to describe a similar process to learning the Greek alphabet, except this one is possibly going to be easier. So we talked about the Greek alphabet back in episode 333. But in this episode, talking about the Latin alphabet, I'm assuming, Gina, that you want to learn the classical Latin alphabet,

in which case the symbols are very much like those of modern alphabets in Western languages, like English and the Romance languages. And so all we have to worry about, really, is just learning the names, and then, of course, which letters are being used. So I would suggest that you choose four general locations in a memory palace, so maybe four furniture items in a single room. This isn't going to take a large memory palace. It'll be very simple. So you can choose maybe a living room or a parlor or something like that that you want to store your Latin alphabet in and choose four general areas. You'll use one area for the letters

whose names are consonants ending with E, the letter E, like B, D, P, and so on. Then you'll choose another furniture item for letters whose names are consonants that begin with the letter E, like F, L, M, and so on. Then another one for simple vowels, of which there are only four, A, E, I, and O. And then one for irregulars. So, H, K, Q, X, G, R, and Z. So the first task is just to list the letters out into those four categories, and then you're going to tie them to those different furniture items in some way. So, you're going to associate all the letters that start with A, all the consonants that start with A, with each other. And the way that you might do that is, let's say that you assign those to an armchair. You might have a bunch of

words, physical nouns, that start with those letters all together on that armchair. So you have a feather, and you also have a bottle of mustard. So you remember that both F and M have that name the same way. It's just E and then the letter that makes the sound, F-M. And then on another one, you might have a B and a dump truck, and so you have B and D. And this way, if you ever want to remember a letter and what its name is, you can just associate it with the letters surrounding it based on where you've placed it in this little alphabet palace.

On top of that, I would just suggest following the process that we used in episode 333 for memorizing the Greek alphabet in this little alphabet palace. On top of that, I would just suggest following the process that we used in episode 333 for memorizing the Greek alphabet to remember the names along with the sounds and with capital and lowercase symbols. You just have something fall off of the couch and it smashes or something like that

to turn into the lowercase symbol. I hope that helps, Gina, and if you wanna share your mnemonics with me during this process, I'd be happy to put them at masterofmemory.com so that more people can benefit from this as well. And for anyone listening, 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 again soon.