Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0398: How to memorize adverbs in an organized memory palace

Episode Date: September 16, 2015

Gina is learning German vocabulary using mnemonics, but as a native Spanish speaker, she is having some trouble remembering adverbs. I suggest an approach for organizing these adverbs by specific categories in a memory palace. 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 […]

Master of Memory 398. 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 wrote in an email, I've started teaching myself German this March. I took the placement test this May and placed in the 2003 level, which is the third semester. I've been happy

with my progress. I was able to memorize the cases in less than 30 minutes using mnemonic aid. However, I'm having trouble memorizing adverbs. Every word is new, and since it's not a romance language, I have very little to grab hold on. Any suggestions on how I could tackle the adverbs?" So Gina, what I would do with the adverbs is very much what we've done with the Spanish adverbs in the Spanish at one month.com course, Accelerated Spanish. Although they will be different for German, as you say, all the words are different. Still, you can organize them in a memory palace into what I would say are about five different categories. So first of all, we have booleans, which are basically yes,

no, and everything in between. So in Spanish, your native language, we have si, no, casi, which is almost, totalmente, probablemente, siquiera, and all of those. So everything like that. Another palace you would use would be for adverbs related to degree. So we have muy, we have menos, we have mas for more, we have tan for so, and so those will all be in one place because they indicate the degree that something is happening or that something is a certain way. The third category would be time adverbs. So we have, for example, ya, ahora, después, antes, aún, nunca, and all of those. The fourth category would be location, where you would store adverbs like aquí, ahí, afuera, atrás, and so on. The fifth location would be manner.

So this is much more broad, but it's how something is done. For example, it can be done well or poorly, bien or mal, rápidamente, así, and all of those. And what you're going to do with these five categories is, again, you'll create a different memory palace for each one, and then organize the palace such that it makes sense. For example, we have a row of degree adverbs in the Spanish course with the images located in this order. Menos is first, then tan, because that could be a little more, then muy, then mas, and then at the extreme right, demasiado. So you can see that those are going from least to most as far as degree is concerned.

That way our students can see visually how to keep the order straight and how to know which one to use for things that mean less or more. Our time adverbs are organized similarly with ahora and ya in the middle, antes in front of something for before, después behind something for afterwards, nunca hidden somewhere, siempre wrapping around everything, and todavía stretching across different things, stretching

across different times to indicate that something hasn't changed for yet or still. And as an example, in that case, it's a long loaf of bread shaped like a V. So you can see how the V as the stressed syllable of todavía is both a trigger for the word and an illustration of the fact that todavía means still or yet, because between two different times, nothing has changed. And that kind of leads me to how you're going to create your mnemonics themselves. You'll create an image of some sort, some sort of physical object, based on what the stressed syllable of the word sounds like. So in this case, since it was a bread stand, we chose a piece of bread that was shaped like a V, basically a broken baguette, because todavía has the stressed syllable V.

And so you just want to take the stressed syllable of each word in German and turn that into some sort of object that you can place in that memory palace. And you just place them in that memory palace in the order that I suggested. I'd love to hear how this goes for you, Gina. I'm interested in learning German sometime in the future myself. 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. Thank you.