Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0445: Mnemonic examples or custom mnemonics: Which should I start with?

Episode Date: November 20, 2015

Kelly is learning Spanish with mnemonics (using Accelerated Spanish), and she’s also working on the skill of creating her own mnemonics. But she finds it overwhelming to do both things at once. Which skill should she focus on first? What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, […]

Master of Memory 445 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. Kelly wrote a question in an email saying, I'm finding that trying to learn creative imaging techniques simultaneously with studying Spanish vocab is overwhelming. Should I ease off with language acquisition until I have more facility with low-key building or until I have a PAO anchored or both? So Kelly, I think that this is in some ways a productivity question

rather than a memorization question. And what I'd like to say is I believe very strongly in setting very concrete and time-oriented goals. That's the best way to improve in pretty much any area. So it sounds like you're trying to do multiple things at once. You're trying to work on learning Spanish with the Spanish course at Spanishin1months.com. You're trying to work on your imaging techniques and creating memory palaces. But what I really recommend is not just learning things in general, although you can kind of learn the foundations to understand this show at masterofmemory.com slash start if you just want to get into general mnemonics. But

I think that beyond the basics, you should really focus on having a particular learning project and a particular outcome that you want from that learning project. So if you're interested in learning Spanish, go ahead and keep using the free course, and you can make that a timed goal. You might have three months, six months, whatever it is, and just get through that and do whatever you can with that and stick to that. Don't worry about anything else. What's going to happen is you're going to be improving with your imagery techniques. You're going to be improving with various learning skills, and really learning a language is a great way just to improve your learning in general

because there are so many aspects to it and it just constantly challenges you and keeps you sharp. Once you're done with that project, then choose some other topic that you really want to be good at, whether that's learning history, which is something I'm really interested in right now, or whether it's another language, or whether it's a particular exam or something like that that you want to work on. So my recommendation for you, Kelly, is not to try to do everything at once, but to set maybe three-month goals. I'm a big fan of three-month goals and have a particular outcome that you want at the end of those three months, and then everything that you learn should be toward that one goal. For example, if you decide to get really serious about Spanish, then plan a trip to Mexico or to Argentina or

something like that. It's not as expensive as you might think, but just plan to spend some time in a Spanish-speaking country at the end of your goal. That makes it really concrete that you need to focus on the language and get to a specific level that you want to get to by the time you make that trip. But again, the bottom line is just focus on one thing at a time, have a specific outcome in mind, and you will be improving in your learning abilities and you'll be able to apply that to the next project that you get to whenever you're done with the first one. Now, speaking of language learning, if you want to support Master of Memory, please go to masterofmemory.com slash vote

to vote for our Mandarin project on Kickstarter. You can do it with any amount of money, whether you're serious about learning Mandarin yourself or not, but it is the best way at present to support the show and show people that Master of Memory is creating serious language projects. If we get this funded by December 18, I'm going to do a one-month language challenge in February with basically no knowledge of Mandarin before the month starts

and then trying to achieve whatever level of fluency I can in one month using basically every language learning technique that I talk about in these podcasts. This is going to be a huge groundbreaking project for Master of Memory and really for the world of language learning and accelerated learning in general, but it all depends on getting a very ambitious goal funded by December 18. So please go to masterofmemory.com slash vote just to check out what we're doing, what the challenge looks like, and maybe even to see if you would be interested in joining me for the challenge or for learning Mandarin afterwards.

Again, that's masterofmemory.com vote. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com question, and I'll talk to you again soon.