Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0465: Memorize 200 countries in alphabetical order

Episode Date: December 18, 2015

Benson wants to memorize the names of the countries in alphabetical order. I give him a strategy for storing the countries in a memory palace, using stressed-syllable mnemonics. 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 465. 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. Benson submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Benson says, Hi Timothy, I'm currently trying to remember the list of 197 countries in alphabetical order. So 15 would be Barbados in my system. I'm using a major peg system, basically.

I'm also trying to use the major system well from 1 to 200 as well. It's going at a pretty slow pace. How would you suggest that I combine this with a memory palace or other techniques? So Benson, I personally don't see any practical reason to memorize the number of the country in an alphabetical list. I see that as a pretty arbitrary idea because the fact is if another country is created, you know, this is the list of countries changes all the time if you think about it. And so assigning a number like that to the country doesn't really mean anything. Let's say a new country that starts with an A comes up. Every single one of your numbers will change.

But at the same time, I do like the idea of having a list of all the countries and being able to recall all of them in order just so you don't miss any. It's an interesting way to make sure that you keep all the countries in mind, I suppose. And also, at the same time, using them alphabetically is a nice technique simply for remembering all of the names of the countries because you can store them in a memory palace according to the first letter of the name. So what I would recommend is that you create a memory palace with about 20 locations, 20 to 25 different main stations or different rooms for the different letters that countries start with. Some letters are more important than others for this, as you'll see. And you'll use the stressed syllable for each country's name

to create an object that you're going to store in that place. And the reason for the stressed syllable is that that helps with good pronunciation of the country's name, which is quite difficult in some cases, but it also helps with coming up with your object for each country. You know, the object that you use to store it in that location,

rather than a major peg, you're actually remembering the country's name directly and the country's name also will create an object that you'll just store in the location. And then when you remember that object, another benefit is that you'll remember the entire country's name just by having focused on that one syllable. So that's quite helpful as well. Now, as some examples, let's go to the M room in your palace. This might be the 13th room in your palace. And let's just name all the countries that start with M.

There are actually a ton of these because the letter M is very fashionable as a first letter for a country name. So we have Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, and Myanmar. And I may have mispronounced some of those names, but I did look up the stressed syllables of them, so I'm getting those right. Now, the thing is, all those names are, well, some of them are quite similar, and some of them even have similar stressed syllables, but we'll find a way to make sure that we get them all in order and all spread around the room. So let's see, Macedonia, the word don, that's one of the hardest stressed syllables in the lot. But the first thing in the room,

which let's say I'm going to use the room that I'm in right now, the first thing that you encounter in this room is a footrest. And so I would put a dome on the footrest, maybe a sort of canopy and, or maybe a bone, one or the other. I would just have to experiment to see which works best because that stress syllable is pretty difficult. Dome. It doesn't really lend itself well to many physical objects, but we'll store that in the first place. And it's not too hard to remember Macedonia when you see that, especially if you've said this list a couple of times. The next thing in the room is a couch. And for Madagascar, I would just put a big thing of gasoline on the couch and spilling into the couch so that the couch starts to smell like gas. That's pretty easy. So we have Macedonia, Madagascar. Next, Malawi. I would imagine a law

book and it would be on a clock on the wall next to the couch. So we have Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi. Then Malaysia is on the window, and that would be a bunch of Lay's chips. For the Maldives, we would put a mall or something that represents a shopping mall on the chair that I'm sitting. No, on my microphone, actually. The microphone is the next place. And so we have the Maldives. But then we also have to have something representing a mall on my rolling chair to represent Mali. And you might think that that is a bit odd to have to represent both of those with the same stressed syllable. But since they're

so close to each other, you can just practice saying both of them separately the same stressed syllable, but since they're so close to each other, you can just practice saying both of them separately, and then maybe you'll use your object peg to tie the population of the place to each of those countries eventually at some point, which is what I would focus on for your object mnemonics, by the way. Not the number in the list, but rather the, let's say, the population in terms of millions of how many people live in the country. But anyway, that'll help you distinguish between the two countries and remember which is which. And then you'll continue around the room with the stressed syllables of these different countries, turning the stressed syllables like egg from Montenegro and goal, like a soccer goal from Mongolia. And Mauritania, you'll turn the word retain into something, and Myanmar, that one's kind of hard,

Mozambique, that one's easy, you just use a disembodied bird's beak. But anyway, again, most of these stressed syllables do turn themselves into objects pretty easily, and then those objects will easily turn back into the country's name. So that's the way that I would recommend learning this list and learning the names of the 200 countries in order using a memory palace. Thanks for the question, Benson. And for everyone listening, please check out masterofmemory.com slash mandarin because today is the deadline for getting this Kickstarter project funded. If we're successful in raising $12,000, that will build some momentum and create the impetus for a bunch of courses that we're planning to create in 2016, basically at two or three times the rate that we've created materials in 2015.

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