Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0549: Reprise: Is a memory palace ALWAYS the right solution?

Episode Date: April 14, 2016

Reprise: Is a memory palace ALWAYS the right solution? 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.

Hey guys, this is Timothy, and I'm publishing a book. Now, this may not be new news to all of you, but I bring it up because it's temporarily changing some things here on the show. We're going to be running a series of reprise episodes for the next few weeks due to my need to focus exclusively on this writing project. The book is going to cover absolutely everything about language hacking that I've learned from years of working directly with fluency coaching students and native speaking coaches to see what truly works and gets amazing results. It's going to be a high-end book with the hardcover copy priced at around $40, and that's if I can keep it as short as I'd like to keep it.

But as podcast listeners, you can actually get a free digital copy of the book if you sign up early. Just go to Spanishin1month.com, and you'll be on the early bird list to get access to the book the day that it's released. Meanwhile, for now, enjoy this rerun of one of my favorite episodes from the last few months. 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. Natalie submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Natalie says, I'm a college student and struggle on learning my accounting course, and it's quite hard for me to remember the format and terms.

I heard about the method of Loki and mnemonics, but I don't really know how to relate these methods. So what I would do, Natalie, is actually question whether the tactics that you're hearing about are necessarily applicable to your situation. The method of Loki is the memory palace method. Those are just basically two synonyms for the same thing. But really, a memory palace is useful if you're storing information in a particular place so that you can always go to that place in your mind and find it there. I find memory

palaces particularly helpful if you want to store information in areas where they're organized with other similar things. Like when we teach languages, we teach people to place all of their words of particular functions, like pronouns, object pronouns, dative pronouns, etc., in scenes that belong to other words of the same function. But I don't know if that's necessarily the best solution in your case. In your case, generally, the trigger, as you say, is probably going to be these terms that you don't know. So the goal is that when you come across a term, you should remember what it means. What I would actually suggest that you start with is not

building a memory palace, but doing what I suggested in the previous episode and going to the back of your textbook, if you have a textbook, and just searching for the terms that you don't know in the index. Find the ones that are referenced the most times throughout the book and make sure to learn those really well, ignoring all the terms that you don't know but aren't used very much. Start with the ones that you don't know that are used throughout the whole book. If you don't have a textbook, you can maybe take a web page or something like that on your particular subject and search for any term that you've come across that you don't know. And whichever has the highest count of words you don't know, you'll want to learn those first. Another thing you can do is, before going to your textbooks for your study, you might just go online and do some general research

into what's called the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and just do some very high-level research on that. So I would actually suggest starting with the Wikipedia page for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, especially under the Basic Concept concepts part of that page, just to get sort of a, you know, take a step back and get a fresh perspective on accounting in general. And between that and learning all these terms that I suggested you look up for yourself, I think you'll be in much better shape for your course. Now, listeners have asked about how they

can support Master of Memory and keep this show free for the world, particularly if you don't have a lot of time or any money of you, is very easy, and will only take a few seconds, and it requires nothing but your smartphone in your hand right now. So listen, if you've enjoyed listening to this show and you have a smartphone right now with an internet connection, there's no excuse for you not to do this. Here's how you can give this show immense support without even having to type more than two words in your phone. So guys, this is really easy. You'll be done before this episode even ends. So here's step one. If your phone's between your fingers, in your podcast app, go to the search to search the podcast store and type the word accelerated, A-C-C-E-L-E-R-A-T-E-D, and then the word Spanish. So have you done that? So you've searched for accelerated Spanish. Now step two, here's the surprise. Click on the new show, not the old one that has a big ugly red word across the artwork,

but the fresh new one. And then step three, just hit the subscribe button and you're done. That's it. By subscribing to the all new freshly released Spanish podcast, you're helping support Master of Memory in more enormous ways than you might imagine. Meanwhile, 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.