How to Use a Memory Palace to Boost Your Vocabulary
A Memory Palace is an imaginary construct in your mind that’s based on a real location.
How to Create a Memory Palace In 4 Easy Steps
Step 2: Form a linear path through the floorplan. Do this before you number your stations. Memory Palaces work best when you don't cross your own path or lead yourself into a dead end. Don’t cram every possible station into your first palace. Include the obvious locations like a bathroom, bedroom, living room, kitchen, as well as an entry point.
Step 1: Choose a familiar building and draw a floorplan. This can be your home, a school, church or movie theatre. It can be any building so long as you know it well enough to draw a floor plan.
Step 3: Make a top-down list of those stations in linear order. This step is useful for testing purposes
Step 4: Review your palace: At this point, you should have: (1) a floorplan of a familiar building, (2) a linear path drawn on the floorplan that does not cross itself, (3) designated a starting point and exit point, (4) numbered the stations, (5) written the top-down list, and (6) walked through the Memory Palace (floorplan) several times so you can see or recall each station.
How to Use Your Memory Palace
To encode your information, create images that are large, bright, colorful, weird and filled with intense action. You can stick the images to a station in your Memory Palace and revisit them at any time.
Tip: exaggerate this imagery so that you can retrieve them by drawing on sounds and meaning.
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Paying attention in a special way to target words and phrases.
Encoding the sound and meaning of information using imagery and action so each word or phrase becomes memorable.
Decoding imagery and actions so you can move words and phrases into long-term memory.
a bridging figure
The concept of a bridging figure will help you supercharge your Memory Palace and accelerate your learning. This figure is someone who takes an imaginary journey through your Palace and interacts with your images for each word. Ideally, your bridging figure should be a person you already remember.
Practical Tips for Using Your Memory Palace to Master a Foreign Language
Build a well-constructed Memory Palace using the principles you’ve just learned.
Relax. Memory techniques work best when you’re mentally and physically free from stress.
Memorize a selected list of words, ideally in alphabetic order.
Catalog the words, meanings and mnemonics either by hand on paper or in an Excel file or the equivalent.
Remove yourself from your written record or Excel file and all other materials that might cause you to cheat by looking up the meanings of each word.
Write out the words and meanings based on your memory on a piece of paper. Don’t worry if you miss a word or your associative imagery fails to trigger the sound and meaning of a word on your list. You can fix this later.
Check the list you produced from memory with your record.
Use these words in conversations, write them into a ten-sentence email and keep your eyes and ears open for them as you read and listen to your target language.