Before I get to my question, let me say I’ve read “Moonwalking with Einstein” and a few other memory books so I’m not ignorant to the benefits of mneuomonics and memory palaces.
However… in my experience they’re only beneficial for remembering characters. I find the SRS and Spaced Recall system of memrise works amazingly well for remembering the pinyin and meaning.
I feel like it’s easier just to remember the pronunciation and meaning and let the SRS system batter it into my memory directly. I also feel like the memory palace or Mems method is best suited for cramming stuff into short term memory but will (to be blunt) fill your head with too much crap for long-term memorising.
I agree with this. Even for characters, I don’t really see the benefit. Sure, they can be helpful for learning the radicals, but beyond that characters are fairly mnemonic in and of themselves. I don’t really see the benefit in trying to come up with and/or remember another layer of symbolic meaning in addition to the one that can be glanced by the characters.
You mention battering pronunciation and meaning into your memory directly, which I’m inclined to agree with. Surely, when it comes to languages fluency is one of the most important parts which requires your knowledge of it to be in your unconscious/implicit memory. In contrast, aren’t mnemonics used for active recall?
That said, I am not an advanced learner. I also never found mnemonics helpful in school - my short term emmory was good enough for any tests and my long-term memory good enough to be able to quickly find details using books/internet. My intuitive understanding is therefore that mnemonics are mostly helpful if you need to learn something fairly long and be able to recite it precisely in the future. Unless you’re an actor or a spiritual leader, I don’t really see how that translates into being useful in the real world.
I echo OP’s call for more opinions. It would be good to hear from people who have used mems successfully, and how you go from thinking about the mem to accessing your vocabulary directly when speaking/listening.
not exactly true… I used to have the same standpoint at the beginning (of learning Chinese) few mems, indeed, are worth remembering…
but the point is, after some while around, is that you forget the mem and remember the items - only if the mem was indeed great… at least this happened to me
I agree, the only point where a mem may be helpful for me is when I am trying to remember an item for the first time. Normally I don’t use mems when I am reviewing.
On the other hand, people often use the mem field for providing additional information on the item, some grammar explanation, example phrases etc. And this is what I am often very grateful for.
I’ve never found mnemonics useful. It is just having to memorize more then you need to memorize.
Mems don’t really work for me either. Especially the ones that are already on here. Sometimes I marvel at the extra mental acrobatics people go through to remember a simple word. I would rather just remember the word.
I don’t use mnemonics. For European languages, or perhaps languages with an alphabet, I don’t need to as I will just remember the word after a few exposures. With Chinese I need more exposures. Some words though I just can’t get into my mind, perhaps because the dictionary definition is not good (too many disparate definitions, usually), for those words I really should be using a mem.
It depends… I use mems only Chinese or Malay/Indonesian, I would never look for a mem for Italian. mMy memrise is set not to show mems, only when I have big problems I click “help me to remember” (Recently an user made some good mems in my Malay course)
However, I did “like” mems for other languages.
As said, a good mem does not ask you to remember the “path” (as Ben Whately wrongly seemed to believe) - it is about the “click”, “Ahaaaa” that certain mems give… like this one, for ex, a mem that many people like (the pronounciation for “spoon” is “shao2”)… I had to look through my “liked” mems, I did not remember the mem anymore, but i’ll never forget “shao2”
well, of course, a mem showing a Doge di Venezia for “gedogen” - to allow in Dutch will not have many fans - not to many people seem to know nowaday that a “Doge” was, probably many think about dogs or something
Haven’t used a mem on more than .1% of my cards. That being said… I still have some cards I have seen 20, 50, even 75 time and I just keep forgetting it. I haven’t bothered doing a cost-benefit analysis. But, I would say if you can’t memorize a word in a language…just forget about it until you see it in context. I keep a physical list of these words. Then take a mental note of that word when you see it in authentic content and how it is used and map that to your native language. This method has been much more relaxing for me… when I sometimes get caught up in why can I never remember the difference between two similar words I’ve learned from flashcards. Or how I would apply them.
well, unless one is using only memrise to learn Chinese (which simply cannot be), this is a point with no point… what this suppose to mean? that I will encounter a word that I know that I don’t know when on memrise?
for short, my tow cents: Yes, something mems are worth "bothering. “Bother” checking out the mems, when you have difficulties remembering an item. Who knows, you might find a gem. You may save (a lot of) time and energy by doing this.
my mems are artistic and full on info… not funny and shit… i use images that i can remember and i know exacly what and when … i used to think that they are shit until i started to use and it helped me so much… plus if i forget something i know exacly where to go and look…
In my case, they help me quite a lot. Note that my mems do not include any mental imagery as I am not able to see images in my head, rather they are formed by stories made of words. I recently went back to some old lists of Chinese vocabulary, and it those stories that came back quickest when deconstructing the characters part by part trying to recall the meaning of the whole.
Yet, I agree that at some point, the simple cramming and repetition takes the upper-hand in a cost-benefit analysis and does a pretty good job at remembering my items. Provided one has regular interaction with the language or continues repeating the vocabulary lists over and over.
Same thing for Korean, but to a lesser extend in for Spanish.
Anyhow, I’ve decided to drastically reduce my usage of Memrise as it became too much of an obsession and distracted me from to me more useful techniques. The ones that emphasize context over simple flash-card repetition. Still, those long memrise session render it much easier now to use those other techniques, so no effort lost there.
I digress.
Long story short, mems are useful for me when it comes to remember words that I do not encounter on a daily base.
Yes I agree with you, my plan is to use memrise to learn about 1000 words and then use sentence mining after that to expand vocabulary, learn grammar and build listening skills.
If you are a native English speaker, you may have once learned “I before e, except after c…” That may still be useful.
Or maybe in 1st grade you were taught to write the word “bed” as a reminder of which direction b and d face (the word bed looks like a bed with a headboard and footboard). That tool, or something similar, may have been useful for a few days.
Our learning throughout life is filed with little tricks or supports.
If you’re into sentence mining, check out Language with Texts here, it is an open source alternative to LingQ. I discovered it a while ago and I find it pretty amazing.
My only point was that if I struggle to memorize the definition for a word on memrise, i don’t worry about it. I will sometimes end up ignoring the word on memrise, but writing it down in my notebook. When I read something, I might come across one of these words and usually it makes a lot more sense what the meaning is.
I think good mems are great! If the mem is good it creates a bridge in my mind from the native word to the target language word. I’ll have near prefect reviews immediately. Then as mentioned prior as time goes by I forget all about the mem and I just know that’s what the word means. I will say if a mem doesn’t draw that bridge between both it’s rather pointless and I do see this quite often.
In addition, how much easier it is to learn characters with using the radicals to tell a story or some how bridge that gap! Those are mems in and of themselves.
I haven’t made use of mems either, though I’m sure they can be beneficial when done right. With the spoon example, it’s funny and memorable but it’ll associate “shao2” with the word “spoon”, but not with the character 勺. In the past I’ve made some attempts at creating them (by request) and tried provocative imagery, super-imposing characters on images, or deconstructing characters but none really worked.
Does anyone have good pointers for mem creation in Chinese character learning courses?
hmm… not really… i just use yellowbride to read a lot, wikitionary and also wordsense.eu and sometimes even yabla… i do my research on all of them and i write down in mems the important info… i love to see how they were formed … helpes me also wit japanese and even with korean a little… i for example have a problem with brigh light that is why i use dark neon images for mems and then the text is easier to read for me… i am sure many would find my mems to much but for my eyes they are exacly what i need… i use mems now as if i was in college and i would take notes in classes … for me it is working really well… sometimes i go back to read some of them… here is a glimpse of my mems https://www.memrise.com/user/murganmori/?page=2
