MAGIC MEMORY

So I'm skimming a book called Ideogram: Chinese characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning ... it's a (semi-)academic text despite the wonky cover. The author spends most of the book ripping up some predictable orientalism and shoddy mystico-academicism. The tone is pretty playful but sharp. The guy knows his stuff pretty well but it's hard to take a book with this cover seriously.

In any case, there's one chapter about Harry Lorayne's method of memorization and how it can be applied to learning kanji. Lorayne was a parlor magician of sorts who could recall a lot of names.

His methods are:

1) Linking (visual)- make absurd associations in order to remember a pairing. An example, for the character for 'horse,' the author describes it as an exasperated face with a hand covering it 9or something like that). The association is supposed to be ridiculous & therefore memorable

2) Pegs (auditory) - This is a phonemic mnemonic schema for remembering numbers/lists. You can represent multiple digit numbers by making up words using the given consonants.

1. /t,d/
2. /n/
3. /m/
4. /r/
5. /l/
6. /sh, ch, s, j/
7. /k,g/
8. /f,v/
9. /p,b/
0. /s,z/

3) substitute words - Every Good Boy Does Fine, puns, etc.


Meh.