I wanted to talk a little about memorisation. I have been doing a lot with "the method of loci" and "dominic method" for remembering things. I've been using this approach, but also using Anki. I've noticed a considerable difference in some of the words I'm trying to remember. However, because I started the method of Loci before the Anki deck, my observations might be skewed.
The method of loci is basically you walk through a building or other route that you know well, and you place images in various locations along the way, and you just walk the journey occasionally to refresh the memory.
학생 - Student (A Uni student standing in front of the house I lived in as a child)
선생님 - Teacher (in the foyer of the entrance, [foyer being a fancy word for coat and shoe storage])
의사 - Doctor in white opening the door into the next room
가수 - Singer - A child's castle singing in the middle of the room. (Helps with sound and translation)
물 - Water spouting from an old radio
맥주 - Beer spout inside a dart board, pouring out beer
군인 - Soldier, Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) dressed in combat fatigues, opening the next door.
So in the images above I also "hear" the sound of the word being said as part of the image. More recently, I have plugged in the new vocabulary into Anki, and I've been using that. So some observations I have had about my own memory are.
I remember better using the method of loci the meaning of words and the sound of the words, but the written form of the word is hazy and vague. With Anki because I'm seeing the written Korean word, and hear the computerized voice I recognize more word forms. The computer generated voice is not as useful as you'd think, and I'm probably better off just sounding out the word myself.
Now, it might be a function of having a head start that the loci method makes recalling those words easier than the ones I see in the anki deck. Or it might be because when I'm using the loci that I'm actually visualizing the object for the most part (other than the singing castle, for example). So in my head I'm seeing a desk, pen, pencil, etc, or the Japanese flag when I visualize 일본 (Japan)
It also helps in I don't need my phone or computer, I don't even need any lights or anything other than my brain. I just have to walk through the journey and if I forget something then I review it later. But normally I remember everything, and it is just sitting in a chair imagining my little journey. Anki, I normally do while walking the dog. I put in some headsets and do the cards and occasionally throw the ball for the dog. All my vocabulary is in the Anki deck, but I stopped doing the loci thing about 75% of the way through my teacher's vocabulary.
But the loci words seem to have "stuck" better than the anki words, and the ones I remembered that way seem to pop into my mind quicker than the anki ones. So for example when my teacher asked me today; "Do you remember how to say, Notebook?" It was easy, because 공책 (notebook) is sitting on the 책상 (desk) beside the 연필 (pencil) in my imagination and I just said the word. Then he asked me; "Do you remember how to say, Movie?" and I could picture a sort of hazy collection of letters beginning with 영 ... But couldn't get 영화.
When I'm required to spell some of the words I have memorized with the loci method, it isn't too difficult to come up with the written word or near too it, because with the image is the sound of the word, so I can sound out each letter in order to spell the word. But with the Anki thing, it is more difficult because although I see the word with each review, and I hear the computer voice, this doesn't seem to be as internalized as the loci words.
I'm taking a short break from lessons during the holidays because there will be too much going on for me to get up at 5:30 AM to have a lesson at 6:00, so I'm going to take all the vocabulary I have been given and complete the journey around my old house and add all the new ones with images and sound. I've also extracted about 50-60 phrases that I want to memorize from my Lonely Planet Phrasebook. So I'm building an imaginary Korean town, and I'm populating it with vocabulary. I've started with a restaurant and on the window outside in a menu.
Then as I move around the restaurant things like "Can I see the menu", "Table for two", then things like, knife, fork, spoon, bowl, chopsticks, plate.
I'll have another buildings for other words, bank, police department, doctor's office, train station, airport and my plan is to stick words and phrases that are likely to turn up in those places into that imaginary building in the imaginary town.
Anybody else used these types of memory techniques? Did they work better or worse than SRS for you?
EDIT: I just hit 128 subscribers on YT. This is pretty significant for a computer guy. Now I want 256 !