I thought I would drop another quick update around the Korean memory palaces. I had 4 days between lessons, and I tried to consolidate and build as much as I could into my "Thematic Cityscape". It has been going well, and I am remembering the names, although spelling is still an issue. I gave myself a blind test where I sat down with a blank bit of paper and tried to write out each of the memory loci (e.g. buildings) as I could. I managed to spell 2 out of 32 correctly. Not a good showing, however, most of them I knew. After a review of the spelling test against the actual spelling and liberal use of Google Translate to listen to the mechanical voice, I determined a lot of my problem is I'm not able to spell because I'm not actually pronouncing things correctly.
Korean is very phonetic and if you pronounce it right, you should be able to spell it right. So I spent a lot of time walking through the cityscape and practising the pronunciation. I'm trying to remove (or at least reduce) the "transliteration" I'm doing where I am phonically spelling out the word, but in Latin letters. I've also printed out everything in the greyscale, and I'm copying over the words repeatedly to get them correct. Strictly speaking, since my goal is only tourist Korean, this probably isn't a great use of my time. But I'm not going to worry about that.
Today was my lesson, and I've been given some new vocabulary, two of which require new buildings. But interestingly, a couple of them I didn't need a new building because I had already looked up the word because I needed the building to store something else in. Airport and farm were already on the map. But I now need to plop down two new buildings, a Post Office and a Bank.
The majority of the other vocabulary centred around directions. Up, down, right-side, left-side, bottom, front, back, etc.. My teacher described all these words based on a cube which he drew on a blackboard. I will be dumping a large glass cube in the middle of my park, and I'll stand inside and order an arrow to go to the top, right-side, bottom, etc. Bit like Yondu in Guardians of the Galaxy. So here in this example, I don't need a new building or place in the city, I just dump it into the park.
Just to elaborate on the cube thing. Imagine yourself stepping into a glass cube, and it immediately flies into the air. The only way out is to get the flying arrow to touch each plane of the cube, and it will then land and let you go. You start by shouting out (앞) front, and it touches the glass in front of you. You say (뒤) back, and it goes behind you and touches the glass. Likewise, you shout (아래) and it touches the bottom, etc.
I'm trying to add more detail as I do my imaginary walks around my imaginary city. Trees in the park, the newspaper racks in the library (to hold the word for newspaper) and the reference section (to hold the word for dictionary). I don't really remember much about the layout of the British library, so in my head is a kind of mishmash of libraries I have visited over the years. But don't worry, it is very dark, very quiet and has leather chairs and mahogany wood tables and bookshelves.
@LeBaron: You are right about some words like despite and whether, and there are probably going to be a lot of words that I just have to "brute force" them into my head. This method probably isn't going to work for everyone or every word, but if it gets me a good kickoff then I'll be happy.