Does action/object work?

[oneshot]

So right now, I spend most of my time trying to come up with words for the letter pairs on the fly. I know many people create a list of all the letter pairs and have one word for each (like 552 or something right?)
But I was thinking can’t I just have an action and a person for each letter and always put the action first?
For example if E is “electric” for the action and “elephant” for the person, and F would have “flying” for the action and “frog” for the person, then the letter pair EF would be an electric frog and the letter pair FE would be a flying elephant.
Does that work? I created about half the list in like 5 minutes instead of trying to come up with 552 individual words and memorizing them.
I guess I’ll just try it, but does anyone do it like that?

 

[Keroma12]

That definitely works, but it's inefficient. It's basically one thing per letter, instead of per letter pair, and takes longer to mentally 'say' in your head. If you do lots of practice at once, or do multi, then you'll start getting the same actions and people coming up a lot, which can cause recall errors.

So it depends on how fast you are/want to be and how much you practice I'd say. If it makes it more fun or easier to practice, and you don't plan on getting particularly fast, then it could be great.

 

[qwr]

I would think there are a lot more nouns than verbs, maybe I'm wrong

 

[oneshot]

I probably should have put some qualifiers. I am really slow both in memo and execution and don’t have a desire to be really fast. I’m old and don’t turn fast, so I think working on lowering my memo time is the way to go. Maybe when life calms down, I’ll put some effort into learning 3 style or whatever.
And I’m mainly interested in 4BLD and MBLD because it’s more substantial if that makes sense
But to your point, I had thought about this a little but never asked anyone to clarify. You say how it’s one word per letter and it would be more efficient to have one word per pair, but it seems to me that the execution must be the same whether it’s one word or two
For example if for TS, I had Tiger Singing and you had ToaSt, when we both get to the picture, in my head I would think “do the T alg” then as I’m finishing that I would think “now do the S alg”. And I’m assuming when you got to the picture of a piece of toast, you would have to separate the T and the S and do each alg separately. You don’t have a TS alg (and an alg for each letter pair). Or am I’m missing something?
What goes on in your head when you get to the letter pair?

 

[oneshot]

I would think there are a lot more nouns than verbs, maybe I'm wrong

I would only need one noun and one verb for each letter. So as long as you can come up with one action/verb for the 25 letters it should work.

 

[Mike Hughey]

The advantage of letter pairs is that you are able to encapsulate two pieces with a single image. A few very ambitious people have actually gone to a person-action-object memorization scheme. This means they have memorized 500+ letter pairs for all three categories: a person, an action, and an object - so a total of 1500+ letter pair words. By doing this, a single image of a person performing an action on an object can hold 6 pieces. And the other nice thing is that the order of this interaction is enforced because it is always in the order person-action-object. But it takes a great deal of work to come up with non-overlapping words for all the persons, all the actions, and all the objects, so it's a really big investment to learn this. I would love to try it someday, but I will need to wait until I have a lot more free time than I do these days.

I can see where you might think "Tiger Singing" is as easy to memorize as "ToaSt". And if you're just talking about that single image, you're right. But once you start stringing them together, you are generally trying to put together some sort of picture that holds several of these images. So if I needed to memorize TSPEBD, I would imagine a slice of ToaSt being PEeled (like a potato, with a peeler) on a BeD. But you would have to memorize something like a Tiger Singing to a Potato that has been Electrified when a Butterfly that is Drifting lands on his nose. It's a lot more elaborate, and will reuse those words often from solve to solve (the thing that Keroma12 was referring to), and also it takes longer to think through when refreshing memory.

Also, while I'm sure you're currently just targeting single pieces, if you do continue with this, eventually you will in fact be moving to having separate "algorithms" for each letter pair. Intuitive 3-style really isn't all that difficult, and you don't actually have to memorize the algorithms to be able to use it - you merely have to be able to see how to do them in your head. With not too much practice, you can get where you are able to see them pretty close to immediately. Proper 3-style with optimized speed algorithms takes tons of practice and will probably never be practical for old slow people like you and me , but 3-style with simple commutators isn't that hard to learn to do without specifically memorizing every single one. For edges, you can actually progress from M2 to pair commutators by applying a few simple optimizations that work for many of the cases and are very similar to the original M2 algorithms you learned before.

As for old and slow, I just turned 60 and I'm still able to do kind of okay with BLD. Like you, I prefer bigger BLD. And Mats Bergsten is still on here and is 12 years older than me, and yet is about the same speed as I am at BLD. So take heart, you can make more progress than you think - being old is not a barrier.

 

[oneshot]

I can see where you might think "Tiger Singing" is as easy to memorize as "ToaSt". And if you're just talking about that single image, you're right. But once you start stringing them together, you are generally trying to put together some sort of picture that holds several of these images. So if I needed to memorize TSPEBD, I would imagine a slice of ToaSt being PEeled (like a potato, with a peeler) on a BeD. But you would have to memorize something like a Tiger Singing to a Potato that has been Electrified when a Butterfly that is Drifting lands on his nose. It's a lot more elaborate, and will reuse those words often from solve to solve (the thing that Keroma12 was referring to), and also it takes longer to think through when refreshing memory.

Ok. So I do it differently. Maybe that’s why my journey has so many locations. I put one image (letter pair) in each location. I don’t have the images “interacting with each other. For your example of TSPEBD example I would put a Tiger Singing on my dresser, then a Puking Elephant on my bed, then a Bobcat Dying on my nightstand.
I’ll have to try putting them together.
Thanks for the reply

 

[abunickabhi]

So right now, I spend most of my time trying to come up with words for the letter pairs on the fly. I know many people create a list of all the letter pairs and have one word for each (like 552 or something right?)
But I was thinking can’t I just have an action and a person for each letter and always put the action first?
For example if E is “electric” for the action and “elephant” for the person, and F would have “flying” for the action and “frog” for the person, then the letter pair EF would be an electric frog and the letter pair FE would be a flying elephant.
Does that work? I created about half the list in like 5 minutes instead of trying to come up with 552 individual words and memorizing them.
I guess I’ll just try it, but does anyone do it like that?

I think this type of encoding is inefficient. Each letter pair should be a word or a simple image. Also action and object should not be ordered. It can be in any sequence.

 

[Keroma12]

As Mike said, the inefficiency is more in memorization than in execution. But if you do 3-style, then you would likely just go from toast to the corresponding alg without 'decoding' it into 2 letters - but that's not so applicable for OP or if you're not trying to be fast.

I would highly recommend having the pieces of your memo interact with each other. It makes it so much more memorable, and if you do forgot something then you'll have some additional context to try and deduce it.

I use the PAO system that Mike mentioned (3 full letter-pair sets), and it took about 3 years to be fully comfortable. I created the lists and learnt them faster than that, but I had recall issues for a long time after that which have only disappeared this year. So I can't say I'd recommend it unless you're very dedicated haha.

 

[GenTheSnail]

I use a pretty similar memorization system, but mine is adjective-object. While I do follow the speffz order, I don't use the alphabet, and instead use abcd paired with the face location (Ua Ub Uc Ud, La Lb Lc Ld, etc). This made it really easy to come up with all of my words since I don't have contrasting things like s/c/k/q, and I didn't have to touch j/q/x. I have an object and an adjective for every pair, and then mash them together- UrBan LiD. It's definitely inefficient with regards to memo and recall since I have to "say" basically twice as much when I'm reviewing.

I wouldn't actively recommend it, but if your only goal is to learn BLD then it definitely works. It kinda limits your way forward if you get hooked and want to pursue BLD more seriously though.

I also pair each of my characters, so I'll have an UrBan LiD and a RaCist DAgger sitting on a window sill (4 pieces total), and then two other characters on my bed and so on. I often encode an action, so I'll have my urban lid doing a drive by shooting at the racist dagger, who is spewing slurs. There's not a great way to have clear order, but I find action/reaction to be reasonably consistent. I'm generally able to fit two cubes into each room like this.

My 3bld pb is about 2:30 (with M2/OP), and my MBLD is 5/5 in 45:02. I've gotten very close with 4/5BLD (off by 2 centers and 3 centers respectively) but never managed a success. I haven't really touched the BLD events since 2017, though I'd really like to get down to 1:30 for 3BLD. I don't anticipate finding any serious issues with my memo system for that speed, but I imagine pushing past 45-30 seconds would prove much more difficult when compared with someone with a more standard memo scheme.