Memory Methods

[DeeDubb]

Yes, as I usually have a choice of two or three words for each pair that I have accumulated from memorizing a lot. I still also try to make things up on the spot and try new words because sometimes they're effective and I can use them later on.

Using famous people (or friends) as letter pairs is useful because they usually have some sort of verb associated with them. DB is James Bond (like the Aston Martin DB9) so DB is either him or the verb to spy. But because I occasionally have to use audio or construct longer sentences it can also mean to dab something with something or it is "DuB" like dub step. I would say that this is possible to do with 80% of all my letter pairs.

For instance, SD is the word sad or Sid the Sloth (from Ice Age) while BR is brown or bruise, which can alternate between the noun form of bruise and to bruise something.

I usually make up filler words on the spot like beautiful for EU to make a sentence flow more easily too.

Also, faffing is slang to waste time but AF is also a model (like Abercrombie and Fitch) and the verb to model.

Oh, very interesting... Right now, my memo sheet is pretty much ONLY names of celebrities and people I know. None of these have any flexibility for changing parts of speech. I'm trying to use a room, and I just have each person fill a different role in the room. So, it will be someone's birthday party, and the first pair is the person whose birthday it is. Second pair is his friend throwing him the party, third is someone lurking in the corner, 4th 5th and 6th if necessary are people on the couch. If I have parody the last person is holding an object that starts with whatever letter the last single letter is, and that's the edges. Corners is the bathroom at the party. First target is on the toilet, second is in the shower, third and beyond are in the hot tub... This way I don't really need verbs, because I have a story and I'm just filling it with people, but I think I would memo a lot less if I scrapped the whole thing and went to a system with more flexibility.

 

[Nicck]

The music video for DJ Shadow's "Scale It Back" is the mem for a deck of cards by Ben Pridmore (3rd in speedcards internationally)

Video:

Spoiler

 

[Berd]

I thought I would leave my variant of Roman rooms here, exposed to constructive criticism. I play Halo: Reach a lot. 2+ hours daily for the last 2 hours so I tend to know the maps in this game. So instead of using rooms in my house I use distinct ares of maps. These is better because there are an infinite amount of rooms compared to the number in my house so I can attemped big bld / multi bld knowing that I have enough "rooms". If anyone could point out major floors or link to some other similar methods that would be great, Thanks!

 

[SirWaffle]

So, an idea for memoing multi bld my brother actually thought of and that I hadn't even thought of once (stating this now I think it is a variation of journey method but is something to certainly look into) Basically, instead of using one room from a movie/book, you take a book or book series and have the characters, places and objects as a cube's memo, so for example, I want to memo a cube using the Harry Potter series, (note, not any room imparticular each time) HC AW LI GV SJ NG, BH GQ, TJI. So I'd picture the Hufflepuff common room, with Arthur Weasly holding a lighter and Ginirva (Ginny) studying jar a of newt guts. (now to the quidditch pitch) a bludger hitting Goyle making him quit and storm off and Tonks joins in (making a big enterance so I'd picture fireworks or something to make it standout). This is just a very basic example but the point is you use one book per cube and use as much as possible from the book. For some people this might work well if they are very avid readers and know a lot about a book series. I am actually going to be trying it myself using books I know well. (books I'd use if anyone cares , Harry Potter, Ender's Game, Hunger Games, and Percy Jackson)

 

[slinky773]

So, an idea for memoing multi bld my brother actually thought of and that I hadn't even thought of once (stating this now I think it is a variation of journey method but is something to certainly look into) Basically, instead of using one room from a movie/book, you take a book or book series and have the characters, places and objects as a cube's memo, so for example, I want to memo a cube using the Harry Potter series, (note, not any room imparticular each time) HC AW LI GV SJ NG, BH GQ, TJI. So I'd picture the Hufflepuff common room, with Arthur Weasly holding a lighter and Ginirva (Ginny) studying jar a of newt guts. (now to the quidditch pitch) a bludger hitting Goyle making him quit and storm off and Tonks joins in (making a big enterance so I'd picture fireworks or something to make it standout). This is just a very basic example but the point is you use one book per cube and use as much as possible from the book. For some people this might work well if they are very avid readers and know a lot about a book series. I am actually going to be trying it myself using books I know well. (books I'd use if anyone cares , Harry Potter, Ender's Game, Hunger Games, and Percy Jackson)

Who's up for using Steven King books?

 

[Ollie]

Marcell used to do this with themes. I don't know the specifics, but he used to do a theme for each of his 3 solves AFAIK

 

[A Leman]

Hi Waffle, It's a good idea. The main problem would be that it would take too much time to be coming up with letter pairs on the spot if and you don't seem to have an exact system for finding out what letter pair a word is. It would also put a large limit of the # of possible words. There is another method called the peg method that is not heard about much from cubers. Chester Lian used it in his MBLD WR. The idea would be to use a list of characters/ objects from a show like harry potter and link your letter pairs to them instead of using locations. You could also make the list in order of when characters are introduced. I haven't had much luck with it but others have.

From what I've read, Marcel's themes have more to do with the associations than the actual letter pairs. He'd make a memo sexual, violent or bizarre. Of course, the themes lend themselves to different vocabularies, but that is a more passive than conscious change.

I want to follow up on my attempt to use my PA letter pair list. I know all of the pairs well and I have tried to follow the pattern, but I always end up deviating from using PA during memo's. It seems like I just can't make the switch since all of my time doing BLD has made it easy to come up with things on the spot and my intuition for not swapping the order is very good. I also use adjective sometimes and it's too reflexive of a habit to change those pairs. I do think it was helpful to have a list of person's though and it has improved the overall quality of my images since it is still part of my mnemonic vocabulary.

On another note, I have been getting a lot more dodges where I can make a 2 syllable image of 4 letters like GoLDucK, RoSeWooD, etc.

 

[Caddyswag]

I use letter pairs for corners and audio for edges, I cant seem to make up good letter pairs that make a strong image, can anyone give me a list, or some tips??

 

[Hssandwich]

Llama llama duck

 

[penguinz7]

https://www.speedsolving.com/wiki/index.php/List_of_letter_pairs

 

[Berkmann18]

Harris, yes Tyson use numbers for the memo because as he said, he is good at memorizing numbers

 

[Chog]

I don't know if anyone's mentioned this particular method yet but what's really helping me right now is naming one face of stickers with nouns, another with verbs, another with adjectives, one with weather conditions, etc. It's making it very easy to create memorable sentences and stories.

I don't base them off letter pairs or color pairs or anything like that either, just assigned a word to a location on a face. This was easier for me than trying to come up with things that matched letter pairs or color pairs and whatnot.

 

[kamilprzyb]

I created a system by naming every situation of 2 stickers in this way:
Every pair wchich first sticker is UB is a colour (so I have 20 colours)
UL - characters from video games, LD - items from video games etc.
And in my opinion the best images are people (more than 50% of my images) and items.
Adjectives are quite ok, but they need to be very characteristical and there can't be too many of them. The same with verbs
In general More characteristical images = better memo
I discovered that the best images are my teachers from the past, characters from cartoons that I watched as a kid and famous people (Vladimir Putin for example)

That's my experience with memory system, I hope that it will somehow help you

 

[DELToS]

I like the roman rooms method

 

[Hari]

I created a system by naming every situation of 2 stickers in this way:
Every pair wchich first sticker is UB is a colour (so I have 20 colours)
UL - characters from video games, LD - items from video games etc.
And in my opinion the best images are people (more than 50% of my images) and items.
Adjectives are quite ok, but they need to be very characteristical and there can't be too many of them. The same with verbs
In general More characteristical images = better memo
I discovered that the best images are my teachers from the past, characters from cartoons that I watched as a kid and famous people (Vladimir Putin for example)

That's my experience with memory system, I hope that it will somehow help you

How long did it take you to develop this system? I want to do something similar but with letter pairs to speed up my MBLD memo.

 

[kamilprzyb]

I had few long breaks while making the system + I was very lazy so it took me few months.
Maskow said that it's at least one week of hard work. But it's worth it.
It takes a lot of time because it's over 400 images, and you need to choose the best images.
I have 22 groups of 20 images + images for twists + images for 1 last target(when there's a parity)
Of course you can do it with lettet pairs, the idea is just to have always the same image for a pair
But keep in mind to use mostly people and items in your system, it will be easier to connect them with other images. Adjectives and verbs I use very characteristical and easy to imagine ones like juggling or fat.

 

[MattMcConaha]

I'm fearing the big 500 right now. I haven't done BLD in a while, but I always used to just assign each edge piece as its location on the cube using conventional cube notation. So L in Speffz would be FD and V would be DF. But then you end up using letter pairs for just one piece instead of for two pieces. You might as well just use Speffz and not use letter pairs.
So I guess now I have to start learning Speffz notation.

 

[Chrizzl]

Yesterday I had my first succes with 3x3 blindfolded, and so far I have not been able to do it again. I used Speffz like all of you guys seem to do. With Speffz I find it hard to create words because some letter pairs are annoying. Right now I am thinking about recalling the stickers by linking them to objects/persons.
Why is Speffz so powerful/ widely used? Why wouldn't my proposal work just as well?

 

[tseitsei]

Yesterday I had my first succes with 3x3 blindfolded, and so far I have not been able to do it again. I used Speffz like all of you guys seem to do. With Speffz I find it hard to create words because some letter pairs are annoying. Right now I am thinking about recalling the stickers by linking them to objects/persons.
Why is Speffz so powerful/ widely used? Why wouldn't my proposal work just as well?

If you have person and action for every possible combination of 2 consecutive target then I think that would work just as well.
Because you could memorize ABCD like "person A doing action B and person C doing action D"

The reason "Speffz" (or memoing with letter pairs) is so common is that it is so easy to get in to. You can just make up words on the fly and don't need to prememorize a list of four hundred and something persons and actions before you can use it (like you would have to do if you use the method you described).

You could just make it so that one person/action means only 1 target for you but then you would have to memorize twice as much info as in speffz since in speffz you code 2 targets in a single word.

I would advice you to continue using letter pairs and prememorize good words/images for the letter pairs you find difficult. It doesnt even have to be directly related to those letters as long as you remember what targets it corresponds to. For example I use SuperMan for XM and also some other superheroes for X since X is a difficult letter.

TLDR;
Your suggestion works just as well but it takes a lot of prememorizing before you can really use it.

 

[Chrizzl]

If you have person and action for every possible combination of 2 consecutive target then I think that would work just as well.
Because you could memorize ABCD like "person A doing action B and person C doing action D"

The reason "Speffz" (or memoing with letter pairs) is so common is that it is so easy to get in to. You can just make up words on the fly and don't need to prememorize a list of four hundred and something persons and actions before you can use it (like you would have to do if you use the method you described).

You could just make it so that one person/action means only 1 target for you but then you would have to memorize twice as much info as in speffz since in speffz you code 2 targets in a single word.

I would advice you to continue using letter pairs and prememorize good words/images for the letter pairs you find difficult. It doesnt even have to be directly related to those letters as long as you remember what targets it corresponds to. For example I use SuperMan for XM and also some other superheroes for X since X is a difficult letter.

TLDR;
Your suggestion works just as well but it takes a lot of prememorizing before you can really use it.

Thanks a lot for your reply!
I think I am going to create persons and actions for single targets first. My memo will get quite long then but I don't think thats a problem for me since I am kinda familiar with memory palaces. If I succeed with this I will report it here