I started building a Memory Room to memorise mnemonics at around level 10, when I found that maintaining that many stories rather overwhelming and I’m glad that I took that time as it seems to be saving me time on reviews!
The thing with Kanji is that so many words share the same reading and thus, similar mnemonic components, so having objects in locations around the Memory Room makes perfect sense, I’d say!
Here’s what I mean
My Memory Room has
- an entrance corridor leading off to a staircase or towards the room
- 2 solid walls
- a windowed wall
- a huge stage wall like you’d have in Kabuki:
|-----------------------------Stage (like Kabuki) -----------------|
|
Wall|
|
|
+++++++
Entrance
+++++++ Staircase\\
|----------------------------------Wall-------------- Window wall ^
I’m stood in the centre of the room
I have objects and characters like Koichi, Shougun, Ken, Genji, A car, a pile of thread, a stool, a cage, a Viking, a spirit, a judge, a dog, an acorn etc. placed in specific points around the room such as wall faces and corners. they never move away from their location
Looking out of the window I imagine buildings, the sky, heaven, Kyoto, Tokyo etc.
The Stage is reserved for lavish mnemonics involving tsunamis (I always picture Hokusai’s ‘Wave’ painting!), rivers, earthquakes, rice paddies, rooftops etc.
That’s it!
It might seem like overkill to do all of this but I can honestly say that planting the mnemonics into a single place then walking them through out loud has made retrieval easier, rather than trying to pull a mnemonic from ‘thin air’.
The beauty of it is that even though you’re re-using the objects and characters for potentially hundreds of mnemonics each, your memory is really good at piecing together the right mnemonic for the right combination of radicals!
Give it a go!