Spatial memory and mnemonics

WaniKani
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So I’ve read all the hype around the method of loci and I’ve been trying to utilize it every so often, but it never worked for me.

I’ve read blog posts, watched TED talks, etc, but the explanation of the method of loci was always extremely superficial: “durrr just pick a place u like and put words there lol… something something memory palace bro”

Here’s an example of the kind of superficial explanation I’m talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNmf-G81Irs&t=523s

I tried to follow the advice. I’d pick a location I was familiar with: cities I’ve lived in, places I’ve resided, the house I grew up in, my high school, my grade school, and so on. Nothing sticks.

This week I realized something about myself: maybe 90% of the wanikani mnemonics “take place” in a very particular setting for me: my high school friend’s house/neighborhood. A place I haven’t been to in 13 years.

Both of the reading mnemonics for 上 and 下 take place on my friend’s driveway. The mnemonic for 羽 takes place in his backyard (at the top of a retaining wall – I’m about to jump off before someone spills the はね on my wings). The mnemonic for 青 takes place in his cul de sac (at night). I could go on, but they’re almost all there. The imagery is absolutely vivid for the ones that stick the most.

I’m not sure why, but I think my mind was doing this kind of spatial (or locational) association automatically. None of this was intentional. It makes sense that it’s my friend’s house – I spent most of my time there from ages 12-18.

It seems that I wasn’t able to choose my “memory palace”. My mind made the choice for me. But maybe that’s just me.

Does anyone else have an experience like this? Does your mind pick a particular setting or location for your mnemonics, or is it largely abstract?

5 Likes
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Imteresting!!
I’ll have to give this a try for my tricky words

For myself it is largely abstract

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I am not sure memory palace easily applies here. I usually use them for things I need to recall in a specific order or a short term memory trick.

It never occured to me to consider it for kanji because it would require more « space » than I have in my locations.

But interest to hear otherwise if anyone else has used it.

In my case WK mnemonics worked for the most part, with a tea spoon of creating my own and a pinch of bruteforce repetition for the resisting ones.

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Yeah, I wasn’t sure whether what I’m experiencing could be considered a memory palace. Probably not, but I do think there is something interesting about the imagery one’s mind chooses for the mnemonics.

It seems like the location I mentioned is somehow foundational to how memories are stored in my brain. My dreams often take place in that very same location (unrelated to learning Japanese).

For sure. That was another reason I was skeptical of the method of loci. The limitations become very apparent when you’re dealing with thousands of kanji/vocab.

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I’ve had some experience doing this and I’ve also tried a language learning tool (Hanzi Hero) that uses it. I’ve heard from some people that it has helped them, but in general I’d say it’s probably pretty unhelpful for the majority of learners.

The method of loci tends to be a really effective technique for the short term ordering of information that has low salience, which is to say it doesn’t have any built-in meaning—in other words, it’s close to uniformly random, and individual pieces of information don’t help you organize any other information because they don’t relate to one another.

Mnemonics in general basically act to inject salience by taking information that is unconnected, or at least feels unconnected to the reader (like new, complicated kanji you’ve never seen before), and connecting it to memorable information. The method of loci works best when there’s nearly no way at all to connect the information presented together, like with a randomly shuffled list of numbers or a deck of cards, because you can basically walk the imagined space and reconstruct the information, which otherwise you’d have no way to structure.

But languages are in general very high salience—kanji are built from radicals and, as much as they’re initially counterintutive, phonosemantic compounds and the like are basically designed explicitly to help readers remember what something means and how it sounds. In general, I don’t think even in the case of Wanikani’s relatively straightforward mnemonics, you should be relying on them for every single kanji and word. They’re more helpful for initially building that bridge when information is totally new or when you find yourself getting stuck at first.

Hanzi Hero, for example, can become an absolute mess when you need to remember that Donald Duck is having a punch up with Gokuu in the bathroom with the shower door open and the faucet running with Marty McFly watching from the hallway holding a baguette and wearing only one shoe before you can piece together what 我们是美国人 means or how it sounds. What you really want to do is just look at the words and already know what they are. Mnemonics are really only helpful when they’re helping you to get to that. Hanging onto them really long term, or making them too complex or interdependent, is probably only going to hurt natural reading in the long run.

To conclude a too-long post (sorry!), I think it can be good to use mnemonics and especially to work on your own mnemonics, but at some point you want to be moving past those and into direct remembering, or you’re going to get really stuck later on. Making the mnemonics so detailed and interdependent they eclipse the actual information you’re supposed to be learning is probably just going to be a big hindrance as you progress.

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sup! what exactly is loci?

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To me loci is kind of an extension of the idea that concepts are tied together with related sensory information, specifically locations in this case.

I don’t deliberately attempt to associate places with words, but especially eg with sign kanji it’s easier - 止まれ is written in huge letters on the road near my old apartment, 監視カメラ signs near places with surveillance, etc

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just one irrelevant question and we’ll get back to topic–do you live in japan?

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I did. Obviously a → b connections are easier based on your built environment, but you can create them to some extent (the classic “label everything in your house in Japanese” move, though i personally think that’s overboard)

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