How to Memorize

What to do? Don’t change the channels. Or at least add another channel. If you are planning to speak the poem, record it and learn to speak along with your recording. If you are memorizing a piece of classical music, play along with a recording of it (you can even get software that will slow down the music to the point where you can play it). You can use the print version as well, but focus on the channel that you plan to use to produce the material.

An Answer: Meaning

Another thing that has helped me to memorize things is to understand the logic in them. Poets don’t put words randomly on the page (or most don’t). So, what function does each word have? In a sonnet, for example, each line has a certain meter. You can think about how a word functions in terms of its place in the metrical line (http://www.bookstove.com/Poetry/Poetic-Meter.258255) or how it fits into a rhyme scheme. If the poem doesn’t have regular sound patterns like rhyme or meter, you can think about why a poet chose this or that word over all the other possible words.

In the case of music, it is the same thing. There is logic to every note. It is part of a phrase, it has a certain melodic function, it has a certain harmonic function.

In math, the digits of numbers that are divisible by three add up to a number that is divisible by three. The number 27 is divisible by three because two and seven make nine, which is divisible by three. There are other forms of logic in math that you can use to help the memorization process.

An Answer: Sing it, Rap it, Sign it

When I have helped children memorize Bible verses (King James, too-which has a lot of big words, and my first graders learned them), we created hand motions to all the major words in the verse. It doesn’t matter what the hand motions are; they just have to be something you can remember. If you know some American Sign Language, you can use that. Or use something you can associate with the target word. For example, when we were learning the word “art,” as in “thou art…” we pretended to draw at an easel because the children could remember the word that way. We talked about the changes in English, so they understood what the word meant, but we used the easel as an association they could get.

Singing something also works. Make up a tune and don’t worry about great singing. The point of singing is that when you are missing a word, then the tune lets you know and often you will be able to sing something that you cannot say. That is because your brain puts song in a different place from speech.

Related to singing is rap. English is a very rhythmic language and many phrases can be rapped. The kids I worked with enjoyed clapping their hands and rapping Bible verses. It didn’t help every single kid, but it helped some.

Using your whole body to learn is enormously helpful. Eventually you can give up the signs and the singing, just like you can quote lyrics from songs that you know. But this will get the material into your long term memory in a retrievable fashion.

Ability

For a long time, I thought I was disabled in terms of memory. Part of the problem is that I grew up family members who had photographic memory, so I was like a VW bug comparing myself to a Jaguar. A VW bug isn’t bad-it gets around. Just not as fast as a Jag.

The other problem is that I didn’t know where my strengths were in memorization and I didn’t know how to use them. I didn’t know that channels are significant to the task or how to use channels in a way that actually works.

Now that I know this, memorization doesn’t seem to be the big monster it had been in my mind and I don’t feel so overwhelmed when I work on memorizing things. You can do this, too.