TL;DR: File–Image–Glue is all you need to remember anything!
I’ve been using my insomniac nights (I blame tea and naps and loads of excitement for that) to learn Japanese for a while now. Surprisingly, it works both for my insomnia and for learning Japanese. And sometimes, when you’re simultaneously tired and excited, your brain does strange things — at least you recognize the strangeness with which it operates.
I was learning vocab and trying to guess the pronunciation from the kanji. One of the words was 「小文字」. Looking at the kanji, it was pretty easy to say it meant lowercase letters. However, without even thinking of the meaning, I was neck deep into “Guess the Sound” game. So, without even looking at the word’s meaning, my brain guessed “chiibungaku”.
Now, how did we get to that? 小 means small, so it automatically thought of “chii” instead of “ko” even though I know (logically) that “chii” is the reading in an adjective, usually kun’yomi and would be (usually again) different in compound words. Next, is 文. That was an unknown considering “mo” is not the standard reading. That combined with 字 which I interpreted as 学 (yes, they look ridiculously similar) and the fact that 文学 is a real word which is read as literature and is pronounced “bungaku”, my brain – in a split second – decided that it’s whole pronunciation is “chiibungaku”. When you see the real pronunciation is “komoji” and you’re sleep deprived in the middle of the night, you end up laughing like a mad scientist. And to say, I’m not that great at on’yomi and kun’yomi rules (Japanese has different readings/spellings for the same kanji).
The whole shazam made me realize — I don’t need to know the rules, they will present themselves before me when I need to learn them… The main highlight of the story is not just knowing my competence in Japanese, but to understand how my brain learns. The quieter the world gets, the more you can hear… even the processes that take place in your head.
(On a side note, can you feel your thoughts in your head? Sometimes, when you think too much, that part actually starts aching, me says.)
The whole story is about associations. I don’t know all the different ways the brain learns but I definitely know that there’s two important things. Association and Emotion. I made immediate links from different words and situations I already knew to create a mash up remix of the word. What if I made an appropriate association for the word — I knew 小 is like 子, sometimes used to represent small as in a baby, with the same pronunciation — either “ko” or “shou”. 文 would be hard to guess, since it’s not a common reading. 字 is one of characters for kanji (lit. chinese character), which is the same class as lowercase character. So, I would probably guess “kobunji” and “bun” just sounds weird, so I knew it would be a different reading…
The moral is that it’s not just association and emotion, it’s also the right kind. And to make the right association, you need strong examples which evoke the right stories and emotions. And there’s a way for that. It’s called the FIG method.
I took a extra long course on Memory training (I thought it was supposed to be mysterious and cool — turns out it’s just practice with a small set of tools). If it had to be summarized, it would be as follows:
- File: A file is a fixed idea that you can associate the new idea so that there’s a pointer where you can start to retrieve the new idea.
- Image: The story you use to evoke emotion and make the idea easy to remember.
- Glue: The association you use to attach the new idea to the existing idea.
That’s it! That’s all there is to remembering stuff. So, let’s move on to the applications. There’s multiple ways to use this method.
- One of the most popular one is Method of Loci where you remember a house and have different ideas in different places of the house. This works because people have great spacial memory. The drawback includes the items to remember must be in a strict order, because you trace your steps in the house.
- Another popular one is making a story out of a string of words or ideas. This really works for random words or numbers or even history facts! This is a little more random as stories have multiple beats (like checkpoints) where you can start it from. It’s like trying to remember ABCs. I remember the breakpoints at ABC…. HIJ… MNO… QRS… XYZ… It might be because of the song we use to sing it.
- Mnemonics is an overall term for different ways to make remembering easier. Like the song we use for ABCs, or making an animal out of a year, and so on. It’s a nice way to remember one off ideas (including vocabulary).
Now, if you’re bad at using the techniques, it means either your File, Image or Glue is not strong enough. Taking the example of Japanese vocab, there’s multiple ways you can mess meanings up (like I do regularly).
- File: This can happen when you forget what you’re associating the new word to. Associating a word to “emotion” and then when retrieving, you think “feeling” instead. They are very similar in meaning and it’s easy to forget what it was in the first place. I did that once when I confused 確か (tashika — sure) with 魂 (tamashii — spirit) which kinda sound similar in my head and can mean something similar. So, make the file as concrete as possible.
- Image: When the image isn’t strong enough. When you have different parts of a story, even one part missing or different can change the entire meaning. For example, shine is 照. It’s sun, a sword, mouth and fire. It’s easy to make a story out of these words, for example — I saw someone cut through the fire and sun and it was soo bright. When you see the radicals 日、刀、火 (the four lines), it’s easy to say “oh, it’s shine” but when you write, you only remember these three and not 口. And you might not even remember the order in the beginning, so you might mix up the areas where to write the radicals. So the order and objects are really important in an image. Also, make sure the story is very dramatic and emotional to remember all parts. Using “hen” instead of “here” or “hate” (different sound or an abstract meaning) would help in case the sound is “hey” and making it dance on the top of a skyrise is better than it being in a coop eating corn.
- Glue: Finally, the biggest problem with glue is clarity and bidirectionality. For ex, 唄 which means a song, has two parts — a mouth 口 and a shellfish 貝 and my image was a shellfish singing loudly with it’s mouth. However, when I see the kanji after a while, I don’t know why there’s a mouth near a shellfish… Is it talking? Is is meeting someone? So, the image of that isn’t clear even though it’s right in front, because the glue was weak. The other part is directionality. Now I know 唄 means singing. What is the kanji for dance now? 踊 as well as 舞. It can get complicated to remember multiple associations as well as complicated stories. What’s the guarantee that different radicals won’t be mixed up? The idea is to have very strong glue. The first is for fast dancing and the next is slow dancing (very simplified) — so making sure to make the first image a fast tap dance where as the second one a slow bonfire or ballroom (it helps that the kanji is crowded and looks archaic) is important.
Now that we know how to make good associations and include lots of emotion, the next step is to practice and make sure all three parts of the FIG method are strong. This method is really helpful in remembering many things (even though the story was written with vocabulary in mind).
P.S. Something else that was taught in the course was different parts of the body (files) that are for gluing your images. It can be used to remember lists or names. The list is as follows: sole, shins, leg, butt, tummy, rib, collarbone, mouth, nose, forehead. 10 parts, ten files. Also, the sounds can be used to remember the consonants, so Sam can be attached to sole while Alex can be attached to leg. So when you have the word on the tip of the tongue, you remember the first sound immediately!
Continue to Part 2 for a fuller flashback with skeletons!