A 5 Day Rote Memory System

[Jim Rader]

As long as listovtsy are discussing memory, I'll tell my personal
tale.  I used the dot-in-a-dictionary method when I studied German in
high school and college.  It produced frustration rather than
retention for me so I gave it up when I began to study Latin in
college in favor of a card system, in which I would write the
vocabulary word on the unlined side of a 3'' by 5'' card and the
gloss and sentence in which it had occurred on the other side.  This
worked well for the series of textbooks I was using, which were
monolingual:  texts and grammar were all in Latin.  I found that
writing down the whole sentence and the chapter in which it came up
helped reinforce the word and provided a reference point for where I
first came across it.  The drawback was that it was very
time-consuming.  When I began studying Russian at the Defense
Language Institute in 1971 courtesy of the U.S. Army, I immediately
adopted this system, ordering Russian words  by root rather
alphabetically. Time was less of an issue then because I was studying
nothing else.  When a fellow student saw the massive stack of cards I
had near the end of the 47-week course his comment was "That's sick!"
 I continued to add to the file long after I had mastered the basics
of grammar, and I still use it, though I have never attempted to put
in all the Russian words I have at least a passive knowledge of, and
the last 15 years or so I read Russian very sporadically.  The result
is an idiosyncratic dictionary that fills a number of drawers of an
old library card catalog unit (lots of those floating around now).
I've used the same system for a number of other languages that I've
studied only superficially out of linguistic interest, and I find
that flipping through a file of a hundred or so words in a
language that I haven't looked at in a while is a good way of
reviving a feel for it.

I admit that there's something vaguely medieval about this approach,
and I wouldn't advise it for everybody, but for me it works.

Jim Rader


> > May I add a simple device suggested to me years ago by one of my
> teachers.
> > When using a dictionary, place a small dot by the word in pencil so you
> > will have a record of the number of times you have looked that particular
> > word up.  When you encounter three or four dots beside a word,
> > well--Georges makes the point below.
> Once when looking up a word on a friend's dictionary, I found crosses
> beside words and asked him what they were for. He said / was 'looked this
> up', X was 'looked it up again' and X! was 'you shouldn't have had to look
> this up!.
> Daf
> [web page- http://www.meirionnydd.force9.co.uk ]
>