This sounds a lot like Peter Ramus in the late 1500s with respect to educational reform.

He's sidelining the usefulness of mnemonic techniques in lieu of something he values more, potentially without having a full appreciation of the former.

The difference between what you work out using the Zettelkasten and the memory palace technique is that the memory palace is a pure memory technique. It uses meaningless connections [emphasis added] and the way the brain works to gain access to information. For example, if I mentally write the date Rome was founded with the mnemonic “BC 753 Rome came to be” as a number on an egg in the kitchen fridge, the only reason for this link between the egg in the kitchen fridge of my memory palace and the year Rome was founded is that I can remember this number.

Certainly not an attack against him, but I feel as if Sascha is making an analogistic reference to areas of mnemonics he's heard about, but hasn't actively practiced. As a result, some may come away with a misunderstanding of these practices. Even worse, they may be dissuaded from combining a more specific set of mnemonic practices with their zettelkasten practice which can provide them with even stronger memories of the ideas hiding within their zettelkasten.

There is a mistaken conflation of two different mnemonic techniques being described here. The memory palace portion associates information with well known locations which leverages our brains' ability to more easily remember places and things in them with relation to each other. There is nothing of meaningless connections here. The method works precisely because meaning is created and attributed to the association. It becomes a thing in a specific well known place to the user which provides the necessary association for our memory.

The second mnemonic technique at play is the separate, unmentioned, and misconstrued Major System (or possibly the related Person-Action-Object method) which associates the number with a visualizable object. While there is a seeming meaningless connection here, the underlying connection is all about meaning by design. The number is "translated" from something harder to remember into an object which is far easier to remember. This initial translation is more direct than one from a word in one language to another because it can be logically generated every time and thus gives a specific meaning to an otherwise more-difficult-to-remember number. As part of the practice this object is then given additional attributes (size, smell, taste, touch, etc., or ridiculous proportion or attributes like extreme violence or relationships to sex) which serve to make it even more memorable. Sascha seems break this more standard mnemonic practice by simply writing his number on the egg in the refrigerator rather than associate 753 with a more memorable object like a "golem" which might be incubating inside of my precious egg. As a result, the egg and 753 association IS meaningless to him, and I would posit will be incredibly more difficult for him to remember tomorrow much less next month. If we make the translation of 753 more visible in Sascha's process, we're more likely to see the meaning and the benefit of the mnemonic. (I can only guess that Sascha doesn't practice these techniques, so won't fault him for missing some steps, particularly given the ways in which the memory palace is viewed in the zeitgeist.)

To say that the number and the golem (here, the object which 753 was translated to—the Major System mnemonic portion) have no association is akin to saying that "zettlekasten" has no associated meaning to the words "slip box." In both translations the words/numbers are exactly the same thing. The second mnemonic is associating the golem to the egg in the refrigerator (the memory palace portion). I suspect that if you've been following along and imagining Andy Serkis gestating inside of an egg to become Golem who will go on to fight in the Roman Coliseum in your refrigerator, you're going to see Golem every time you reach for an egg in your refrigerator. Now if you've spent the ten minutes to learn the Major System to do the reverse translation, you'll think about the founding date of Rome every time you go to make an omelette. And if you haven't, then you'll just imagine the most pitiful gladiator loosing in the arena against a vicious tiger.

Naturally one can associate all their thoughts in their ZK to both the associated numbers and their home, work, or neighborhood environments so that they can mentally take their (analog or digital) zettlekasten with them anywhere they go. This is akin to what Thomas Aquinus and Raymond Llull were doing with their "knowledge management systems", though theirs may have had slightly simpler forms. Llull actually created a system which allowed him to more easily meditate on his stored memories and juxtapose them to create new ideas.

For the beginners in these areas who'd like to know more, I recommend the following as a good starting place: <br /> Kelly, Lynne. Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory Using the Most Powerful Methods from around the World. Pegasus Books, 2019.

The Pelman School of Memory Training, 1635 Masonic Temple, Chicago.<br /> LONDON , 4 Bloomsbury St., W.C.; <br /> PARIS, Avenuede Nenilly, 109 ;<br /> MUNICH , Mozartstrasse, 9; <br /> MELBOURNE, G.P.O, Box 1635

p 89 There's a Dickson School of Memory selling a Dickson Method.

Exaggerating the features of people and objects in systematic ways helps people to more easily assimilate both knowledge about them as well as the ability to distinguish between them in an effect which psychologists call the "caricature advantage."

Link this to using caricature as a mnemonic technique for strengthening one's memory of objects and people.

Elizabeth Filips has digital versions of medical school notes online. She's drawn them (in software) by hand with color and occasional doodles in them (there's an image of Einstein's head with an E=mc^2 under it on one page) which makes them more memorable for having made them in the first place, but with the color and the pictures, they act as a memory palace.

I've found no evidence (yet) that she's using direct mnemonics or that she's been specifically trained in the method of loci or other techniques. This doesn't, however, mean that she's not tangentially using them without knowing about them explicitly.

One would suspect that this sort of evolutionary movement towards such techniques would have been how they evolved in the first place.

The presence of a chimerical animal is a potential indicator of mnemonic techniques at work in Phoenician culture.

Most foreign language leaners spend all their time in classrooms or at home sitting down, listening, reading, and writing. This is antithetical to how children acquire language in more natural settings where they're able to move around, interact, taste, touch, smell, etc. as they learn new words in their language. These additional sensory mnemonic techniques add an incredible amount of information and associative hooks to help them remember new words and grammatical structures.

Example of the use of visual, auditory, and proprioceptive methods used in the pedagogy of anatomy.

Gestural mnemonic associations work on three levels: auditory associations, visual associations, and proprioceptive associations.

movement and gesture as a mnemonic device

For deep understanding the elaboration method may be the best tool, but may not be the best choice for learning isolated encyclopedic facts.

By learning isolated facts do they really mean memorizing here? In which case, perhaps using mnemotechniques is the best way to create synthetic associative links by which to tie one's knowledge into their other mental frameworks of knowledge. If thought about this way one is really elaborating their knowledge in a synthetic manner instead of more naturally. Either way, you're doing some form of elaborating as a means of assuming the knowledge. Both forms are work, though slightly different.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-02-09/riverside-sohcahtoa-teacher-viral-video-mocked-native-americans-fired

Riverside teacher who dressed up and mocked Native Americans for a trigonometry lesson involving a mnemonic using SOH CAH TOA in Riverside, CA is fired.

There is a right way to teach mnemonic techniques and a wrong way. This one took the advice to be big and provocative went way overboard. The children are unlikely to forget the many lessons (particularly the social one) contained here.

It's unfortunate that this could have potentially been a chance to bring indigenous memory methods into a classroom for a far better pedagogical and cultural outcome. Sad that the methods are so widely unknown that media missed a good teaching moment here.

referenced video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu4fulKVv2c

A snippet at the end of the video has the teacher talking to rocks and a "rock god", but it's extremely unlikely that she was doing so using indigenous methods or for indigenous reasons.

read: 7:00 AM

The use of mnemonic techniques through history have been crystalized into our language with phrases like "in the first place" and "passing on to the next point".

http://countryoftheblind.blogspot.com/2012/01/mnemonics-for-pronouncing-chinese.html

The Marilyn method is a means of creating associated characters and places to sounds/tones in Chinese for memorizing kanji.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Lynne Kelly</span> in Foreign Languages – a call for opinions – Lynne Kelly (<time class='dt-published'>11/22/2021 12:44:51</time>)</cite></small>

Over the years in academic settings I've picked up pieces of Spanish, French, Latin and a few odd and ends of other languages.

Six years ago we put our daughter into a dual immersion Japanese program (in the United States) and it has changed some of my view of how we teach and learn languages, a process which is also affected by my slowly picking up conversational Welsh using the method at https://www.saysomethingin.com/ over the past year and change, a hobby which I wish I had more targeted time for.

Children learn language through a process of contextual use and osmosis which is much more difficult for adults. I've found that the slowly guided method used by SSiW is fairly close to this method, but is much more targeted. They'll say a few words in the target language and give their English equivalents, then they'll provide phrases and eventually sentences in English and give you a few seconds to form them into the target language with the expectation that you try to say at least something, or pause the program to do your best. It's okay if you mess up even repeatedly, they'll say the correct phrase/sentence two times after which you'll repeat it again thus giving you three tries at it. They'll also repeat bits from one lesson to the next, so you'll eventually get it, the key is not to worry too much about perfection.

Things slowly build using this method, but in even about 10 thirty minute lessons, you'll have a pretty strong grasp of fluent conversational Welsh equivalent to a year or two of college level coursework. Your work on this is best supplemented with interacting with native speakers and/or watching television or reading in the target language as much as you're able to.

For those who haven't experienced it before I'd recommend trying out the method at https://www.saysomethingin.com/welsh/course1/intro to hear it firsthand.

The experience will give your brain a heavy work out and you'll feel mentally tired after thirty minutes of work, but it does seem to be incredibly effective. A side benefit is that over time you'll also build up a "gut feeling" about what to say and how without realizing it. This is something that's incredibly hard to get in most university-based or book-based language courses.

This method will give you quicker grammar acquisition and you'll speak more like a native, but your vocabulary acquisition will tend to be slower and you don't get any writing or spelling practice. This can be offset with targeted memory techniques and spaced repetition/flashcards or apps like Duolingo that may help supplement one's work.

I like some of the suggestions made in Lynne's post as I've been pecking away at bits of Japanese over time myself. There's definitely an interesting structure to what's going on, especially with respect to the kana and there are many similarities to what is happening in Japanese to the Chinese that she's studying. I'm also approaching it from a more traditional university/book-based perspective, but if folks have seen or heard of a SSiW repetition method, I'd love to hear about it.

Hopefully helpful by comparison, I'll mention a few resources I've found for Japanese that I've researched on setting out a similar path that Lynne seems to be moving.

Japanese has two different, but related alphabets and using an app like Duolingo with regular practice over less than a week will give one enough experience that trying to use traditional memory techniques may end up wasting more time than saving, especially if one expects to be practicing regularly in both the near and the long term. If you're learning without the expectation of actively speaking, writing, or practicing the language from time to time, then wholesale mnemotechniques may be the easier path, but who really wants to learn a language like this?

The tougher portion of Japanese may come in memorizing the thousands of kanji which can have subtly different meanings. It helps to know that there are a limited set of specific radicals with a reasonably delineable structure of increasing complexity of strokes and stroke order.

The best visualization I've found for this fact is the Complete Listing of the 214 Radicals and Major Variations from An Introduction to Japanese Kanji Calligraphy by Kunii Takezaki (Tuttle, 2005) which I copy below:

(Feel free to right click and view the image in another tab or download it and view it full size to see more detail.)

I've not seen such a chart in any of the dozens of other books I've come across. The numbered structure of increasing complexity of strokes here would certainly suggest an easier to build memory palace or songline.

I love this particular text as it provides an excellent overview of what is structurally happening in Japanese with lots of tidbits that are otherwise much harder won in reading other books.

There are many kanji books with various forms of what I would call very low level mnemonic aids. I've not found one written or structured by what I would consider a professional mnemonist. One of the best structured ones I've seen is A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters by Kenneth G. Henshall (Tuttle, 1988). It's got some great introductory material and then a numbered list of kanji which would suggest the creation of a quite long memory palace/journey/songline.

Each numbered Kanji has most of the relevant data and readings, but provides some description about how the kanji relates or links to other words of similar shapes/meanings and provides a mnemonic hint to make placing it in one's palace a bit easier. Below is an example of the sixth which will give an idea as to the overall structure.

I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but I'd found an online app called WaniKani for Japanese that has some mnemonic suggestions and built-in spaced repetition that looks incredibly promising for taking small radicals and building them up into more easily remembered complex kanji.

I suspect that there are likely similar sources for these couple of books and apps for Chinese that may help provide a logical overall structuring which will make it easier to apply or adapt one's favorite mnemotechniques to make the bulk vocabulary memorization easier.

The last thing I'll mention I've found, that's good for practicing writing by hand as well as spaced repetition is a Kanji notebook frequently used by native Japanese speaking children as they're learning the levels of kanji in each grade. It's non-obvious to the English speaker, and took me a bit to puzzle out and track down a commercially printed one, even with a child in a classroom that was using a handmade version. The notebook (left to right and top to bottom) has sections for writing a big example of the learned kanji; spaces for the "Kun" and "On" readings; spaces for the number of strokes and the radical pieces; a section for writing out the stroke order as it builds up gradually; practice boxes for repeated practice of writing the whole kanji; examples of how to use the kanji in context; and finally space for the student to compose their own practice sentences using the new kanji.

Regular use and practice with these can be quite helpful for moving toward mastery.

I also can't emphasize enough that regularly and actively watching, listening, reading, and speaking in the target language with materials that one finds interesting is incredibly valuable. As an example, one of the first things I did for Welsh was to find a streaming television and radio that I want to to watch/listen to on a regular basis has been helpful. Regular motivation and encouragement is key.

I won't go into them in depth and will leave them to speak for themselves, but two of the more intriguing videos I've watched on language acquisition which resonate with some of my experiences are:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox6MdRTc0yE

It dawns on me that in some sense small illustrations and images in a mnemonic like manner are what Dave Winer is doing on his blog.

Why might Erasmus have doubted its efficacy? Did he use it? Attempt to? Did he have some sort of cognitive defect that may have made it difficult/impossible for him in particular?

I've not often seen (yet?) suggestions of using bestiaries as mnemonic techniques, but here's one in Charles Butler's Oratoriae Libri Duo.

What other sources used them this way before or after?

To be clear I'm aware of their use for such, but just haven't read much about them in this period for this particular purpose in these settings.

The use of [[visual homophony]] as a [[mnemonic techniques]].

I definitely use reason as a memory technique this way.

Mnemonic sentences for the number e.

Cross reference this with the retranslation of the Temple by In the Footsteps of King David.

The real (open) question is did this memory tradition date back to the time of David, or was it applied (or reapplied) by classical scholars after the first century? Was it transmitted in oral tradition until put back into writing in the new millenium?

A nice hook to pull one into some of the reasons why one would want to pick up languages as well as how to do so.

8:44 method of loci (locorum)

10:02 Learning words in groups based on related sounds.

11:22 Why learn languages? Motivation

Language represents a world cultural view.