How to Remember Words

You can convert anything into words and most words can be imagined (i.e. be converted to a mental image) with no effort. Additionally, human beings use to communicate by using language. Well, this should be reason enough for you to learn how to memorize words efficiently. If it’s not, you might want to take into consideration rereading the first two sentences of this article.

If you read through my other article The Basics of Memory Improvement you should know a bit about the basics of memory improvement. At least I hope so. I’ll skip these basics here and just list the techniques.

Words You Can’t Imagine

If you can’t directly imagine a word, you just need to convert it to something you can imagine. It’s as simple as this. Here are some techniques to do it:

• Convert the words to similar sounding words that you can imagine. This works very well for remembering names for example. You could transform Trey into the word tree for instance.
• Memorize objects that can be easily associated with the word you want to remember. Memorizing a watch when trying to remember time should be fine for example.

After having transmuted the words, you might end up having words you can imagine. Those can be memorized with the aid of the following techniques:

Words You Can Imagine

The first thing you got to do is to make clear you know what you want to link the word (or image) to. Know the context.

You need to link the word to anything. The brain doesn’t want to remember single facts without any context. So take the anchor (that is another word) you want to link the word to and convert the combination of those two words to a mental image (or let me put it this way: imagine it).

This means you should form a mental image that includes both words: The word you initially want to remember and the anchor. (If you can’t imagine this other word, apply the techniques above to convert it first.)

Make this image forming process effictive by applying some of this stuff:

• Repetition: You already know this technique. Thinking about something several times always increases the chance for you to recall it at a later time.
• Exaggeration: Make the image appear strange. Let significant details look absurdly huge. Your brain will tend to remember those kinds of things because they’re seen as new.
• Humor: Funny images are remembered more easily. Plus, it’s fun to think of funny things… Use strange colors to form your images or imagine objects in strange situations for example.
• Imagine in detail: Go into detail. If you try to memorize a dog, then you should see the dog’s ears, nose, hair, eyes; feel its warm breath, pelt or even its big teeth; hear it barking; smell him! (You might leave out the smelling if it’s too gross for you.)

Now the image should come to your mind whenever you think about the anchor.

Note: The anchor you link the word to can be about anything. You can memorize chains of words by linking each word to the next word of the chain for example.