Memorizing grammar

2024-02-18

Hi friend,

I’ve been somewhat enamored of memory techniques ever since learning about the method of loci or the memory palace. Perhaps because memorization hasn’t come easy to me. At least not intentionally.

I have a book called Maths Unwrapped by Mattias Ribbing and Per Sundin. It teaches math using memory techniques and I thought, “This is great. I bet I could do this for Greek” which then led to doing it for Latin which I’m currently trying to learn so I can tutor it in the Fall.

The whole approach is to take concepts and tie them to simple, “Memory friendly images” as Ribbing says. This gives our brains something to tie the knowledge to and so we can recall it on command more easily.

The problem for Latin and Greek is that we need to tie lots of little images together. It’s not enough to understand that Nominative case is used for the subject of a sentence, but we also need to memorize what endings mark the Nominative case.

There are various techniques to combine all this information and I’m currently experimenting on what works best for me and hopefully for others too. So, look for future posts with details.