Josh Notes

I got busy and had to put aside memory training since my last post. Stopping for a little while was a good thing, because it provided a little time for my previous mnemonic system to fade a bit.

At the moment I'm still working on generating my ~3000 mnemonic images.

One difficulty I've been having is finding images for numbers that ended in the letter "r". This might only be a problem in American English, but the letter "r" is so strong it can affect the previous vowel. The troubling number combinations are:

• x34 (vowel: "cAt")
• x64 (vowel: "sIx")
• x74 (vowel: "sEven")
• x84 (vowel: "EIght")
• x94 (vowel: "lUllaby")

For example, there is no easy way to pronounce "734" (car with "ca" as in cat) in my way of speaking, and there is not enough distinction between the sounds for "764" and "794" because the "r" distorts the vowel.

My solution has been to move the consonant "th" from number 8 to number 4. So 364 goes from MIR ("i" as in "sIx") which is a difficult sound to distinguish from 374 and 394, to MITH -- or "mithril shirt".

I'm currently working with the following consonants and vowels:

Digit   Beginning       Middle      End
0       s,z             o,low       s,z
1       t (not d*)      i,bee       t (not d)
2       n               u,you       n
3       m               aa,cat      m
4       r               a,father    r/th
5       l               ai,high     l
6       g (+j cards)    ih,kitten   g
7       k               e,pet       k
8       f/v             ei,hay      f/v
9       p (not b)       u,lullaby   p (not b)

(*I made notes not to use "d" and "b" because I'm going to need them for cards later.)

I changed 9 from "b" to "p" because "9" look like a backwards "p" to me. I moved "b" to the heart/spades combo when memorizing cards. (UPDATE: I moved "b" to 6 because they look similar. My final key is here.)

Having the 9 stand for "p" makes numbers look more like words to me -- for example "149" visually looks like "TAP" ("A" as in father): a spinning top. I'm hoping the visual associations will speed up image recall when reading the numbers.