learn-with-emoji

A memorizing technique with emojis

I should explain it with a poem as an example. Let's take a look at this poem:

”No Man Is an Island” by John Donne

No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friend’s
or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.

---

So We take the first letter of every line. So the poem becomes:

Nea
IEaao
Abafi

and put it in this link

And we get the emojis:

🍜🦅👽
🍦🦅👽👽🍊
👽🦇👽🔥🍦

1st step: Memorizing the lines Top to Bottom

Memorize one line: Memorize each line. Start from the top line. Read it a few times, until you can recite it without looking at the text. Now try to remember it just by looking at the picture of Noodles (Here Noodles represents the first line, the eagle is the second line and so on).

After memorizing the first line, now memorize the second line. Memorize it, until you can remember it by just looking at the picture of eagle.

After second line, review first and second line together. Try to remember just by looking at the pictures. If you can remember them well, then go ahead and memorize third line.

For third line (and any other lines), the process is same. Memorize that line and try to remember just by looking at the respective picture. After that review it together with the lines you learned before. If you reach the last line of your lesson, then the 1st step is done. For a lesson of around 150 words, it takes more or less 2 hours at this step. After this, you can take a break, or learn some other stuff. Then come back for the next step which is very important.

2nd step: Connecting the pictures

In the first step, we memorized the lines from top to bottom and associated them with their representing pictures. Now is the time to establish connection among those pictures.

We are going to start from the bottom paragraph. See the five pictures in the last line. There is an alien, a bat, another alien, fire and an icecream. Here we need a little bit of imagination. Imagine an alien appeared in your room. It's going to attack you. But a bat comes through the window and dashed upon the alien and the alien died on the floor. Another alien appeared suddenly. It blew fire from its eyes and the icecream melt. Can you imagine the scene?

Now with that scene in mind, try to remember the lines following the pictures. When the first alien appears, try to remember that line. When the bat enters, try to remember that line. And so on.

Now whenever you want to remember the last paragraph of the poem, you remember this scene. You will remember the pictures and hence the lines of the poem.

For a 150 words poem, it usually takes another 2 hours, to visualize the paragraphs as scenes with all the pictures connected to each other in a sequence. After this, take a break, may be for a day and go for the next step.

3rd step: Review the poem, top to bottom and bottom to top

This is very important step, I think, reviewing it after 12 hours or 24 hours. Just remember the scenes and remember the lines of the poem. If forgotten, have a look again until you remember them.

It will help you to consolidate the memory of the poem as scenes. You will remember it even without reviewing it for another 1 week, I guess! But if you want to hold it in memory for a longer period of time, you will have to review the scenes after 2 weeks, 1 month and 3 months, 6 months, even after 1 year! Good luck.