A note from your Academic Support Coordinator:

Andrew Court, Tutor in NT Greek, has kindly written us this piece on memorising vocabulary, declensions, and paradigms.

In this, he applies the research that explains how we learn to languages.

You may want to follow this up with Luke Tucker’s guest post on ‘Getting the most out of Anki.’

Got a “Good Memory?”

Let’s see how good your memory is. Below is a sequence of letters. Read through it once at a normal pace, then see how many letters you can recall (maybe try to write them out without looking).

T  L  O  T  R  T  R  O  T  K  W  B  J  R  R  T

How’d you go? When I’ve done this kind of activity with larger groups, I’ve never had a person manage to recall the whole set.

I can recall this set of letters pretty easily, but it has nothing to do with me having a “good memory.” Instead it has everything to do with a simple fact about memory that is, on the one hand, irritatingly plain and, on the other, an example of the key strategy used by “memory experts” to win World Memory Championships (yeah, they’re a real thing!).

The above set of letters is just a long acronym: The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, Written By J. R. R. Tolkien. Recall the phrase, take the first letter of each word, and…voila! The phrase is much easier to recall than the letters because it has meaning. You can remember it because it is attached to all sorts of real concepts: a book with a title and characters in a series by a famous author. Things are memorable when they’re meaningful.

Memory champions leverage this basic concept and reverse engineer it to pull off some seriously impressive party tricks.

Memory is Trained, not Innate

Joshua Foer was working as a journalist when he discovered the world of competition memorisation.^[1] He was tasked with reporting on the USA Memory Championship, an annual event where competitors battle to be the best at memorisation challenges like recalling hundreds of random numbers in sequence, or memorising the order of a pack of playing cards in just a few minutes.

Foer interviewed people at the competition, assuming they must be savants. But he found that those competing all said they had average memories; they were the kind of people who would forget where they’d left their keys as often as anyone. He realised that their memory recall wasn’t an innate gift, it was a learned skill.

So how do ordinary people pull off these amazing feats? What’s going on inside their brains? Studies comparing memory champions with control subjects show there is no difference in the structure or anatomy of their brains. They do not score significantly better on cognitive tests. But there is one difference: when they are put into fMRI machines and asked to memorise things, memory champions activate a different part of their brain. They engage the spatial/navigation part of their brain.

While there are different techniques for trained memorisation, the ultimate concept behind it all is something called Elaborative Encoding. Put simply, Elaborative Encoding is taking something unfamiliar and putting it in a familiar package. You make a piece of information you want to remember easier to remember by relating it to any sort of knowledge or memory you already have.

There’s a classic experiment in psychology that gives a distilled demonstration of this concept. Take two groups of test subjects. Show the first group a photo of a face and ask them to “remember that this man is named Baker.” Do exactly the same thing with the second group, but instead ask them to “remember that this man is a baker.” That one word—“named” or “a”—is the only difference. When shown the face a few days later, the second group is much more likely to recall the word “baker” than the first group.

This result is known as the Baker-baker paradox, and it demonstrates how Elaborative Encoding helps us remember things. When subjects are told the man’s profession, a range of mental associations trigger like a reflex. You call to mind images (people in white hats with flour on their hands), smells (delicious fresh bread), and experiences (places and faces). Those mental concepts activate if asked to remember a baker, but not the name Baker.^[2]

Joshua Foer demonstrated just how true it is that good memory is trained, not innate. After attending the USA Memory Championships the first time as an observer, he decided to engage in some participatory journalism and enter the competition himself the following year. To his surprise, he won.^[3] And he did it by honing the art of elaborative encoding; using story and visualisation of wildly unforgettable things in familiar spaces.

Memory and Ancient Languages

Two places where memorisation is required when learning a language (whether it’s modern or ancient) are vocabulary and grammar paradigms.^[4] Paradigms are a good example of a sequence of sounds that lack meaning^[5] which become more memorisable when meaning is bolted on. To move from a paradigm or word to its meaning (or vice versa) we sometimes just need a push in the right direction. A good memory hook is like a reflex that fires almost without a conscious thought. Like a famous movie quote—“there’s no place…like home”; “may the force…be with you”—they should kick in involuntarily.

The mental move from sound to sense (e.g. from a Greek word like “adelphós” to its English equivalent “brother”) can be aided by short bits of elaborative encoding we often call memory hooks.[6] Rhymes, cognate words, gestures—whatever enriches a connection to prior memory.[7]Take, for example, the city Philadelphia, often nicknamed the “city of brotherly love.”[8] The name comes from two Greek words, φιλέω/philéō (love) and ἀδελφός/adelphós (brother/brotherly). “Philadelphia” bridges the gap and can work as a memory hook for anyone with a decent mental connection between Philadelphia and the word “brother.”

Open

Below are the three techniques that I find most powerful for memorising paradigms. When shown specific memory hooks, students tend to have one of two responses: a) “Ahh, that’s really helpful!” Or, b) “Huh? How does that help!?” Sometimes a memory hook is strong because of the actual process of creating the memory hook. A borrowed memory hook might be immediately useful, or it might not. We need to first rehearse them a little to internalise them. If the hook still isn’t helping, then:

• try to modify it to access things that are memorable in your mind,

• find and try a different memory hook,

• develop your own hook from the ground up.

Some people find it hard to generate memory hooks (the creative process comes more naturally to some), in which case borrowing someone else’s hook can be more efficient and effective. My suggestion is to try a range of things. Give a memory hook a good try to see if it sticks for you, and, if it doesn’t, then find something else or develop your own!^[9] Also remember that memory hooks are like training wheels—they help us stay upright when we’re learning, but eventually we want to take them off. As we better internalise a language, our need for memory hooks steadily declines.

There are three main types of memory hooks that I teach and rely on. They are story phrases, songs, and spatial relations/patterns.

1) STORY PHRASES

Stories are memorable and have an order. This makes them naturally suited for memorising paradigms. Story phrases also have the benefit of being easily elaborated with memorable visuals or rhyme. These can help both the initial triggering of the memory hook as well as the recall of its parts.

By story phrase I mean one or more English sentences that contain the sounds you are trying to recall in their required order.^[10] Here’s one example that a student I tutored came up with for the Greek article: Story Phrase Example.^[11] It uses visualised characters in slightly bizarre circumstances to give sound clues for each of the items in the paradigm in the order students are asked to recall them.

2) SONGS

Humans are good at remembering music; just think about how many pages you could fill with song lyrics that exist in your mind. Of all the memory techniques available, song is perhaps the one most suited to memorising words. Foer says “If you can turn a set of words into a jingle, they can become exceedingly difficult to knock out of your head. … Song is the ultimate structuring device for language.”^[12]

I often listened to Danny Zacharias’ Singing Grammarian tracks,^[13] which put Greek paradigms to well-known melodies, while walking between Redfern station and Moore College.^[14] I still remember my contract verb rules to the tune of Jingle Bells, and my conditional clauses as a rap. I also used songs to remember my article paradigm (to the tune of When I Survey), some verb endings (Mexican Hat Dance for Present Tense and Humpty Dumpty for Imperfect Tense) and the verb “to be” (a modified Farmer in the Dell).

3) SPATIAL RELATIONS AND PATTERNS

The term “method of loci” is often used in discussions of elaborative encoding. You may have heard of the notion of a “memory palace” or “memory journey” which are better known names for the same concept. Ancient orators like Cicero used this to memorise long speeches. In essence, the familiar packaging in this technique is a familiar place. Here’s a common example: let’s say you’re trying to remember a shopping list. First, you imagine memorable versions of each item in different rooms of your house (e.g., a giant orange blocking your door which you roll aside, or a watermelon smashed on your doormat, or a melted cheese slice in the hallway which your shoes stick to). Then, imagine yourself walking through your house, encountering those items, to recall your shopping list.

Years ago, some students created a set of story scenarios mapped onto the Moore College dining hall as a way to remember the entire indicative verb system for Greek 1.^[15] I borrowed this method when I was in first-year and found it worked well.^[16]

Since prepositions often describe spatial relationships, they naturally work well when organised as a diagram. I was shown the “Preposition House” in first year (a combination of visuals, spatial relationships, and story phrases created by students years prior) and it really stuck in my mind.^[17] Even after years of using and teaching Greek, it occasionally still helps jog my memory!

We can also leverage our pattern recognition faculties to aid memorisation. Paradigms are usually learnt as tables, so they have their own spatial arrangement. Noting patterns can help recall paradigms.^[18]

Just One Piece of the Learning Puzzle

Elaborative encoding is not a silver bullet. It’s a power tool. It doesn’t remove the need for things like drilling paradigms (you don’t learn to “bend it like Beckham” without kicking a lot of footballs!).^[19] Rather, think of it as a power tool on your language learning utility belt. Take advantage of your ability to recall songs, absurd stories, and rhymes, and add it to the science of spaced repetition,^[20] the formation of personalised habits,^[21] the timely feedback of self-testing,^[22] the discipline of drills,^[23] and the motivation of “positive affect” (i.e., whatever makes your study fun and interesting).^[24]

Now you’ve equipped yourself with a potent set of devices for memorising an ancient language. And dare I say, you may even find it fun!

^[1] You can read more about Foer in his book “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything” or watch his TED talk.

^[2] As Foer puts it: “At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention. We remember when we are deeply engaged. We remember when we are able to take a piece of information and experience, and figure out why it is meaningful to us, why it is significant, why it’s colorful, when we’re able to transform it in some way that makes sense in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds. We remember when we’re able to transform Bakers into bakers.”

^[3] Joshua Foer memorised the first and last names of 107 random faces in 15 minutes. He memorised 87 random digits in five minutes. He memorised a pack of playing cards in 1 minute and forty seconds which broke the US record.

^[4] Some might be thinking: you don’t have to approach language learning with vocab flashcards and paradigms. That’s true; there are other ways to learn languages. However, this isn’t the place to really delve into those conversations. There are lots of fascinating discussions and experiments happening in the world of ancient language learning, and it’s exciting to see so much vigorous energy directed towards finding better ways to teach languages. I’m all for gleaning the best strategies from “living language” approaches, and I use comprehensible input resources in my own classes. In the end, whether you learn a language through conversational practise, or through “grammar-translation” methods, there is one inescapable reality: the more time you spend attending to the language the more you learn it.

^[5] e.g. the abstract endings for Aorist Indicative verbs -σα -σας -σεν -σαμεν -σατε -σαν, [transliterated: sa, sas, sen, samen, sate, san]

^[6] As an aside, memory hooks can fail in one of two ways: a weak link from stimulus (e.g. a Greek word) to memory hook, or from memory hook to recall target (e.g. an English equivalent). For example, you might invent a memory hook for a Greek word that triggers every time you see the word, but then doesn’t reliably get you to the English sense. Alternatively, the hook’s link to the Greek word might be a little tenuous. I think the best thing to do in these situations is nip the problem in the bud: identify when a memory hook is weak and, first of all, try to modify it. Make it richer and more elaborate. If that doesn’t work, a new hook might be in order. If you’re crossing wires and confusing it with another memory hook, give some focussed attention to finding a way to remember the difference. This happened to be me recently with the Greek words for “no longer” (οὐκέτι; oukéti) and “not yet” (οὔπω; oúpō). I solved the problem by adding an an intentional “distinguisher” to my memory hook to help me to not confuse them.

^[7] On gestures and language acquisition (because it doesn’t really fit anywhere else in this article but I think it’s a cool study), Marion Tellier published the following: “The effect of gestures on second language memorisation by young children” Abstract (lightly edited to simplify jargon): “Twenty French children took part in an experiment. They had to learn words in a foreign language (English). One group of children were taught words with pictures and another group with accompanying gestures. Children in this group had to reproduce the gestures while repeating the words. Results show that gestures and especially their reproduction significantly influence the memorisation of second language words…. When reproduced, gestures…leave a richer trace in memory.

^[8] The city was founded by William Penn, a Quaker, who probably knew the name Philadelphia from Revelation (1:11; 3:7). There was more than one ancient Philadelphia, and there are different theories about their names, but the basic sense of “love” from “phil-” and “brother” from “adelph-” are undisputed.

^[9] I’m not talking here about your “learning style.” People often talk about “being a visual/kinesthetic/auditory/etc. learner.” This comes primarily from Gardiner’s Multiple Intelligences theory and is commonly referred to as “learning styles.” While this sort of thinking can help people study better, I don’t think it’s for the reason that people often think it is. The strength of Gardiner’s “multiple intelligences” research is overstated. The reason learning styles thinking helps teachers to teach better is that they start introducing variation into their teaching which is simply more interesting for learners. But, when (as this article says) people start putting themselves in learning style boxes, it becomes a problem. I think it sets up a false hope in people, as though their learning struggles are because the teaching method and their personal learning style aren’t aligned. “Learning styles” doesn’t solve a genetics problem (e.g. “I’m a kinesthetic learner, not a visual learner”) it solves a motivation and memory problem (e.g. “I would have stopped studying sooner but variation reduced boredom,” and “I would’ve had a weaker memory of this but I strengthened my memory hook by adding gestures/melodies/characters etc.”)

^[10] You’ll find three examples I developed here: memory hooks for non-indicative Greek verbs. There are three story phrases (one each for imperatives, subjunctives and participles) and a rap (for infinitives).

^[11] This student was in an unusual situation where he found out he had to sit the Greek 1 end-of-year exam in about 3 months’ time as an entrance requirement to his course. He had done a small amount of Greek many years earlier, but basically had to learn the entirety of Greek 1 in a few months. He would also be the first to tell you that he was not a “high-achiever” kind of student, not much of a reader, and not naturally drawn to learning languages. With diligence and our regular tutoring sessions, he not only passed but achieved a distinction.

^[12] Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin Books, 2012, chp 6. For further discussion on memorisation of Biblical Languages see: Merkle, Benjamin L., and Robert L. Plummer. Greek for Life: Strategies for Learning, Retaining, and Reviving New Testament Greek. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2017.

^[13] http://www.dannyzacharias.net/singing-grammarian

^[14] One caveat about songs and, in fact, any borrowed memory hook. Some resources will sequence their paradigms and grammar charts in different ways. When using any textbook or resource, be aware that they may structure things differently. The Singing Grammarian teaches some parts of verbs with a different system to our curriculum. I still found the resource helpful, and was able to filter the content to align with the college curriculum, but some may find the differences just introduce confusion.

^[15] Available on the LSS Greek 1 module under resources.

^[16] Although, for me personally, it was more the story phrases and character visuals than the spatial layout that aided my memory.

^[17] The Preposition House diagram is also available on the LSS Greek 1 module under resources.

^[18] For example, in the Greek noun declension paradigms, Genitive Plurals (-ων) form a matching horizontal line; Datives have some kind of iota; the Neuter Genitive and Dative rows copy the Masculine; the Neuter Nominative copies the Accusative.

^[19] On the value of rote-learning in combination with other learning strategies, check out this article about a woman who learned Russian through military schools and then applied the strategies of repetition and practice to learn mathematics and become an engineering professor.

^[20] On spaced repetition and flashcards: I used Memrise initially because of the gamification and collaborative memory hook features, but Anki is the Rolls Royce of pure spaced repetition flashcard software. I also recommend biblevocab+ if you want to add pronunciation and be able to target your vocab to a certain portion of the Bible, but the pronunciation features aren’t free.

^[21] For me, the walk from the station to College was a reliable time for flashcards.

^[22] You might like to check out Murray Vasser’s Greek and Hebrew quizzes, which come fairly close to the sorts of assessment used in our courses. Testing is a powerful learning tool. It helps you figure out what you do and don’t know, plus the effort of retrieval is the formation of stronger memory. Making feedback happen as quickly as possible helps, so I suggest doing exercises in a way where you alternate as much as possible doing an exercise then checking an answer, so long as this isn’t trading off too much wasted time in any sort of page switching.

^[23] I’m a fan of the “Purpose Games” website for creating any sort of quiz based on a table of information like a verb table.

^[24] Check out the excellent LGPSI by Seamus MacDonald for an easy Greek reader that uses the same method as Oerberg’s famous “Lingua Latina” along with comprehensible input methods. A student who knows just the alphabet can start reading chapter one and intuit the sense of the text—it feels a bit like magic and is a great motivation boost that also reinforces a feel for the basics of the language!

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