A memory palace for language learning

A memory palace, also called the method of loci, is the technique memory champions use. You picture a place you know well, like your home or your walk to work, and leave each thing you want to remember somewhere along the way. To recall them, you walk through the place in your mind.

Why places work

When researchers scanned the brains of people who win memory competitions, they found nothing unusual in their structure. Nearly all of them were using the same method, placing things in places they knew (Maguire et al., 2003).

Ordinary people can learn it too. In one study, people with no memory training practised the method of loci for six weeks. Their recall of a word list went from about 26 words to 62, the gain was still there months later, and their brain activity had shifted towards the champions’ (Dresler et al., 2017).

Using a memory palace for vocabulary

The classic memory palace is built for lists in order: a shopping list, a speech, a deck of cards. Vocabulary is harder, because you need to recall a word from its meaning, in any order, for years. Learners who use palaces for words usually combine them with a memory hook:

1. Choose a place you know well, and pick spots in it: the front door, the sofa, the kitchen sink.
2. For each word, make a scene with a sound-alike hook. Bota (boot) sounds like “boat”: picture a big boot sailing along like a little boat.
3. Put the scene in one of the spots, and make it interact with what’s there: the boot floating in your kitchen sink, full of washing-up water.
4. Review the words later, ideally on a spaced schedule, so the scenes don’t fade.

It works, but it’s a lot of effort per word, and a single palace fills up fast. The research on palaces for vocabulary is also thinner than for lists: most studies are small or short-term.

A lighter version: same sound, same place

To use places for thousands of words, choose the place by the word’s sound. Every word that starts with the same sound happens in the same place you know. Words starting with “sh” might all happen in your shed; words with “m” in your mum’s kitchen.

Then the place does two jobs. It gives each word’s scene somewhere real and personal to happen, and it’s a clue to how the word starts. When you remember the scene, the place reminds you of the first sound.

This version is our own design, and it hasn’t been tested as a whole. The parts it’s built from are well supported: places you know as memory cues, scenes where things interact (Wollen et al., 1972), and pictures that relate to you (Symons & Johnson, 1997).

How Flashfriend does it

In Flashfriend you pick your places once: one place you know for each starting sound. Every new word’s scene then happens in its place, with a sound-alike hook drawn in and the tone or gender colour on it. Flashfriend paints each picture, so you don’t have to hold the whole palace in your head, and you’re tested on each word just before you’d forget it. Once you know enough words, you read them in sentences with one new word each, and grammar arrives one pattern at a time.

See all the memory techniques behind every card, or read about memory hooks.