"Controlled memorization, thank goodness, works brilliantly"
I am very satisfied with the course.
I have a lot of experience memorizing languages and laws and regulations, but I had never been satisfied with my recall of historical information and, in some cases, precise information (statistics, specifications, codes, English vs. metric measures, etc.), but after these first courses, these kinds of information no longer present problems. I have not found other memory systems to be useful in this regard, having tried the peg system and Dominic O'Brien's system. Whenever I found gaps or inconsistency in the exercises, an email always brought a rapid and helpful response.
Controlled memorization, thank goodness, works brilliantly.
One anecdote from "real" life: Last summer I decided to bike 350 km down the Danube from Passau to Vienna. At that point I was still hacking away at the First Database, and this trip -- already bought and paid for -- meant another break from getting through the DB. On the plane to Europe I used the time to create support images of a new, much bigger DB to cover the trip's daily routes, distances, historical dates of sites, names, etc. Not only did I finish the support image structure by the time I had landed, but I had also filled in items for my first two days and fixed them in memory.
Then, each evening I continued filling in as much as I could and reviewed those items the next morning at breakfast. I had all essential information for each day at my fingertips and rarely needed to refer to maps or the guidebook. It was unbelievably fun to bike this route and have a feeling of dejá vù, and an unexpected benefit was quickly being able to label and annotate all the pix I took after returning home. There's a moral here: When you have a personal stake in the material, applying the techniques goes really fast and efficiently. This personal DB was a genuine pleasure to master.
Needless to say, I am really looking forward to the rest of the course. I've already picked my language!
Daniel |