Quote:

Took me the longest to remember idiophone, remembered the I and that bottle capped instrument and always was of the opinion it’s an idiotic instrument and couldn’t remember the word
Alex



Hi Alex,

Before getting back to quote, here is little bit of context for me writing this:
I have worked on memorizing some stuff that is very useful for my job (one of the tasks I do is teaching presentation/demonstration skills workshop). So, I used ABC lists as a key aid in holding the whole structure of the course I teach in my head, just to be on top of things. ABC list ended up with having 5-10 entries for almost all letters except odd ones (w, x, y). As said by Vera in course, isolated facts without context offered little value in this form (after all, there were more than 200 key words to remember).

So plan B was to make this familiar to me by creating a story from it. I’ll skip whole strategy of creating efficient story, but let me say this: I ended up with story completely familiar to me (and memorized ;-), and it takes me now less than a 5 minutes to tell it in whole, and in it include all 200 key words. It took some 3 days actively working on the story + few next weeks re-telling it couple of times per day, but in the end I got whole course structure in that little story. And since this is one day course (more than 7 hours of theory, exercises, and participant demonstrations/presentations) which I hold often, this effort was extremely beneficial for me.

Now let me get back to quote above. Reading that immediately reminded me of my experience about creating story for the course. When I look what you said and that is:
  1. word you had trouble with is idiophone
  2. you used this expression to describe it: an idiotic instrument

… I have immediately thought of Idiotic Phone. Combining bolds you have Idiophone. And here is short explanation how I have no problem remembering this now: Picture ordinary glass (as a cup) one tries to use as a phone. You put glass over your mouth and use it as speaker of phone. But, now you have a vacuum situation, and sound cannot go anywhere, because the glass is blocking your mouth. So using glass in this way wouldn’t make particularly useful phone, right? One could even call it idiotic Phone in a manner of speaking.

And there you go. Although my explanation (just last part for idiotic phone I am talking) took close to 10 sentences, now I need just about 1/10 of a second (or less) to picture a glass over my mouth used as a phone, and with that I can remember Idiophone at the same moment.

Don’t know if this helps to anybody, but I thought without sharing it will help nobody, right?

Take care,
L2I