Mnemonics

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LostInSpace
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11 May 2007, 1:37 pm

Grimbling wrote:

I'm lost without mnemonics to remember lists of planets, chemical elements etc. Can't remember lists at all otherwise, unless I have to use them hundreds and hundreds of times. This might be partially because the early years of my education were spent in the then-fashionable system of not bothering children with trivial details like remembering the alphabet in the right order.

In IT in our last year of high school, for no readily explicable reason we had to remember a specific set of steps for problem solving, ie

1. Define the problem
2. Specify the solution
3. Design the solution etc etc... Yes, fairly straightforward stuff and pretty common-sense, but to pass the test we had to actually write it down in the exact words the teacher wanted. I could not remember it, so I came up with a very silly mnemonic: Do Such Deeds If Dogs Tell Everyone. It's the dumbest thing ever, but I passed the test.

That's what I use mnemonics for, when remembering specific steps that had to be written down exactly on the test. It really helps.

the-over-analyzed
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11 May 2007, 5:59 pm

Anybody remember this one from math?
We had a word 'SOHCAHTOA' pronounced kind of like SO-CA-TOE-UH.

richie
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12 May 2007, 12:07 pm

How about this one from electronics:
Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly.
And then there was ELI the ICE man.

Grimbling
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12 May 2007, 10:51 pm

the-over-analyzed wrote:

Anybody remember this one from math?
We had a word 'SOHCAHTOA' pronounced kind of like SO-CA-TOE-UH.

We had "some old hams can't always hide their old age" for that. It came in very handy for remembering the formulas... but then my numberblindness took over, and I couldn't do anything with the formulas... :oops:

9CatMom
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13 May 2007, 9:46 am

I took piano lessons, so I remember "Every Good Boy Does Fine," "Good Boys Do Fine Always," "FACE," and "All Cows Eat Grass." (Which I modified to "All Cats Eat Grass.")

I remember using a sentence about Siamese cats at one time. I can't remember what I used it for, however.

Saepius
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13 May 2007, 9:59 am

ChrissandraChrissamba wrote:

I agree. In my French class, we used to have to learn stupid songs and phrases to remember vocabulary and grammar rules.
...

Did you ever have DR MRS VANDERTRAMPP? Each letter is supposed to stand for one of the verbs that uses être as its auxiliary instead of avoir. I never found that useful in the slightest. First, you have to remember how to spell the thing. And then, you have to remember what each letter stands for - how can that possible be helpful, especially when some of the letters are repeated? I tend to find it easier just to recognise that a) most of the verbs are about motion and b) they mostly come in pairs, like naître (to be born) and mourir (to die).

LostInSpace
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14 May 2007, 12:32 pm

the-over-analyzed wrote:

Anybody remember this one from math?
We had a word 'SOHCAHTOA' pronounced kind of like SO-CA-TOE-UH.

Yup. Also "PEMDAS" to remember the order of operations.

LostInSpace
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14 May 2007, 12:40 pm

ChrissandraChrissamba wrote:

I agree. In my French class, we used to have to learn stupid songs and phrases to remember vocabulary and grammar rules.

In my Spanish class, we had to sing, "Oh oh oh oh oh, as, as, as, as, as, a, a, a, a, a, amos, an!" to remember verb endings for "ar" verbs.

We had all sort of songs in my Latin class to remember endings. The verb ending song was:

O S T, Mus, Tis, Nt sung to the "Mickey Mouse" song.

Then, the endings for the first three declensions were to "Frere Jacques", the endings for the fourth declension were to "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" and the endings for the fifth declension were to "Row, row, row your boat." Those were really helpful. Not so much the verb endings ones, because there wasn't as much to memorize.

richie
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14 May 2007, 2:12 pm

LostInSpace wrote:

the-over-analyzed wrote:

Anybody remember this one from math?
We had a word 'SOHCAHTOA' pronounced kind of like SO-CA-TOE-UH.

Yup. Also "PEMDAS" to remember the order of operations.

I remember it as "Please Remember My Dear Aunt Sally"
For: Powers, Roots, Multiplication, Division, Addition, & Subtraction.

Sapphires
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15 May 2007, 3:46 am

richie wrote:

LostInSpace wrote:

the-over-analyzed wrote:

Anybody remember this one from math?
We had a word 'SOHCAHTOA' pronounced kind of like SO-CA-TOE-UH.

Yup. Also "PEMDAS" to remember the order of operations.

I remember it as "Please Remember My Dear Aunt Sally"
For: Powers, Roots, Multiplication, Division, Addition, & Subtraction.

We use SOHCAHTOA too.
We use the British version of PEMDAS. We call it BoDMAS - Brackets, pOwers/roots, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.

Saepius
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15 May 2007, 8:44 am

We use BODMAS in Australia, too - the problem is that, while everyone agrees that B, D, M, A and S stand for brackets, division, multiplication, addition and subtraction respectively, everyone seems to have their own opinion about what the O stands for. I've heard that it's of (meaning implicit multiplication), that it's or (i.e. brackets, if present, or otherwise division, multiplication, division and subtraction) and that it's power. Personally I think it's just there because BDMAS would be stupid.

Noetic
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16 May 2007, 2:11 pm

walk-in-the-rain wrote:

Does anyone else get puzzled by mnemonics. I was watching a science channel and they are having people make up new mnemonics since Pluto is no longer a planet. Is it really that hard for people to memorize the order of the planets to begin with (lol). Is it honestly easier to remember a silly phrase. I saw the same thing when I was looking at psychiatric stuff - they have these things for people to memorize for personality disorders and other conditions. I find the shortcuts just confusing extra information that you would have to translate into the original defintion. It seems like an extra step.

Thank you!! ! I have been discussing this with my partner for a while, I just do not GET them! It's even harder for me to remember the word for the acronym, and then to get the connection between that word and what it stands for...

I wasn't even aware of acronyms until the end of high school, and never really got the hang of them since... (I actually thought the girl who told me about them was trying to take the pish when she explained them to me - I couldn't believe anyone would want to learn an EXTRA step!)

I am so happy that I've just read this!

Last edited by Noetic on 17 May 2007, 4:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

SolaCatella
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16 May 2007, 5:42 pm

My memory system is color/smell/motion based (can't explain it much better than that), so most list-based mnemonics don't work too well. About the only form of mnemonic I use is making a sing-song tune of whatever I'm trying to link so it fits better in my head. I do use a few in Latin for grammatical exceptions like Unus Nauta for the Naughty Nine adjectives and "she bleats as Brian dials" for present subjunctive verb changes (my class had fun coming up with mnemonics for that one; the other one I sometimes use is "Ben's ears have giant briars") plus a couple of the old math standards like PEMDAS and SOH-CAH-TOA, but that's about it.

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