Some Mnemonic tips for the Tiger Mother
I heard the currently infamous Chinese “Tiger Mother” on the radio this morning, espousing her view that it is essential to go through a certain amount of rote learning of any subject or skill before you can go on to be creative with it. This actually seems to me to be, in general, not a...
Using memory techniques to design the perfect school
One of the things that’s very obvious is that the best schools are richly decorated by things relating to the kids themselves: photographs, paintings, project-work. Unlike the classroom on the right. A second obvious thing is how much schools-building has been going on in the recent past. All over the place, new 20 million pound...
Why is Mandarin so incredibly easy to learn?
This might seem like a rather unusual title, given the amount of time people devote to harping on about how impossibly hard it is to learn Chinese. But there really are a lot of reasons why Mandarin Chinese is in fact a very easy language to learn. I struggled with European languages through my school...
Never lose your keys again!
Memory, it’s said, rejoices in the unusual, the delightful and the socially unacceptable. Does the whereabouts of your keys fit any of these descriptions? No? Well there’s your problem for you. Almost everyone finds it difficult to recall where they’ve left their keys. There’s no doubt that it’s just much more difficult than recalling where,...
The Real Wordplay of Ah Q
Yesterday morning I finally got around to plucking 阿Q正传 (The Real Story of Ah Q) off the bookshelf and beginning to read it. This is probably the most famous novel of the great giant of 20th century Chinese literature Lu Xun, and being an eager sinophile I should by rights have read it years ago. Indeed it...
Britain’s Tiananmen Square?
I watched and read the reactions of press and public to the student protests against tuition fees in London in December last year with great interest. It seemed astonishing to me that, after just one day of students protests, there was talk of the police being powerless to tackle the demonstrators, and discussion of more...
Why does Memrise teach the meanings and pronunciations separately?
If you have just started to learn Chinese on Memrise, then the perfectly reasonable thought might have occurred to you, “Why does Memrise let me choose to learn either to read a character or to pronounce it? Can’t I do both?” It is a fair question, and one with (I think) quite an interesting answer....
Learn the US Presidents- with a memory walk
The method of loci is a famous memory technique that exploits our incredible spatial memory, borrowing its clarity and organization to help you learn totally unrelated information- sequences of ideas, objects or anything else. The best way to introduce yourself to this amazing spatial memory technique is to try it out in a real space. This is...
