Memorization Techniques: Remembering Forever!

This final article will be an explanation of the VERY best way to memorize something in the fastest amount of time possible and to remember it for months or even years. One great way that you can use this memorization technique is to easily learn a language. 

Still with the example of learning a language in mind; imagine you learn a new word in Dutch and after memorizing it you wait one day and review it again. If instead, you waited a day or two longer, you might have still been able to recall it but with much more difficulty. Either way, after a while your memory of that word will decline if it is not reviewed. This is obvious but it is called the forgetting curve.



Your memory forgets exponentially, so with trying to remember a vocabulary word, the time closest to when you learned it, is when you are able to recall it quickest. Even though at first you can recall the word quickly if you don't review it, then you will also be forgetting the word the fastest at that time (that is the time closest to when you learned it). As more and more time passes you forget what you learned slower and slower.

You can see this being demonstrated in the graph above.

Now the question becomes of how you should retain this memory without practicing everything you need to learn every 5 minutes. The secret of this question lies in one factor which I didn't go through yet.

This is called spaced repetition and refers to the fact that after each time you review something you retain the information for a longer period of time and that is declines slower. You can see this being demonstrated in the graph below which shows the memory going up to 100% percent after every time the information is reviewed and the rate of forgetting slowing down. 

In order for this to work well you must first review after one day, then after 2 days, then after 3 days, and slowly increase the time in between of reviewing what you need to learn. Eventually you will only need to review once every few months and be perfectly capable of easily remembering any information. If in the beginning you forget the information you can restart this cycle and the next time around you will surely remember.

You might have just realized how simple this all sounds but the complexity of learning the information will depend on more factors such as: the difficulty of the material, how meaningful it is to us, how the material was learned, and even physiological factors such as stress and sleep.

In summery, forgetting happens most quickly closest to the time the information was learned and it slows as time passes. The more it is reviewed, the longer we can remember it, and faster we can pull it from our long-term memory.

You can practice this with flash cards and have them organized on your desk. If you are actually trying to learn a language then you can probably find a good app and do this on your tablet or smartphone. Knowing this knowledge of spaced repetition can severely increase your efficiency in trying to learn and maintain information for long periods of time.

If you want to know exactly how you should pick out the times in between repetitions and the best ways to actually memorize the information in order to began all of this, or if you want to master and know all this information in much greater detail in order to improve the way you retain information for long periods of time for the rest of your life, then I would strongly suggest you check out my previous article about The 4 Best Memorization Books on the market (book #4 in particular is about this topic).