The best way to memorize depends on what you're memorizing
A grocery list, 300 words of Spanish and a ten-minute talk need different techniques. Tell this page what you have to learn and it gives you the method that fits, step by step.
The best way to memorize depends on what you're memorizing. Use a memory palace or a story for lists and speeches, chunking for numbers, flashcards you answer from memory for vocabulary and exam facts, and plain-language explanations for ideas. Whatever you pick, test yourself from memory and repeat on growing gaps (a day, three days, a week). No technique lasts without that.
What do you need to memorize?
Pick one. You'll get the one or two techniques that work best for it, and how to do them.
A list or sequence A shopping list, steps in a process, events in order
- Memory palaceEvery item gets a fixed spot on a route you know, so the order comes for free.
- Story methodFaster to set up for a one-off list of 10 to 20 things.
- Pick a route you know well: your home, your street, your commute. Choose five to ten stops along it, in order.
- Turn each item into an odd, vivid picture and put it at one stop. Eggs smashed all over the doormat stick better than a neat carton.
- Walk the route in your head once, naming each item. Then walk it again without looking at the list.
- No route handy? Link the items into one absurd story, in order, and tell it to yourself twice.
To make it last: walk the route again from memory an hour later, the next day and three days later.
Words or vocabulary A new language, terms for a class, names
- Flashcards, spacedRecall plus spacing is the best-tested way to keep hundreds of words.
- Keyword imageA quick picture for the few words that refuse to stick.
- Make small cards: one word per card, with a short example sentence. Test both directions, word to meaning and meaning to word.
- Say the answer out loud before you flip. Sort the cards into "knew it" and "missed it".
- Go through the misses again before you stop. Then review on growing gaps: a day, three days, a week, three weeks.
- For a stubborn word, link its sound to a picture of its meaning. Keep it on the same schedule: the picture alone fades fast.
To make it last: ten to twenty new words a day is easier to keep up than a hundred on Sunday.
Facts for an exam Definitions, dates, causes, formulas
- Self-testing, spacedPractice testing and spaced practice were the two top-rated techniques in a large review.
- ElaborationAsking "why is this true?" ties each fact to something you already know.
- Sort the material first: group the facts under five to seven headings and learn the headings.
- Turn each fact into a question. For each one, also ask why it is true and answer in one sentence.
- Test yourself from the questions only. Mark the misses and start with those next time.
- Start a week or more before the exam, with shorter sessions on more days instead of one long one.
To make it last: enter your exam date in the review schedule calculator to space your sessions.
A speech or presentation A talk, a toast, a pitch, an interview answer
- Memory palaceEach section gets a room, so you always know what comes next.
- Rehearse from memorySaying it aloud without notes is retrieval practice for the whole talk.
- Don't memorize it word for word. Cut the talk down to five to nine key points, each a short phrase.
- Give each point a room on a route you know, with one image that stands for it.
- Rehearse out loud from the route, not from the script. Check the script after each run and fix only what you missed.
- Learn your opening and closing lines word for word, so you start and end cleanly.
To make it last: run it on different days rather than five times in one evening.
Numbers PINs, phone numbers, dates, constants
- ChunkingGrouping digits turns ten things to hold into three or four.
- Major systemTurns digits into words you can picture, for numbers you need for years.
- Split the number into groups of two to four digits, the way phone numbers are written: 415 829 3067.
- Give a group a meaning when you can: a year, an age, a time, a price.
- For numbers you need for a long time, use the major system: each digit is a consonant sound, and you add vowels to make words. 3.14159 becomes "meter tulip".
- If there are several words, place them on a memory palace route so the order holds.
To make it last: recall the number the next day and again a few days later before you rely on it.
Ideas from a book or course Concepts, arguments, frameworks, lessons
- Feynman techniqueExplaining it simply shows you exactly what you don't understand yet.
- Spaced questionsQuestions on a schedule keep the ideas, not just the feeling that you read them.
- After a chapter or lesson, close it and explain the main idea in plain words, as if to a curious 12-year-old.
- Where you get vague or stuck, go back to the source, then explain it again.
- Write three to five questions that ask why, how, or for an example, not just names and dates.
- Answer them from memory the next day, a few days later and a week later. Rewrite any you keep missing.
To make it last: see how to remember what you read for a full routine.
Every technique does one of two jobs
Memorizing is two separate problems, and most advice mixes them up.
Getting it in. Your short-term memory holds very little at once. In 1956 the psychologist George Miller put the limit at about seven items, and pointed out that it counts chunks, not letters or digits. Later work by Nelson Cowan suggests the real limit is closer to four chunks. Techniques like chunking, the memory palace, stories and acronyms all work on this side: they pack many small things into a few meaningful ones, and hang them on things you already know well.
Keeping it. Whatever you got in starts fading within hours. You can watch it happen on the forgetting curve. The fix is the same for every kind of material: pull it back out of memory before you look, and do that again after longer and longer gaps. That is retrieval and spacing, and it is why the chooser above ends every plan with a schedule.
Here are the two most visual "getting it in" techniques at work.
Chunking Same letters, fewer things to hold
Memory palace Five errands, five rooms, one walk
- Entry: eggs smashed all over the doormat. You step in yolk.
- Kitchen: the fridge is covered in stamps, every one licked.
- Living room: the sofa is built from batteries and buzzes when you sit.
- Study: basil grows out of the keyboard. The whole room smells of pesto.
- Bedroom: light bulbs hang from the ceiling like grapes, all switched on.
At the store, walk through your home in your head and the list comes back in order.
Below are the seven techniques worth knowing, roughly in the order you'll use them, each with a worked example.
Spaced retrieval: flashcards done right
This is the base layer under every other technique. Test yourself instead of rereading (active recall), and space those tests out over days and weeks (spaced repetition). In a large 2013 review of ten study techniques, John Dunlosky and colleagues rated only two as highly useful: practice testing and distributed practice.
Flashcards are the classic tool, and most people use them in a way that wastes half the benefit. The rules that matter:
- Answer before you flip. Out loud or on paper. Reading the front and turning it over is recognition, not recall.
- One fact per card. A card with four things on it gets "half right" forever.
- Keep the misses in play. A card you missed comes back at the end of the session, and sooner next time.
- Grow the gaps. A day, three days, a week, three weeks. The review schedule calculator gives you exact dates.
Card A: el ayuntamiento → ? Card B: town hall (in Spanish) → ? Add a sentence on the back: La boda es en el ayuntamiento.
Monday: you miss card B, see the answer, and get it right at the end of the session. Tuesday: right, after a pause. Friday: right. Next Friday: right, instantly. Its next review is in about three weeks. Four short looks, and the word is yours.
Chunking: fewer, bigger pieces
Chunking means grouping small items into bigger ones that mean something. You already do it with phone numbers: ten digits become three groups. Miller called this kind of recoding "an extremely powerful weapon" for fitting more into a small memory.
The most famous demonstration is a student known as SF (Steve Faloon), studied by Anders Ericsson and William Chase. His digit span started at about 7, an ordinary score. SF was a keen runner, so he learned to hear groups of digits as running times: 3492 became 3 minutes 49.2 seconds, close to the world record for the mile. After more than 230 hours of practice, he could repeat back 79 random digits. His short-term memory hadn't grown. His chunks had.
Chunking works for facts too. When Gordon Bower and colleagues showed people word lists organized into a clear hierarchy, recall was two to three times better than for the same words in random order. So before you memorize a pile of facts, sort it.
Thirteen names in a row is too many to hold. Three regions of four or five is easy:
New England (4): Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island
Middle (4): New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware
Southern (5): Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia
Learn the three headings first, then the members of each. When you recall, you check each group's count, so a missing colony is easy to notice.
The memory palace (method of loci)
You place images of the things to remember at spots along a route you know well, then walk the route in your head to get them back. The idea is old. The Roman orator Cicero tells the legend of the poet Simonides, who could name the guests killed when a banquet hall collapsed because he remembered where each one had been sitting. Cicero recommended places and images as a way to remember speeches.
It is also what the best memorizers use. When Eleanor Maguire's team studied ten people with exceptional memories, mostly top competitors from the World Memory Championships, they found no sign of exceptional intelligence or unusual brain structure. Nine of the ten used the method of loci for some or all of the tests.
Ordinary people can learn it. In a 2017 study by Martin Dresler and colleagues, memory athletes recalled about 71 of 72 words twenty minutes after studying them; matched controls recalled about 40. Volunteers with no experience then practiced the method of loci for 30 minutes a session, 40 sessions over six weeks. Their recall improved much more than that of people who trained on a different memory task or not at all, and the gain was still there four months later. A 2021 meta-analysis of 13 randomized trials found a medium-sized benefit overall, though the authors noted that many of the studies had a high risk of bias.
The animation above is a full memory palace.
Making it work: exaggerate (size, number, mess), add a sense (the yolk under your shoe, the smell of pesto), and use the same route every time so the stops become automatic. For a longer list, use a longer route, like your walk to work.
The story method (link method)
When you have no route ready, chain the items into a story, in order. Each item makes you think of the next.
In a classic 1969 study, Gordon Bower and Michal Clark gave people 12 lists of 10 unrelated nouns. One group made up a story for each list; the other just tried to learn the words. Right after each list, both groups remembered almost everything. The difference showed up at the end, when people had to recall all 12 lists: the typical story-maker recalled 93% of the words, the typical memorizer 13%.
The list: dog, violin, river, envelope, tomato, ladder, clock, feather, bus, key.
The story: A dog plays the violin so badly it falls into the river. It floats away on a giant envelope and crashes into a tomato the size of a house. It climbs a ladder up the tomato and finds a clock that sneezes feathers onto a passing bus, whose driver hands it a golden key.
Tell it once, then try to list the ten words from the story alone. Silly and physical beats sensible: the stranger each link is, the better it holds.
Acronyms, sentences and the major system
Short mnemonics are cues: they remind you what the items are and what order they go in. They don't explain anything, so use them for small, fixed sets that you already understand.
- Acronyms use the first letters. The Great Lakes are HOMES: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior.
- Sentences keep an order. "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos" gives the planets from the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
- The keyword method links a foreign word's sound to an image of its meaning. Be careful with it: Dunlosky's review rated it low, because it suits only some material and its benefits often fade quickly.
- The major system is for numbers. Each digit is a consonant sound: 0 s/z, 1 t/d, 2 n, 3 m, 4 r, 5 l, 6 j/sh/ch, 7 k/hard g, 8 f/v, 9 p/b. Vowels are free fillers, so any number can become words.
3.14159 → 3 1 4 | 1 5 9 → m-t-r | t-l-p → meter tulip.
Picture a tulip growing beside a meter stick, as tall as the stick. Learning the code takes an evening.
Elaboration: ask why it's true
Elaboration means connecting a new fact to what you already know. The simplest version is to ask "why is this true?" and answer it. Researchers call this elaborative interrogation, and Dunlosky's review rated it moderately useful: helpful across many kinds of facts, with less evidence from real classrooms than testing has.
It works because a fact with reasons attached has more ways back into your memory. It also tends to help most when you know a bit about the topic already, because the answer has to come from somewhere.
The fact: Venus is hotter than Mercury, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun.
Why? Venus has a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere that traps heat, a runaway greenhouse effect. Mercury has almost no atmosphere, so its heat escapes.
Now the fact isn't arbitrary. It is attached to something you know about greenhouse gases, and if you forget which planet is hotter, you can work it out.
The Feynman technique for ideas
Ideas from a book or a course aren't lists. You don't need the exact words; you need to understand the idea well enough to use it. For that, the Feynman technique works better than any mnemonic: explain the idea in plain words, as if to a curious 12-year-old, and notice where you get stuck or reach for jargon. Those are your gaps. Go back to the source, fix them, and explain it again.
Explaining from memory is itself a round of retrieval, so the technique does double duty: it checks your understanding and strengthens the memory at the same time.
First try: "It's the cost of the next-best alternative foregone." That is the textbook sentence. It doesn't show you understand it.
Plain words: "When you choose something, you give up whatever else you could have done with the same money or time. That thing you gave up is the real price. Going to a concert costs the ticket, and also the evening you could have spent working an extra shift."
Questions to keep: What is the opportunity cost of a free afternoon? Why can something free still have a cost?
Where sleep fits
In a 2016 study by Stéphanie Mazza and colleagues, 40 French adults learned 16 French and Swahili word pairs, then relearned them 12 hours later. One group learned in the evening and slept in between; the other learned in the morning and stayed awake. The group that slept needed about half as many attempts to relearn the words (about 3 instead of 6), and a week later recalled about 15 pairs to the other group's 11.
One study isn't a rule, but the practical version is easy: study in the evening, then test yourself the next morning before you look.
What doesn't work, and honest limits
- Rereading and highlighting feel productive and were rated low in Dunlosky's review. They make material familiar, which is not the same as being able to recall it.
- Cramming can carry you through tomorrow morning. The spacing research is clear that it fades fast after that, so anything you need next month needs reviews spread out.
- Nothing replaces review. A memory palace you never walk again fades like any other memory. If you want to know why you forget what you read, it is mostly this.
If your real goal is to learn a whole subject, not just hold facts, see how to learn faster.
Where Prismo fits
For a grocery list, a PIN or a toast, you don't need an app. The memory palace, chunking and the major system above are faster, and they need nothing but your head.
Ideas from books and courses are different. The plan for them ends with writing questions and answering them from memory on growing gaps. That last step is where most people stop, because writing good questions takes time and keeping track of when to review takes discipline.
I built Prismo to do that part. After a chapter, a course lesson, a podcast or an audiobook, you write or dictate a few lines in your own words, like the plain-words step of the Feynman technique. Prismo pulls out the ideas worth keeping and writes the questions: multiple choice, true or false, fill in the blank, short answer, and questions that connect two ideas. Your answers set the schedule: right answers wait longer, misses come back sooner. A few lines about opportunity cost become questions like this one:
A friend gives you a free concert ticket for a night you could have worked an extra shift. What does the concert cost you?
- Nothing, the ticket was free
- The pay from the shift you gave up
- Only what you spend at the venue
Comes back in 3 days, then a week later.
Sources
- Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97.
- Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114.
- Ericsson, K. A., Chase, W. G., & Faloon, S. (1980). Acquisition of a memory skill. Science, 208(4448), 1181–1182.
- Bower, G. H., Clark, M. C., Lesgold, A. M., & Winzenz, D. (1969). Hierarchical retrieval schemes in recall of categorized word lists. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8(3), 323–343.
- Bower, G. H., & Clark, M. C. (1969). Narrative stories as mediators for serial learning. Psychonomic Science, 14(4), 181–182. Results as summarized in Reysen, M. B., & Fischer, Z. H. (2026). Adaptive memory: Story processing improves recall performance. Evolutionary Psychology, 24(1).
- Cicero, De Oratore, Book II, 86–88: the Simonides story and the method of places. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy supplement on ancient imagery mnemonics.
- Maguire, E. A., Valentine, E. R., Wilding, J. M., & Kapur, N. (2003). Routes to remembering: The brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience, 6(1), 90–95.
- Dresler, M., Shirer, W. R., Konrad, B. N., Müller, N. C. J., Wagner, I. C., Fernández, G., Czisch, M., & Greicius, M. D. (2017). Mnemonic training reshapes brain networks to support superior memory. Neuron, 93(5), 1227–1235.
- Twomey, C., & Kroneisen, M. (2021). The effectiveness of the loci method as a mnemonic device: Meta-analysis. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(8), 1317–1326.
- Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
- Mazza, S., Gerbier, E., Gustin, M.-P., Kasikci, Z., Koenig, O., Toppino, T. C., & Magnin, M. (2016). Relearn faster and retain longer: Along with practice, sleep makes perfect. Psychological Science, 27(10), 1321–1330. Summary: Association for Psychological Science.
