# Letter pairs/getting faster



## oneshot (Nov 8, 2016)

i know I'm sooooo slow. I want to get a little faster. With the goal of multi blind. My question is that my memo is so slow and I'm wondering if having a list of all the letter pairs will help. 
For example most of my memo time is spent figuring out what images to create. Let's say it's CB, in my head I might think "hmmm, CB can be cooking beans, or maybe cheetahs biting would be better"
But if I had letter pairs figured out CB could always be CaB (like taxi), so I see CB, think CaB and move on. 
So is it better to have letter pairs?


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## Daniel Lin (Nov 9, 2016)

oneshot said:


> i know I'm sooooo slow. I want to get a little faster. With the goal of multi blind. My question is that my memo is so slow and I'm wondering if having a list of all the letter pairs will help.
> For example most of my memo time is spent figuring out what images to create. Let's say it's CB, in my head I might think "hmmm, CB can be cooking beans, or maybe cheetahs biting would be better"
> But if I had letter pairs figured out CB could always be CaB (like taxi), so I see CB, think CaB and move on.
> So is it better to have letter pairs?



For now I'd recommend you stick to the same images every time, or use whatever you think of first. If you want to get into multi though, it is better to have 2 or more images per letter pair so you don't confuse different cubes. But you can start with one image per pair and then add more once you're comfortable with the ones you use

Also, don't use cooking beans or cheetah biting for CB. That's inefficient. Just use Cab (taxi) or Cob (corn) or Cub (bear). Make each letter pair as simple as possible


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## Berd (Nov 9, 2016)

CB = Cube!


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## Heart_Johnson (Nov 9, 2016)

I have a fixed list of pairs, but over time i've phased some pairs out because i've simply found better ones.
I use "cub" (like a baby bear) for CB, i've leeched most of my pairs off the speedsolving wiki. Over time you can recall each pair instantly, it'll become second nature.


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## RicardoRix (Nov 10, 2016)

I wrote a slightly strange esoteric program to help using letter pairs and generating a letter pair list.
https://www.speedsolving.com/forum/threads/letterpairs.56318/


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## YouCubing (Nov 11, 2016)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1krNPCl9c-Uj8s4XHefu1DWPYVGbA-MpbMk5Fp_UwYiw/edit?usp=sharing
a list of my pairs (I've kind of just gotten used to them after so many solves)
I use Speffz, that's why some letter pairs are missing
also keep in mind I use audio memo so a lot of these pairs won't work as images


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## Hammer (Feb 1, 2017)

Heart_Johnson said:


> I have a fixed list of pairs, but over time i've phased some pairs out because i've simply found better ones.
> I use "cub" (like a baby bear) for CB, i've leeched most of my pairs off the speedsolving wiki. Over time you can recall each pair instantly, it'll become second nature.


I think a fixed image for each pair is good and i am actually trying to make a list, but its not turning out well. I can't find an image for the letter pair AW, and the rest of my pairs aren't great either. Could you please post all your letter pair images beginning with A (Except AU and AK because my buffer is DF) to help me plz?


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## newtonbase (Feb 1, 2017)

Hammer said:


> I think a fixed image for each pair is good and i am actually trying to make a list, but its not turning out well. I can't find an image for the letter pair AW, and the rest of my pairs aren't great either. Could you please post all your letter pair images beginning with A (Except AU and AK because my buffer is DF) to help me plz?


Amy Winehouse for me. I've attempted a full list of people but I'm not there yet. 
This is an excellent resource http://peoplebyinitials.com


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## pglewis (Feb 1, 2017)

Daniel Lin said:


> Also, don't use cooking beans or cheetah biting for CB. That's inefficient. Just use Cab (taxi) or Cob (corn) or Cub (bear). Make each letter pair as simple as possible



I know this is an old reply and I'm literally just getting started with 3-bld but I wanted to add that it seems like the length of the word or phrase for my images doesn't matter so much as long as A) the image is vivid and B) the image maps back to a pair unambiguously (until my image list is cemented). The mental cost for me seems to just be the image itself and the links among them. 



Hammer said:


> I think a fixed image for each pair is good and i am actually trying to make a list, but its not turning out well. I can't find an image for the letter pair AW, and the rest of my pairs aren't great either



For AW I have A&W Root Beer (the logo is a good image for me) and "awoke". I'm trying to get actions/descriptions as secondary images while building my list because I find it easier to build a memorable story that way vs. trying to link noun-noun-noun-noun.


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## newtonbase (Feb 1, 2017)

pglewis said:


> I know this is an old reply and I'm literally just getting started with 3-bld but I wanted to add that it seems like the length of the word or phrase for my images doesn't matter so much as long as A) the image is vivid and B) the image maps back to a pair unambiguously (until my image list is cemented). The mental cost for me seems to just be the image itself and the links among them.
> 
> 
> 
> For AW I have A&W Root Beer (the logo is a good image for me) and "awoke". I'm trying to get actions/descriptions as secondary images while building my list because I find it easier to build a memorable story that way vs. trying to link noun-noun-noun-noun.


The PAO system would be great but there are so many to learn.


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## pglewis (Feb 1, 2017)

newtonbase said:


> The PAO system would be great but there are so many to learn.



Yeah, having an action and/or adjective as a secondary is my attempt at a compromise vs. strict PAO, which would require collecting even more images. Far too early to tell how effective I'll be with it.


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## newtonbase (Feb 1, 2017)

pglewis said:


> Yeah, having an action and/or adjective as a secondary is my attempt at a compromise vs. strict PAO, which would require collecting even more images. Far too early to tell how effective I'll be with it.


Intuition tells me that knowing one set of images very well beats having to think about 2 or 3 sets but I'd be interested in the view of people with more experience.


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## mark49152 (Feb 2, 2017)

newtonbase said:


> Intuition tells me that knowing one set of images very well beats having to think about 2 or 3 sets but I'd be interested in the view of people with more experience.


I'm not hugely more experienced but am of the opinion that there are more important things to focus on first, like having vivid, unambiguous images, being able to quickly and reliably form and recall scenes, having a good system of rooms or journey, etc. That all takes a lot of practice and refinement. Whether you really need extra images or a structured system like PAO is something I don't think you can really conclude without some experience without them first. You might put in lots of extra effort to learn a system that doesn't actually work any better, or doesn't help with whatever your real problems turn out to be. For example, it's good to have tricks and techniques to make sure you recall pairs in the right order from a scene. It's not hard to do that, especially when you learn from experience what kind of image combinations you are likely to mistakenly reorder. PAO addresses that same problem but is more constraining and to me seems like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Personally, I have concluded that I need a few extra images because I sometimes struggle when my main images are hard to combine together. For example if they are all people I might mix them up or recall the wrong people. So I am adding some extras, but not for all pairs. I'm also adding extras for parity letters and flips/twists since they come up more often.


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## abunickabhi (Feb 25, 2017)

I feel letter pairs get too cumbersome for 20+ MBLD attempts. Letter triads or letter quads should be tried.
Like instead of CB=cube , we can have cube=cube
cueb= cue ball
becu= because
and so on !
There are about 120000 possiblitities here which is equivalent to a language.


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