# Memorization... fast and effective



## piece popper (Dec 23, 2012)

I have only managed one successful BLD solve, and when I retry, it takes 30 minutes to memorize. Now, you might refer me to the memorry methods page, but, dang it, that place makes no since. Please, just post a good and easy memorization method, and explain it.


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## Noahaha (Dec 23, 2012)

Assign a letter to each corner sticker and a letter to each edge sticker. You can use the Speffz scheme if you want (in the wiki). Then learn to take any pair of two letters and make a word out of it. And then make sentences/images/stories with those words.


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## piece popper (Dec 23, 2012)

Well, I give letters to edges and corners according to theirs color orientation when they will be in the buffer position. Merely assigning letters is kind of different for me. Is there a way to memorize such letters (the story method works horribly for me, because I don't have a good imagination), alothough, the story method would work if someone could make a chart of combonations of two colors and their inverses and good words that involove them. Like, BR= brine, or something else.


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## BillyRain (Dec 23, 2012)

piece popper said:


> Well, I give letters to edges and corners according to theirs color orientation when they will be in the buffer position. Merely assigning letters is kind of different for me. Is there a way to memorize such letters (the story method works horribly for me, because I don't have a good imagination), alothough, the story method would work if someone could make a chart of combonations of two colors and their inverses and good words that involove them. Like, BR= brine, or something else.



Using the same words every time would not work at all. It would for one single solve, but after that discarding the memo to start a new one using the same words will be nigh on impossible. You need every memo to be as unique as possible. This is how it locks in. 

Use the same words and you will fine yourself thinking.. "brine.... oh wait.. was that the memo for the last solve.. orrr....... AAAUUGH F**K"


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## Noahaha (Dec 23, 2012)

piece popper said:


> Well, I give letters to edges and corners according to theirs color orientation when they will be in the buffer position. Merely assigning letters is kind of different for me. Is there a way to memorize such letters (the story method works horribly for me, because I don't have a good imagination), alothough, the story method would work if someone could make a chart of combonations of two colors and their inverses and good words that involove them. Like, BR= brine, or something else.



This is a bad system. Many people start off with it, but it is not effective. Almost everyone good or semi-good uses a letter scheme. You'll thank yourself for it.


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## UnsolvedCypher (Dec 23, 2012)

If you want a video explanation, this is a good one. If you want, you can use the edges method for the corners, rather than using his corner method.


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## piece popper (Dec 23, 2012)

Changing how I letter/# pieces really does help. Thanks. I can come up with some phrases that make since. One of them was "Dots in the Sune mean Prime." Not for non- cubers.


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## LarryLunchmeat (Jan 2, 2013)

I use the letter for each piece method. I find tailoring all the pieces to your own system much more efficient than assigning random letters to pieces. 

All of my edges are based around famous characters. Most are from video games or comic books as those are other interests of mine.
All of my corners are based around countries flags. Since corners have 3 colours, I found it rather difficult to find characters matching these colour schemes. Also I wanted corners to be a different variety from edges so it would be easier to differentiate during the memorization portion. Most flags have three colours so I went with that, although for some colour combos it was a real stretch finding flags that matched.

I'd also like to point out that I use characters and flags for lettering purposes only. I don't actually visualize the characters in a story. 

Here's my current system. It tends to change a lot once I find better fits. For example, I recently started using "C" for red/white edge. My red/white edge used to be "J" for Jason Voorhees but i found the letter "J" to be tricky to fit into words.

Blue/Red - (M) Mario
Blue/Yellow - (W) Wolverine
Blue/Orange - (H) Hobgoblin
Blue/White - (S) Staypuft Marshmallow Man
Orange/Yellow - (F) Flameboy
Orange/White - (G) Goomba
Red/White - (C) Carnage
Red/Yellow - (N) I have nothing good for this so I just assigned the letter "N" to this piece
Green/White - (T) Toad Man (mega man 4 ;o)
Green/Red - (R) Raphael
Green/Yellow - (L) Link
Green/Orange - (B) Blanka

Blue/White/Orange - (M) Marshall Islands
Blue/White/Red - (F) France
Blue/Yellow/Red - (C) Colombia
Blue/Yellow/Orange - (R) as far as I know, there is no flag with this colour scheme so I just assigned the letter "R"
Green/Orange/White - (N) Niger
Green/White/Red - (H) Hungary
Green/Yellow/Red - (B) Bolivia
Green Orange/Yellow - (S) Sri Lanka

There's a few things to watch for when assigning your own letters though. The first thing is to avoid using rare letters such as "Z" "X" and "Q" as they tend to be harder to fit into made up words. 
The second more important tip is to avoid using vowels. That way, it's easy to use three, four or even five letters per word rather than just two. 
For example if you get an edge combo in this order, "B,R,F,N,G" I would think of the word "Barfing." If you were to have a system with vowels, you wouldn't be able to assign this many letters to a word because you would lose track of which vowels are actual pieces and which vowels are just filler.

One last tip is choose your blindfold cube wisely. I really like the Zhanchi or MF8 Legend for regular speedcubing, but they are too fast and wild for my liking when blindfolded. I like a stable, more crunchy cube so I can feel every move happen when blindfold solving. That way I won't second guess if I did a 90 or 180 degree turn on that T-Perm.


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## Noahaha (Jan 2, 2013)

^do you use 3OP? Seems like you only have one image for each piece.


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## 5BLD (Jan 2, 2013)

After you've sorted yourself out in terms of a lettering scheme, actually coming up with a memo method is something very personal. Try making stories with the letters, or making objects, placing them along a set journey, or on set locations on your desk. You can even try doing pure letters, i know someone who's fast with memoing just letters. You can combine with with audio, or do visual memo by tapping.

What I do is quick stories (no set words, and varied number of letters per word) for edges, and visual or audio memo for corners, i.e. i just say the memo out loud, and can repeat it back.


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