This process sounds needlessly complicated and elaborate at first, but it benefits from converting a difficult association (between arbitrary sounds and a new meaning) into a few links that are much easier to associate and remember. With practice, each conversion of this type may take only fifteen to twenty seconds, and it really does help with remembering foreign-language words. This particular kind of mnemonic works for this purpose, but there are others that work for remembering lists, numbers, maps, or sequences of steps in a procedure. For a good introduction to this topic, I highly
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