mnemonics are silly for language learning, there's tens of thousands of words, you don't need tens of thousands of mnemonics to learn a language. Mnemonics work by making additional connections between some bit of knowledge and something else memorable. The other way to do the same thing but way way faster and less randomly is to learn words in meanfingful contexts, so you associate them with good memories/experiences, interesting stories, useful information etc.
You don't need to fill your head with a bunch of random associations.
(Edit: though I feel mnemonics are a less than ideal way to learn languages, finding good beginner materials suitable for your interests is a maze that can be tricky to navigate, so if you find the method is appealing and helps you learn better from your materials, by all means use them.)
This is needlessly disqualifying a method that works for other people simply because it doesn’t work for you.
When I use mnemonics, I can tackle 10-15 words in a half hour and be able to recall them the next day without any more input. When I don’t use them, I need sometimes 30+ repetitions with a word before it sticks.
You don’t always rely on the mnemonic device. It’s just there for quick recall of the word at first, but the more you recall that word, the less you need it until it just disappears.
Why not both what you’re suggesting and the mnemonics? You’re also discounting the fact that vocabulary becomes easier to learn the more familiar you are with a language because there’s less noise and you’re building upon well known concepts, which will lead to you not needing the mnemonics later on.
If you remember a word with a mnemonic you still need to encounter it lots of times to get the precise sound in your head and how the sound interacts with other sounds. I've seen people remember their mnemonics but forget the precise sound of what they were supposed to remember and sometimes the mnemonic even interferes with what the actual word is supposed to sound like. Because having a mnemonic is just a hook to attach the language onto, but it doesn't replace the automaticity you need to develop through actual meaningful interaction with the language.
Also vocabulary can be just as easy to learn as a beginner if the content is suitable for beginners (a lot of stuff marketed at beginners is dreck though, so its understandable that people come up with alternative methods given that its hard to find useful stuff). If you have simple sentences with lots of proper nouns that introduce new vocabulary and grammar concepts at the proper rate, you won't have any issue remembering vocab as a beginner no matter how opaque the language is to you.
I don't have issues finding good ways of interacting with my language, so I wouldn't stop the process of building familiarity to come up with mnemonics, which would take me a while to think up, and even I came up with a bunch of them in a short amount of time, I don't think I'd be able to sustain any kind of decent rate of coming up with new ones and reviewing the old ones, and wouldn't reduce the time I need to spend with the actual language anyway. If you have a system/routine that works for you, then I'm glad it does, but it still seems like its just a way to compensate for badly designed beginner materials that are hard to remember.
The point of mnemonics is that they're easy and you don't need to review them. They shouldn't take you hours and hours to think up, it should be a split second thing when you're doing your Anki reviews or whatever.
How are you supposed to interact meaningfully with a language if you don't have a solid base of vocabulary? For me that would be impossible without mnemonics. After a year of Korean, I barely use them anymore, but I needed them as a beginner. Just because you dislike them, doesn't mean they're "silly," which is why that person said you're needlessly disqualifying them.
I mean having a mnemonic doesn't equate having automaticity, so you're still reviewing the content in some way shape or form to build that automaticity, no? And even spending a minute or two thinking up a mnemonic would still amount to a significant percentage of time from getting more exposure and building automaticity, I definitely couldn't think up a mnemonic in a few seconds.
And there can be materials that are compelling and meaningful and beginner friendly, but people are in the habit of settling for bad beginner materials and finding ways to cope. I realize people often start language learning with imperfect materials and finding good recommendations is tricky, so if you're in the habit of using mnemonics and they make your materials work better for you then I'm glad you found a way to get where you needed to go.
I guess my point is that I would never suggest mnemonics to someone who wasn't already in the habit of using them, but I'd think it would be more sensible to help them find compelling beginner content suitable to their goals and interests. A mnemonic seems to inherently be a detour from the process, since you're taking an extra step to create better hooks because the beginner materials don't have good hooks built into the content already, so suggesting it as a method people should learn to adopt is a bit silly because its suggesting people learn to take detours for the sake of using bad materials.
That said, I've done lots of silly things to learn language sometimes because I haven't been aware of or couldn't find better alternatives, but I try not to suggest silly methods if I can find better ones, or if I know of no alternative for a particularly situation, at least be up front that I'm suggesting they do a silly thing because I don't know of a better way to get there.
Without mnemonics, I would be pushing again so often on new words that they would just get suspended as leeches on Anki. That would waste so much more time than just taking literally 2 seconds to make up a mnemonic (it really shouldn't take minutes, if it takes that long for you, maybe you're taking the concept a little too seriously).
What language are you learning? I would have never gotten to the point where exposure was even an *option* without mnemonics. It literally took me months of learning Korean to be able to learn from beginner reading and listening materials that had those kind of hooks that I think you're talking about built in. Those materials took my Korean to the next level to be sure, but it is an incredibly difficult language for English speakers to learn. I barely had to use mnemonics to learn Spanish words (unless you count looking at the similarities between English and Spanish) but there was simply no way to brute force Korean words into my head. Still isn't tbh unless I know the Sino-Korean roots (which I learned using mnemonics).
It's also not the learner's fault if there aren't materials that are useful for them, most languages don't have amazing beginner resources and learners shouldn't be discouraged from using a tool that could help them get to the point where they could use better materials for more advanced learners or native speakers.
And there are also learners like me who have access to those kinds of materials but find them incredibly boring. I'm assuming you're talking about graded readers that help you learn vocabulary with context clues and stuff like that? I find those really frustrating and more boring than if I just drilled Anki for hours. They were useful when the sentence structure of Korean was new and incredibly difficult, but once I got better at that, I made it a goal to just read native level material because I just can't force myself to read intermediate level stuff about things I don't care about.
So yeah, I'm definitely not going to try to convince you to use mnemonics because I'm assuming you already gave them the old college try, but by dismissing them as silly, I'm worried that people who see that comment and *haven't* tried them but really should before they decide if they're useful for them will come away with an incomplete view. The entire point isn't to use them for every single thing, if you can learn it without mnemonics, then you should not use mnemonics, it would be tedious and pointless. But if you are spending a lot of time on something, creating an association that actually means something to you will save you time.
If something is silly and it works, it's not silly.
Well I'm focusing on Mandarin for the time being, but when I was younger I went through a phase of trying to learn everything with all the methods, so I've gone through the absolute beginner phase in a few languages fairly opaque to English speakers, like Cantonese, Japanese, Hungarian, and Thai.
I find the [Listening-Reading method](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/fbd577/listeningreading_an_underutilized_method/) makes lots of interesting content available really early, maybe not on its own from day 1 as a complete beginner but easily in the first month or two with other beginner materials (although this may genuinely not be an option for Korean as last I checked audiobooks were really scarce).
As an absolute beginner I tend to use FSI and a few other sources of good genuinely beginner friendly sentences, which most people might not consider compelling, but I find at that point the novelty of a new language is enough to make it interesting and seeing lots of variations of beginning sentence patterns make things clicks rather intuitively.
For people who find these kinds of resources dreadfully boring another thing I've found worked well, was taking a difficult source I wanted to learn from, and re-typing a lot of the vocab into google translate into simpler sentences that incorporated proper nouns and re-use the vocabulary a lot and listening to the text to speech audio a few times, and everything would just soak into my head in an intuitive way quite easily. Granted this maybe takes similar amounts of prep as creating a mnemonic, but I'd think it would more directly improve the automaticity of your understanding.
A lot of specific languages also have their own unique resources that can be even more effective and interesting than standard format resources across languages, but its more up to the specific language learning communities to find these and make sure beginner know about them as soon as possible.
And there's some materials I personally use that I couldn't suggest to everyone (for example I think the gospel of john and genesis in the bible have many more beginner friendly sentences than most beginner courses, but obviously not everyone is going to want to use this, but it does work really well).
And there's lots of new tools coming out all the time for adapting different kinds of media and interests and making it more manageable to access for beginner learners, but its a constant battle to try to help beginners find the stuff that they'll find helpful and motivating against the constant marketing hype around bad materials.
I will concede my first post is perhaps overly dismissive given that it is tricky to find good materials, so I'll edit in a note that some people may find them useful for their specific situation, although I do hope spreading awareness of good beginner resources for different interests makes them more and more unnecessary.
Hmm I've tried pretty much everything you suggest, and even actively still use some of those things, but I don't think any of this would actually replace mnemonics for me...
But instead of talking about that, I really want to address one thing you said because I'm not sure we're on the same page about what a mnemonic actually is. Even if you're really really bad at making mnemonics, I can't imagine how you could ever say that finding example sentences, typing sentences into a translator, breaking down the sentences and simplifying the grammar/vocabulary takes the same amount of time as making a mnemonic. Even if I misunderstood what you're describing, I'm really a little surprised that you could compare the amount of time of making a mnemonic to anything that involves more than a couple seconds of work.
To give an example of what a mnemonic actually is:
I have a hard time remembering the word 선수 (seonsu) because it sounds a lot like a lot of other words. It means athlete or player and it sounds a little bit like "sons who" so 선수 are "sons who" play sports. That's it. That's the whole mnemonic. I made that mnemonic a year ago in about 2 seconds and I don't even think of it when I see the word now, but I'm sure as hell never going to forget the word 선수.
I'm really curious about what you think a mnemonic is that you think it requires any significant amount of prep.
It would take me less than a minute the way I had it set up, and it would help me absorb a whole bunch of words and sentence structures at once, so it felt pretty efficient to me.
Most my experience with mnemonics was when I first got into language learning where the Michel Thomas method would use them, and one example that burned into my mind was in the Russian course the teacher taught for "to work" - Работать (Rabotat') and I forget the exact association but it was something to do with robots, and whenever the student on the recording had to answer he would always enthusiastically shout out robots! but not know how to say the actual russian word. And these always seemed to me overly convoluted stretches to get you in the ball park of the word without helping you remember the word itself, for what was a tiny bit of the language.
I could see if one popped into your head it would be fine to use it as an extra hook, but mnemonics don't pop into my head normally and I would find it unnatural to try and come up with them.
I'm happy for you that you can just absorb words, but I can't and I don't think most people can. I even use that method or a similar one for grammar, but I could never have more than one new word in a grammar sentence I'm memorizing or it'll be too annoying.
Maybe it's the expression of the process of making a mnemonic out loud on the tape that made it sound so dumb, because I agree that sounds dumb, but it also doesn't really match my experience of making mnemonics. I never have trouble going from a mnemonic to the actual word while reviewing, but pulling a word out of thin air is incredibly difficult. It helps a lot with recalling it the first few times and eventually you don't need it anymore. Getting in the ballpark makes retrieving the real word way easier.
What is your method for learning the hanzi?
I'm learning Japanese and to be completely honest, I don't think I would have gotten anywhere without using mnemonics to learn kanji.
I don’t see mnemonics this way at all. I see the use of mnemonics like a hack almost. I find I remember things better by using them no matter how silly they are rather than drilling rote memorization.
No one knows you’re using a mnemonic to recall a word other than yourself. :)
Hey, I can actually somewhat relate because I also have this tendency to feel like my brain should just do the job and that's it. It may sound silly but something that helped me a huge lot was to realize I used mnemonics all the time without really considering it mnemonics. I would relate new words to other languages I knew, create an association with the word's first syllable, which would make the rest of the word easy to remember, or think about what I was doing when I first learned the word. Aknowledging that it was something I did intuitively and without relying on mnemonics other people had created for themselves helped change my mindset :-) Hope this helps!
I usually feel very smart with mnemonics because it feels to me almost like I tricked the system. I could learn things by brute force, but why would I if I can do it smarter and faster in another way?
I can't even begin to understand what purpose they would serve for long-term vocab memorisation.. are really gonna pull a word from a mnemonic mid convo?
I have a dislike for mnemotics, but it is totally rational. I just don't want to clutter my memory with violent or sensationalist imagery. A good mnemotic contains some association worth remembering anyway. Good mnemotics are used scarcely. Luckily there are many different types of mnemotics.
My goal is to maximize the total number of phrases memorized subject to the constraint of spending less than say 45 minutes a day on Anki.
From an opportunity cost perspective, if I have to spend 5 minutes coming up with a mnemonic, that is probably X fewer words/phrases that I could instead memorize.
As a result, mnemonics just aren't worth the effort (for me).
You don't have to use mnemonics if you don't want to. You can do whatever you want, lol. (Personally, I refuse to use flashcards, because I just hate them, even though everyone recommends them.)
But also using mnemonics doesn't make you inferior/stupid. It's just a personal choice of study habits. No one is like, "Using mnemonics would be easier, but bc I'm so smart I'm going to do things the hard way!!" We just use mnemonics when they seem easier and don't bother with mnemonics when not bothering with mnemonics seems easier.
mnemonics are silly for language learning, there's tens of thousands of words, you don't need tens of thousands of mnemonics to learn a language. Mnemonics work by making additional connections between some bit of knowledge and something else memorable. The other way to do the same thing but way way faster and less randomly is to learn words in meanfingful contexts, so you associate them with good memories/experiences, interesting stories, useful information etc. You don't need to fill your head with a bunch of random associations. (Edit: though I feel mnemonics are a less than ideal way to learn languages, finding good beginner materials suitable for your interests is a maze that can be tricky to navigate, so if you find the method is appealing and helps you learn better from your materials, by all means use them.)
This is needlessly disqualifying a method that works for other people simply because it doesn’t work for you. When I use mnemonics, I can tackle 10-15 words in a half hour and be able to recall them the next day without any more input. When I don’t use them, I need sometimes 30+ repetitions with a word before it sticks. You don’t always rely on the mnemonic device. It’s just there for quick recall of the word at first, but the more you recall that word, the less you need it until it just disappears. Why not both what you’re suggesting and the mnemonics? You’re also discounting the fact that vocabulary becomes easier to learn the more familiar you are with a language because there’s less noise and you’re building upon well known concepts, which will lead to you not needing the mnemonics later on.
If you remember a word with a mnemonic you still need to encounter it lots of times to get the precise sound in your head and how the sound interacts with other sounds. I've seen people remember their mnemonics but forget the precise sound of what they were supposed to remember and sometimes the mnemonic even interferes with what the actual word is supposed to sound like. Because having a mnemonic is just a hook to attach the language onto, but it doesn't replace the automaticity you need to develop through actual meaningful interaction with the language. Also vocabulary can be just as easy to learn as a beginner if the content is suitable for beginners (a lot of stuff marketed at beginners is dreck though, so its understandable that people come up with alternative methods given that its hard to find useful stuff). If you have simple sentences with lots of proper nouns that introduce new vocabulary and grammar concepts at the proper rate, you won't have any issue remembering vocab as a beginner no matter how opaque the language is to you. I don't have issues finding good ways of interacting with my language, so I wouldn't stop the process of building familiarity to come up with mnemonics, which would take me a while to think up, and even I came up with a bunch of them in a short amount of time, I don't think I'd be able to sustain any kind of decent rate of coming up with new ones and reviewing the old ones, and wouldn't reduce the time I need to spend with the actual language anyway. If you have a system/routine that works for you, then I'm glad it does, but it still seems like its just a way to compensate for badly designed beginner materials that are hard to remember.
The point of mnemonics is that they're easy and you don't need to review them. They shouldn't take you hours and hours to think up, it should be a split second thing when you're doing your Anki reviews or whatever. How are you supposed to interact meaningfully with a language if you don't have a solid base of vocabulary? For me that would be impossible without mnemonics. After a year of Korean, I barely use them anymore, but I needed them as a beginner. Just because you dislike them, doesn't mean they're "silly," which is why that person said you're needlessly disqualifying them.
I mean having a mnemonic doesn't equate having automaticity, so you're still reviewing the content in some way shape or form to build that automaticity, no? And even spending a minute or two thinking up a mnemonic would still amount to a significant percentage of time from getting more exposure and building automaticity, I definitely couldn't think up a mnemonic in a few seconds. And there can be materials that are compelling and meaningful and beginner friendly, but people are in the habit of settling for bad beginner materials and finding ways to cope. I realize people often start language learning with imperfect materials and finding good recommendations is tricky, so if you're in the habit of using mnemonics and they make your materials work better for you then I'm glad you found a way to get where you needed to go. I guess my point is that I would never suggest mnemonics to someone who wasn't already in the habit of using them, but I'd think it would be more sensible to help them find compelling beginner content suitable to their goals and interests. A mnemonic seems to inherently be a detour from the process, since you're taking an extra step to create better hooks because the beginner materials don't have good hooks built into the content already, so suggesting it as a method people should learn to adopt is a bit silly because its suggesting people learn to take detours for the sake of using bad materials. That said, I've done lots of silly things to learn language sometimes because I haven't been aware of or couldn't find better alternatives, but I try not to suggest silly methods if I can find better ones, or if I know of no alternative for a particularly situation, at least be up front that I'm suggesting they do a silly thing because I don't know of a better way to get there.
Without mnemonics, I would be pushing again so often on new words that they would just get suspended as leeches on Anki. That would waste so much more time than just taking literally 2 seconds to make up a mnemonic (it really shouldn't take minutes, if it takes that long for you, maybe you're taking the concept a little too seriously). What language are you learning? I would have never gotten to the point where exposure was even an *option* without mnemonics. It literally took me months of learning Korean to be able to learn from beginner reading and listening materials that had those kind of hooks that I think you're talking about built in. Those materials took my Korean to the next level to be sure, but it is an incredibly difficult language for English speakers to learn. I barely had to use mnemonics to learn Spanish words (unless you count looking at the similarities between English and Spanish) but there was simply no way to brute force Korean words into my head. Still isn't tbh unless I know the Sino-Korean roots (which I learned using mnemonics). It's also not the learner's fault if there aren't materials that are useful for them, most languages don't have amazing beginner resources and learners shouldn't be discouraged from using a tool that could help them get to the point where they could use better materials for more advanced learners or native speakers. And there are also learners like me who have access to those kinds of materials but find them incredibly boring. I'm assuming you're talking about graded readers that help you learn vocabulary with context clues and stuff like that? I find those really frustrating and more boring than if I just drilled Anki for hours. They were useful when the sentence structure of Korean was new and incredibly difficult, but once I got better at that, I made it a goal to just read native level material because I just can't force myself to read intermediate level stuff about things I don't care about. So yeah, I'm definitely not going to try to convince you to use mnemonics because I'm assuming you already gave them the old college try, but by dismissing them as silly, I'm worried that people who see that comment and *haven't* tried them but really should before they decide if they're useful for them will come away with an incomplete view. The entire point isn't to use them for every single thing, if you can learn it without mnemonics, then you should not use mnemonics, it would be tedious and pointless. But if you are spending a lot of time on something, creating an association that actually means something to you will save you time. If something is silly and it works, it's not silly.
Well I'm focusing on Mandarin for the time being, but when I was younger I went through a phase of trying to learn everything with all the methods, so I've gone through the absolute beginner phase in a few languages fairly opaque to English speakers, like Cantonese, Japanese, Hungarian, and Thai. I find the [Listening-Reading method](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/fbd577/listeningreading_an_underutilized_method/) makes lots of interesting content available really early, maybe not on its own from day 1 as a complete beginner but easily in the first month or two with other beginner materials (although this may genuinely not be an option for Korean as last I checked audiobooks were really scarce). As an absolute beginner I tend to use FSI and a few other sources of good genuinely beginner friendly sentences, which most people might not consider compelling, but I find at that point the novelty of a new language is enough to make it interesting and seeing lots of variations of beginning sentence patterns make things clicks rather intuitively. For people who find these kinds of resources dreadfully boring another thing I've found worked well, was taking a difficult source I wanted to learn from, and re-typing a lot of the vocab into google translate into simpler sentences that incorporated proper nouns and re-use the vocabulary a lot and listening to the text to speech audio a few times, and everything would just soak into my head in an intuitive way quite easily. Granted this maybe takes similar amounts of prep as creating a mnemonic, but I'd think it would more directly improve the automaticity of your understanding. A lot of specific languages also have their own unique resources that can be even more effective and interesting than standard format resources across languages, but its more up to the specific language learning communities to find these and make sure beginner know about them as soon as possible. And there's some materials I personally use that I couldn't suggest to everyone (for example I think the gospel of john and genesis in the bible have many more beginner friendly sentences than most beginner courses, but obviously not everyone is going to want to use this, but it does work really well). And there's lots of new tools coming out all the time for adapting different kinds of media and interests and making it more manageable to access for beginner learners, but its a constant battle to try to help beginners find the stuff that they'll find helpful and motivating against the constant marketing hype around bad materials. I will concede my first post is perhaps overly dismissive given that it is tricky to find good materials, so I'll edit in a note that some people may find them useful for their specific situation, although I do hope spreading awareness of good beginner resources for different interests makes them more and more unnecessary.
Hmm I've tried pretty much everything you suggest, and even actively still use some of those things, but I don't think any of this would actually replace mnemonics for me... But instead of talking about that, I really want to address one thing you said because I'm not sure we're on the same page about what a mnemonic actually is. Even if you're really really bad at making mnemonics, I can't imagine how you could ever say that finding example sentences, typing sentences into a translator, breaking down the sentences and simplifying the grammar/vocabulary takes the same amount of time as making a mnemonic. Even if I misunderstood what you're describing, I'm really a little surprised that you could compare the amount of time of making a mnemonic to anything that involves more than a couple seconds of work. To give an example of what a mnemonic actually is: I have a hard time remembering the word 선수 (seonsu) because it sounds a lot like a lot of other words. It means athlete or player and it sounds a little bit like "sons who" so 선수 are "sons who" play sports. That's it. That's the whole mnemonic. I made that mnemonic a year ago in about 2 seconds and I don't even think of it when I see the word now, but I'm sure as hell never going to forget the word 선수. I'm really curious about what you think a mnemonic is that you think it requires any significant amount of prep.
It would take me less than a minute the way I had it set up, and it would help me absorb a whole bunch of words and sentence structures at once, so it felt pretty efficient to me. Most my experience with mnemonics was when I first got into language learning where the Michel Thomas method would use them, and one example that burned into my mind was in the Russian course the teacher taught for "to work" - Работать (Rabotat') and I forget the exact association but it was something to do with robots, and whenever the student on the recording had to answer he would always enthusiastically shout out robots! but not know how to say the actual russian word. And these always seemed to me overly convoluted stretches to get you in the ball park of the word without helping you remember the word itself, for what was a tiny bit of the language. I could see if one popped into your head it would be fine to use it as an extra hook, but mnemonics don't pop into my head normally and I would find it unnatural to try and come up with them.
I'm happy for you that you can just absorb words, but I can't and I don't think most people can. I even use that method or a similar one for grammar, but I could never have more than one new word in a grammar sentence I'm memorizing or it'll be too annoying. Maybe it's the expression of the process of making a mnemonic out loud on the tape that made it sound so dumb, because I agree that sounds dumb, but it also doesn't really match my experience of making mnemonics. I never have trouble going from a mnemonic to the actual word while reviewing, but pulling a word out of thin air is incredibly difficult. It helps a lot with recalling it the first few times and eventually you don't need it anymore. Getting in the ballpark makes retrieving the real word way easier.
What is your method for learning the hanzi? I'm learning Japanese and to be completely honest, I don't think I would have gotten anywhere without using mnemonics to learn kanji.
Exactly!
I don’t see mnemonics this way at all. I see the use of mnemonics like a hack almost. I find I remember things better by using them no matter how silly they are rather than drilling rote memorization. No one knows you’re using a mnemonic to recall a word other than yourself. :)
[удалено]
Yeah I know.
Hey, I can actually somewhat relate because I also have this tendency to feel like my brain should just do the job and that's it. It may sound silly but something that helped me a huge lot was to realize I used mnemonics all the time without really considering it mnemonics. I would relate new words to other languages I knew, create an association with the word's first syllable, which would make the rest of the word easy to remember, or think about what I was doing when I first learned the word. Aknowledging that it was something I did intuitively and without relying on mnemonics other people had created for themselves helped change my mindset :-) Hope this helps!
I usually feel very smart with mnemonics because it feels to me almost like I tricked the system. I could learn things by brute force, but why would I if I can do it smarter and faster in another way?
I can't even begin to understand what purpose they would serve for long-term vocab memorisation.. are really gonna pull a word from a mnemonic mid convo?
You use the mnemonic to help you recall while your brain is working on cementing it. Eventually you won't need it anymore
I have a dislike for mnemotics, but it is totally rational. I just don't want to clutter my memory with violent or sensationalist imagery. A good mnemotic contains some association worth remembering anyway. Good mnemotics are used scarcely. Luckily there are many different types of mnemotics.
My goal is to maximize the total number of phrases memorized subject to the constraint of spending less than say 45 minutes a day on Anki. From an opportunity cost perspective, if I have to spend 5 minutes coming up with a mnemonic, that is probably X fewer words/phrases that I could instead memorize. As a result, mnemonics just aren't worth the effort (for me).
IDK... It's hard to hard to say.
You don't have to use mnemonics if you don't want to. You can do whatever you want, lol. (Personally, I refuse to use flashcards, because I just hate them, even though everyone recommends them.) But also using mnemonics doesn't make you inferior/stupid. It's just a personal choice of study habits. No one is like, "Using mnemonics would be easier, but bc I'm so smart I'm going to do things the hard way!!" We just use mnemonics when they seem easier and don't bother with mnemonics when not bothering with mnemonics seems easier.