www.NakedScience.com

Copyright Michael Curtis ..2007..

Alphabet and Alphabet Letter Pairs

Alphabet in General

I use 26 images to represent the letters A to Z, and 26 images to represent lower case letters A-Z. I do not cover the lower case in this online course but here are the words/images which I use to represent upper case letters of the alphabet:

A is for Apple
B is for Beer
C is for Clock
D is for Dragon
E is for Edge (like the edge of a cliff; imagine the edge of a cliff)
Tip: Imagine a chunk of the cliff: just a section from the top - 
it is easier for me to picture it in different imaginary situations that way.
F is for fence
G is for Gas canister
H is for Harp
I is for Ink
J is for Jump
K is for Keg
L is for Lens
M is for Mug
N is for Negligence
O is for Ogre (a type of giant)
P is for Prig
Q is for Quick - get-rich-quick schemer image
R is for Rigid - like a window frame which should be rigid.
S is for Cigarette - well the 'C' sounds like 'S'...
T is for Togetherness
U is for Ungainly
V is for Vagabond
W is for Wag - a wagging tail of a dog
X is for eXaggerate - eg. Pinnochio or a particular liar or an exaggerated item - like an overrated trophy
Y is for Yoga
Z is for Zig-zag path of a wasp

Alphabet Letter Pairs

I also have images for representing pairs of letters (upper case). This helps me in many memory challenges where a pair of letters can symbolise items which need to be memorised. eg. If I am memorising a page of text, a word beginning with 'mo' can be represented by its obvious image (eg. the moon can be imagined as the moon) or by using the 'MO' image word [molasses] because 'moon' begins with 'mo..'. This is especially useful when a word is novel and I do not have an obvious image for it.

I can learn my AA-ZZ images as people or creatures. When I think of a word such as 'MOlasses' [representing MO], I can thinking of a person who I already connect with molasses instead of visualising molasses themselves. I know a pop song where the singer mentions molasses in a song; so I can imagine that female singer to represent MO. I even considered trying to use people images for all of the AA-ZZ images. The reason for that is that people or actors can be imagined doing actions to people or objects: it helps stories to build up when there is a person involved. Besides, I nowadays use people to represent 000 to 400; so it seems consistent to use people for 401 to 999. Besides imagining people, I can imagine creatures too such as a humanoid aardvark.

The numbers on the left are a possible 3-digit code that each image can represent. These 676 numbers go from 400 to 1076. In March 2006, I decided that I will represent 3-digit numbers in this way. The first 366 images will be represented by images of people which also represent days of the year. 000 will be my 29th February image and 001-365  will be images for other dates in the year. 366 - 400 will be represented by some common 3-letter combinations such as 'SHA'. This strategy is not obviously as easy as the method of typical memory course books but I am going to use it because, in the long term, it will be powerful for memory tasks and assist me with calendar mathematics. You can see now why flash cards are so important to me - they will assist me to learn a relationship between a long number and a single image.