The Art of Memory
Apr 15, 06:43 PM
In a couple of weeks’ time, I will be six months into my Chinese language learning, and so far it’s been a riot. Compared to my earlier attempts to make some inroads into Bulgarian for the previous novel (currently back at the forge where it is being hammered into what I hope will be close to its final shape…), the process of learning Chinese has not only been relatively painless, but has also been huge amounts of fun. This is not to say that I’ll be shooting the breeze in Mandarin any time soon – chatting about world politics and obscure points of Confucian philosophy, that kind of thing – but I definitely have a sense of steady progress; and this is, in part, due to the excellent resources available for learning Mandarin. I’ve become something of an addict over on skritter.com, and have also been hugely enjoying spending time over at Chinesepod, which is enormously impressive. This, coupled with classes down here in Leicester, and occasional meetings with a Chinese friends so they can entertain themselves with my woeful inadequacies as I attempt to stammer even the most basic of sentences, has meant that I feel that I’m getting somewhere, even if I’m not getting there that fast.
In terms of learning strategies, I’ve decided to make an early assault on learning a goodly number of characters (three thousand is the target for the first year or two), so that I can open up the possibility of making use of the huge amount of printed, written and online material that there is out there. And it is in connection with this – with a measure of scepticism – that I bought a copy of James Heisig’s controversial Remembering the Hanzi
However, at first glance the method sits rather uncomfortably. After all, some of the mnemonics seem to be so outlandishly absurd that they can feel like mental clutter. Take, for example, Heisig’s mnemonic for 朝 or “dynasty”:
Picture a great palace with a powerful emperor seated on a throne in its innermost court. To keep the Wizard-of-Oz illusion that this power is beyond question and beyond the understanding of the masses, the whole complex is kept shrouded in mist. How do they do it, you ask. On one side of the throne is a servant pulling on a cord to wave a gigantic fan back and forth. On the other, a servant with a long cord hooked on a corner of the quarter moon. When he pulls on it, the moon tilts over and spills out a month’s supply of mist that keeps the myth of the dynasty alive.
Eh? On the surface, this really doesn’t look very promising. Why bother with cords and outlandish stories, and the Wizard-of-Oz? Why not go straight for the jugular? Isn’t this just a massive waste of time?
But there is method in Heisig’s apparent madness, as there is in his advocacy of mnemonic methods. Indeed, mnemonics have a long and august tradition. Part of this tradition is explored in Jonathan Spence’s fascinating The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
Matteo Ricci was one of the early Jesuit missionaries to China, and drew upon traditions that stem from the ancient Greeks to develop his own highly sophisticated (and systematised) mnemonic method that helped him master Chinese to a degree that impressed even the literati of China at the time. Ricci’s method involved the construction of a “memory palace”, a sort of virtual building of the mind in which mnemonics, built around visual images, could be set. Once such a palace was constructed, it would be possible to remember entire texts by simply taking a stroll from room to room. So effective was this method that Ricci could quote whole texts in Chinese – not just from beginning to end, but also (because he was something of a show-off, it seems), in reverse from end to beginning.
It is interesting to ask why such undeniably powerful methods are no longer in favour. One reason is suggested by Spence himself, who discusses the English philosopher Francis Bacon’s denigration of mnemonic methods. Mnemonics, Bacon believed, simply clutter the mind. They were a species of imaginative extravagance that had no place in the system of knowledge of the sciences. Even if they worked, Bacon and his fellow opponents to mnemonics claimed, they were just a way of showing off, their astonishing effectiveness didn’t really mean anything. Clever, but only as a party trick. What is interesting is that Bacon’s objections to mnemonics are surprisingly close to the objections advanced against Heisig’s method – and, indeed, suprisingly close to my own initial scepticism. We are in this, perhaps, all heirs of Bacon. When looking at mnemonic methods, they seem – in their extravagance, in their tendency to rely upon stories and pictures rather than more abstract concepts – childish, over-the-top, and even slightly embarrassing. They do not fit with the kind of way that we are trained to use our minds these days.
However recent studies in memory have suggested that the imaginative extravagance of mnemonic methods mirrors rather closely the way the mind remembers, which might suggest that it’s time to rethink their usefulness. We do not remember things in the way that a filing cabinet “remembers” things: by slotting things into a rigid and logical schema. Instead, memory is a much more fluid affair, more metaphorical, more story-like, and more physical (it is no accident that many of Heisig’s mnemonics are strongly visceral, for we remember images associated with basic bodily sensation much more easily than those that are more literally disembodied).
Anyway, to come back to my progress with learning to write Chinese, so far things seem to be working well. I’m starting to be able to work my way through texts, along with a dictionary and a bit of patience. Those dense little squares of strokes are beginning to resolve themselves into recognisable patterns. And if at first working with mnemonics does not sit very well, and all of those stories seem like unnecessary diversions, I’m beginning to get a sense that, when it comes to the art of memory, it may be that the apparently most direct route is far from being the quickest.