How to Use Memory Palaces for Long-Term Vocabulary Retention

From Concept to Practice

In the previous article of this series I outlined what a memory palace is. Here I explain how I actually lodge foreign-language words in a palace, and what construction rules I follow so those words stay put for years. My approach is pragmatic. I start with a clean list; I verify meanings in authoritative sources; I design compact, memorable scenes that encode five or six items at a time; then I walk those scenes along a route I know by heart. The result is a navigable, durable inventory of vocabulary—reviewable at will, without software, in sequence, and in full.

List First, Palace Later

The first step is to draw up an alphabetical list of the terms I want to learn. The longer the list, the more adjacent entries share initial syllables—useful for grouping. The principles of this method gradually emerged as I was learning Sanskrit. Below is the beginning of a lexicon that exceeds a thousand entries. As you might have understood by now, my native language is French, hence the French translations:

• निभ/wTsl: ressemblant, semblable, similaire (ifc.)
• निभृत/wTsl: porté ou déposé, caché, secret/cmt:> भृ = porter [attendre भृ p. 764]
• निमित्त/wTsl: signe, présage – cause, motif, raison
• निम्न/wTsl: profondeur, dépression, cavité, creux
• निर्झर/wTsl: une chute d'eau, une cataracte, un torrent de montagne, une cascade
• निश्/wTsl: nuit

A few quick explanations about this list:

• Legend: “wTsl” stands for word translation, “cmt” for commentaire (these field boundaries used to feed card generation in Anki).
• Transliteration of the five Sanskrit words: nibha / nibhṛta / nimitta / nimna / nirjhara / niś.
• The first word of this list doesn't coincide at all with the beginning of the dictionary. The reason is that I had learned previous words through other means (Anki, previous memory palaces, aborted experiments).

Authoritative Sources Only

During collection, I use sources I trust for both form and sense. Apple’s Dictionary app exposes excellent references for many languages. When a language isn’t covered, I deliberately hunt for the standard work—one that breaks entries down by sense and illustrates them copiously. For Sanskrit, the venerable Monier-Williams was the obvious choice. Mining it took time, but its philological rigor proved priceless, as it allowed me to exclude items from strata earlier than the epics—the genre that motivated my study. I made local exceptions to the alphabetical rule by lumping together cognates thanks to the etymological indications in each entry.

When I capture a meaning, I add minimal but decisive disambiguators: a likely object for a verb; a concrete noun for an adjective; a typical domain if needed. The final definition should omit no major sense and be clear enough to stand alone. Example entry, maṅgala, illustrating this idea:

• मङ्गल/wTsl: bonheur, félicité – chose auspicieuse (e.g., bon présage, prière, bénédiction, festival) – un bon travail

I feared “chose auspicieuse” (auspicious thing) might feel vague later, so I embedded a few canonical examples from Monier-Williams.

Scope: Manageable by Design

Painstakingly traversing a thousand-page dictionary to harvest everything it contains sounds intimidating. But if I drop transparent compounds whose meanings are obvious from prefix + root + suffix, the number of items to actually learn shrinks to a few thousand—a mere fraction of the total content of the Monier-Williams. It’s substantial, but tractable. I stress-tested the method on Sanskrit because I wanted both the challenge and the evidence. In most cases, though, empirical accumulation is wiser: let reading seed the list.

Recently I had to learn Modern Greek. Thanks to Ancient Greek, I could read literature quickly. A few months of reading yielded several hundred candidates; I then sorted them alphabetically. The result is similar to a disciplined dictionary harvest, with two bonuses: I read authors I care about, and I watch the Greek language in action. Both pipelines have merit. You can chase butterflies across a field with a net, or you can study pinned specimens at the museum. I alternate, depending on goals.

From Lexicon to Scenes: the keyword method

Once this exciting phase of collection ends (or pauses), I compose memorable scenes that each encode five to six words. I then place those scenes along a familiar route through a real place—my palace. Because I will review with no external support, a crucial precaution is to attach a rebus, an emblem to each word: an image that fuses signifier and signified, cuing both phonemes and meaning

In practice, I search languages I know for near-homophones, then stage the things denoted by these homophones so the target term (in Sanskrit or Greek) pops into mind as soon as I visualize the emblem. Psychologists call such cross-lingual pegging the "keyword method"¹. Under the name "magnetic memory", it is a core principle of Anthony Metivier's approach. Breaking a word into syllables and building associations around each one is a very old technique indeed²:

Memoria verborum is remembering every word of a segment of text by associating each syllable with a particular visual cue [...] Such techniques are a form of word-games and charades puzzles; they are described in an early fourth-century text of sophistic fragments called Dissoi logoi (literally ‘‘Double Arguments,’’ a Greek Sic et non), where one is advised to make rebus-like associations to remember names and unfamiliar or difficult words. Thus to remember the name ‘‘Pyrilampes’’ one may associate each syllable with an image, for example, a fire (pyr) and something shining (lampein).

Applying the keyword method

Take निम्न (nimna), quoted above. It sounds like English hymn but means “depth, hollow.” I picture a cantor singing a hymn at the bottom of a cave—problem solved: sound and sense fused. I repeat for neighbors in the list. Two ominous crows will represent निमित्त (nimitta), “sign, cause”—one imitates the other. I place the birds inside the same cave carved for निम्न (nimna). Slowly the scene sharpens.

When it feels solid enough, I set it in the Jardin des Plantes, right after the previous station—say, beside the small gate of the wallaby enclosure. During review, a quick mental stroll through that corner suffices: I see the five or six emblems, decode, and recover each Sanskrit word.

Why Alphabetical Order Helps

Ordering by initial letter makes recital and recall smoother, because grouped words usually share the first syllable, or at least the first phoneme. The more exhaustive the list, the smaller the acoustic gap between neighbors. In Greek, where reading feeds the lexicon, I wait until I have several hundred items, so that once they are ordered from α to ω, the distance from one to the next remains short. Tight bricks make a stronger wall.

What This Is (and Isn’t) vs Anki

Palace work is of a very different kind than Anki (see my take on the pros and cons of flashcards). All the crucial effort happens in me: tracking bilingual puns, weaving surreal scenes out of cross-linguistic fabric, and plotting a daily revisited route. Instead of letting an algorithm interrogate me on its schedule—with failure resetting intervals in ways that feel correctional—I invest heavily to build and maintain a structure I control.

Flashcard review can be oddly brittle and frustrating: miss one card, and the interval collapses; some items never stabilize, others never wobble. Cards hang by a thread, bound to snap one day or another. Outside the allotted minutes with Anki, I cannot deepen the mesh between items I “know.” Engagement with the process of memorization is much lower. With the palace, I can recite whole stretches any time, strengthen weak links on the spot, and enjoy the simple satisfaction of sequential mastery.

To sum it up, I find that, with Anki, one cultivates a more superficial relationship to vocabulary. A palace requires the dedication of the whole mind. It is an inner cabinet of curiosities to which one returns with delight, whereas Anki is an external chest, filled with jewels I no longer think about once I’ve closed it for the day.

Construction Rules I Actually Use

• Chunk size: 5–6 items per scene. More bloats imagery; fewer wastes loci.
• Phonology first: Choose rebuses that cue initial consonants and vowels, then the rest; avoid images that only convey meaning.
• Concrete anchors: Prefer tangible objects and actions to abstractions.
• Distinctiveness: Exaggerate size, motion, texture, or emotion; bland images fade.
• Separation: Keep neighboring scenes a few steps apart along the route; avoid visual bleed.
• Housekeeping: Keep a detailed index so I can jump to any section on demand and mend memory lapses easily.

My Review Protocol

• Encoding: Build one scene; rehearse it in isolation until it plays smoothly.
• Integration: Walk the last three scenes together; ensure transitions stick.
• Consolidation: On the next day, traverse all scenes that still feel "freshly painted" before adding new material.
• Compression: As scenes harden, they take seconds to scan, freeing time to add more.
• Weekly sweep: I try to tour the full palace once a week. The loop is fast and pleasant, not punitive.

Why It Works for Me

The palace gives me what flashcards never quite delivered: a comprehensive inventory I can recite in order. I walk it often—sometimes in full, more often in segments—until I reach an easy weekly cadence. The feeling is palpable control in lieu of statistical reassurance. I can point to the shelf where a word lives and take it down.

In the next series, I’ll show how I use AI-generated illustrations to stabilize these scenes and accelerate encoding.