By the way, as an extremely verbally-fluent nondyslexic person who was also an excellent choral singer, I can confirm the superpowers of singing versus talking. For example:
I can recite some Maori, Zulu, and a bunch of Hebrew, with only a vague idea what it means (I’m sure I once knew), because of a singing it in a variety of songs. (And like many singers I can recite large tracts of Christian liturgy in Latin; in fact to recite it in English I usually have to translate on the fly from Latin.)
I memorised about 140 digits of pi just by having Hard ‘n’ Phirm’s Pi Song on in the background and singing it; it took less than a week and almost no effort, if I recall correctly (and however many digits of tau 6.2831853071795864769252867665590 is took literally no effort, that was lodged in my memory after maybe two listens of Vi Hart’s Tau and I wasn’t even trying).
Similarly there were some tedious mathematical formulae (the line element for differentiating in spherical polar coordinates, for example) which I “drilled” into my head by making up some nonsense tune for them and then repeating it about three times.
Thoroughly underused technique for minimal effort parroting.
oh huh … It hadn’t occurred to me to use it for memorization. I should try that, considering I think I have subpar memory for non-narrative/non-logical information like strings of numbers. Good point!
Conversely, I think I have above average memory for narrative and logically coherent information like how things work or events that happened in the past. It feels like that type of information has a ton of “hooks” such that I can use one of a dozen of them to recall the entire package, while a string of numbers has no hooks. It’s like someone is asking me to repeat white noise. But phone numbers and codes and what not are that. Let alone trying to keep track of numbers on something like a graphics card or processor (I gave up).
Yup. This is how I learned German: found some music I liked and learned to sing it. I haven’t learned much Japanese, but there’s a bunch of songs I can sing (and know the basic meaning of) even though I couldn’t have a basic conversation or use any of those words in other contexts
By the way, as an extremely verbally-fluent nondyslexic person who was also an excellent choral singer, I can confirm the superpowers of singing versus talking. For example:
I can recite some Maori, Zulu, and a bunch of Hebrew, with only a vague idea what it means (I’m sure I once knew), because of a singing it in a variety of songs. (And like many singers I can recite large tracts of Christian liturgy in Latin; in fact to recite it in English I usually have to translate on the fly from Latin.)
I memorised about 140 digits of pi just by having Hard ‘n’ Phirm’s Pi Song on in the background and singing it; it took less than a week and almost no effort, if I recall correctly (and however many digits of tau 6.2831853071795864769252867665590 is took literally no effort, that was lodged in my memory after maybe two listens of Vi Hart’s Tau and I wasn’t even trying).
Similarly there were some tedious mathematical formulae (the line element for differentiating in spherical polar coordinates, for example) which I “drilled” into my head by making up some nonsense tune for them and then repeating it about three times.
Thoroughly underused technique for minimal effort parroting.
oh huh … It hadn’t occurred to me to use it for memorization. I should try that, considering I think I have subpar memory for non-narrative/non-logical information like strings of numbers. Good point!
Conversely, I think I have above average memory for narrative and logically coherent information like how things work or events that happened in the past. It feels like that type of information has a ton of “hooks” such that I can use one of a dozen of them to recall the entire package, while a string of numbers has no hooks. It’s like someone is asking me to repeat white noise. But phone numbers and codes and what not are that. Let alone trying to keep track of numbers on something like a graphics card or processor (I gave up).
Yup. This is how I learned German: found some music I liked and learned to sing it. I haven’t learned much Japanese, but there’s a bunch of songs I can sing (and know the basic meaning of) even though I couldn’t have a basic conversation or use any of those words in other contexts
I was low-key imagining you speaking German like Rammstein and then Japanese like Baby Metal.
My inner comedian not withstanding, that sounds awesome! _