Many parents might have such an experience: children do not want to study or are afraid of the subject of integrated humanities, especially history, which comes with a huge amount of contents to be memorized.  Their academic results were always poor.  Even if children were willing to study hard, they were largely discouraged by the massive contents of the names of persons and places, years and so on.  Not only did the efficiency of their study drop considerably, but children also got a plight while studying the subject.

Have parents or their children ever thought of any skills to help memorize the huge amount of historical contents without difficulties?  Taking the subject of Chinese history as an example, the history of Wu Hu Uprising and Sixteen Kingdoms in North China was a period full of confusion and complexity.  There were a lot of country names, for example, Former Qin, Later Zhao, Western Liang, Southern Yan, Later Liang, Former Yan, Later Qin, Northern Liang, Later Yan and so on, which seem not to be associated with one another.  When children study this chapter, they will be very much confused.  However, we can be able to change such a long list of names from a disorderly and unsystematic status to the one with certain regularity by a mnemonic chant as follows:

FIVE LIANG (Former, Later, Southern, Northern and Western),         

FOUR YAN (Former, Later, Southern and Northern),

THREE QIN (Former, Later and Western),

TWO ZHAO (Former and Later),

ONE HAN Plus ONE XIA.

According to the mnemonic chant following FIVE LIANG in the brackets, we can memorize the country names as Former LIANG, Later LIANG, Southern LIANG, Northern LIANG and Western LIANG; for the line of FOUR YAN with a similar mnemonic chant, the country names can be memorized as Former YAN, Later YAN, Southern YAN and Northern YAN; a point to be noted here is that the missing word of "Western" is now used in the line of THERE QIN, which can be memorized as Former QIN, Later QIN and Western QIN; TWO ZHAO is memorized as Former Zhao and Later Zhao according to a similar mnemonic chant; as for the bottom line, we can just simply memorize both HAN and XIA to complete the task.

This is a kind of interesting and effective memory skills for studying.  I have successfully used this method to help my form one student to memorize all these country names without difficulties in less than ten minutes.  It should be noted that each time when I asked the student to tell me all the names, he could easily achieve the task without seeing any information.  Because all these names have become a list of mnemonic chants, which can be memorized easily and rapidly on a long-term basis, which is not comparable by a short-term memory which can be lost easily.

Another example is the Six Ministries system of the Tang Dynasty, namely the Ministry of Lì(meaning personnel), the Ministry ofHu (revenue), the Ministry of Lĭ(rites), the Ministry of Bing (defense), the Ministry of Xing (justice) and the Ministry of Gong (works).  If you keep repeating of reading out these names in this sequence until you are very familiar with and accustom yourself to them, then you get your own mnemonic chant.  One student asked me if this was only a type of enforced memory.  Of course, not.  I did a simple experiment with the student immediately, asking him to read out the names of the six ministries not in the sequence with which he was very familiar with.  Although all the names were what he was familiar with, he could hardly read out all of them smoothly. 

This experiment proves that any information can be memorized easily and rapidly for a long term as long as such information can be changed into a sample mnemonic chant which your tongue can accustom itself to.  Don’t believe?  You can try another example, such as the names of the Five Dynasties in North China, namely Later Liang, Later Tang, Later Jin, Later Han and Later Zhou (hint: you can just delete all the “Later”words to change them into your own mnemonic chant); or the names of the Southern Dynasties in South China, namely Southern Song, Southern Qi, Southern Liang and Southern Chen (all the names can be changed into a mnemonic chant after all “Southern”words are deleted). 

The memory skills of these mnemonic chants can help memorize a huge amount of information very effectively, thus enabling you to enhance your short-term memory to a long-term one easily and considerably on a much faster pace.  With such skills, my students not only improved their memory but also increased their efficiency in study much more than before.

(If you have any inquiries about this article or would like to arrange a tutorial class, please contact Andrew So, the writer via email: info@education-ladder.com)

ANDREW SO,                                                                                                                 

Master of the CUHK & Teacher of History, Geography and Liberal Studies