Memory Palace

Hey folks, I recently came across what feels like a real treasure-trove of information about Chinese language, history, and culture, and wanted to share it here -

It started with a recent NYTimes article, "Secrets of a Mind-Gamer", in which the author, who professes to have no special talent for memorization, describes his journey from simply interviewing 'mental athletes' to actually participating in the USA memory championship. This article is definitely worth a read if you haven't done so already!

It caught my attention because I am preparing to take the Chinese medical license exam this summer, and in the past I have been hopeless at memorizing the vast number of 'herbal formula songs' (方歌) and quotations from medical classics that this exam requires. After using the "Memory Palace" method mentioned in the article to memorize five 'formula songs' with surprisingly little effort, I started searching online for more info about how to use this method specifically for memorizing Chinese-language material.

I came across descriptions of the book "The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci", which includes an account of how Ricci, a 16th century missionary who died in Beijing, used the ancient Memory Palace method of memorization to pass the imperial examinations. It looks like a really good read, but what interested me the most was that an Amazon review of the book mentioned a "Chinese-language treatise by Ricci on the mnemonic arts". What could be better than reading about a method for memorizing Chinese in the same language?

After a bit of searching, I was able to find a list of all of Ricci's works on Baidu (which I think is copied from the zh.wikipedia page), and it was easy to identify《西国记法》as being the one described in the Amazon review. PDFs of this work can be downloaded from various sites.

《西国记法》is written in 文言文, which is a struggle for me to understand, so a bit more searching led me to a Chinese translation of "The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci" called 《利玛窦的记忆之宫》, which, being written in modern Chinese, I find much more readable. Reading Ricci's original work is getting easier as the newer book gives me more of an idea of what he was talking about.

It is fascinating to read about Ricci's experiences in China at that time - quite inspiring - and the techniques that he shared in《西国记法》are quite useful for learning more Chinese!

Thoughts during lecture

A few thoughts I had while listening to a lecture this evening.

1. As regards 病因, there are two important things: first, which one is most important, and second, which one can the doctor change.

2. In CM, there are a limited number of 病因. 七情, for example. Nobody is going to discover an eigth 情! In WM, there is no limit to the number of 病因, and new ones (viruses, for example) are being discovered all the time.