I had a Hebrew teacher who assigned the following exercise on the first day of class: Memorize the alphabet backwards. Once the pupils knew the alphabet backwards and forwards, we were able to look things up quickly in the dictionary.
I became much more familiar with the Latin alphabet after I performed the following exercise: Type out every two-letter string, in alphabetical order. This was laborious because I didn’t know where the keys were on the keyboard; perhaps that contributed to its effectiveness.
I learned the alphabet very early (~2 years old), and when I was about 4 or 5, I learned how to say it backwards without referring to any outside cues. I can remember saying it backwards and really having to focus on visualizing the alphabet while doing it. It’s perhaps because of this forward-backward learning that I know the alphabet in the same way I know the digits 0-9. There is no process to create the list in my mind, it’s just there, permanently.
So, maybe practicing saying the alphabet backwards is a good memory aid. But also, visualizing the letters should also be helpful if you are able to visualize letters at all (some people aren’t).
Type out every two-letter string, in alphabetical order.
A similar method works for developing one’s ability at scrabble. The “two letter scrabble words” deck in Anki seems altogether too much like an exhaustive enumeration of permutations.
Inquiry seconded. I have a vague sense of whether certain letters appear early or late in the alphabet (I don’t need to sing to know that B comes before X) but for any finer-grained distinctions I need the song.
You could memorize the numeric values of the letters (A=1, B=2, … , Z=26); if you can figure out which number is bigger without counting, you can figure out which letter is later.
Disclaimer: I have not actually done this, because memorizing 26 separate, individually useless items is a pain.
I did this a few years back while bored at school, and it has actually been surprisingly useful.
I find the easiest and quickest way is to try to write the number in a way that makes it look like the letter; eg for H imagine drawing two lines above and below to make it look like an LCD 8. Using this I thoroughly memorized the letters’ numbers in about 15 minutes. You’d need to periodically rememorize to keep the numbers fresh, though.
Like D Malik, I did this as a kid. I managed to invent modular arithmetic as a game; the big insight for me was that, although I had originally set ‘Z’ = 26, it was also true that ‘Z’ = 0. I suppose that it was doing these arithmetic problems (for fun) that allowed me to actually complete the memorisation.
After deciding that counting should begin with 0, I’ve tried to relearn them, but it didn’t take (it’s easier to just add or subtract 1).
While the song helps to remember the specific order, in order, of the alphabet, I just went ahead and found patterns in the alphabet. Can you remember the vowels? What does the alphabet look like without them? What letters are between a and e? e and i? Which letter is in the middle of the alphabet? Knowing those answers (and others) helps break the entire string up into chunks that you can manage easily and cross reference unconsciously with the entire song memorized so you can recall the relevant information quickly and easily. The practice also familiarizes oneself with the alphabet itself overall and other connections and patterns will be recognized in an out-of-conscious manner.
Oddly enough, I seem to “just know” this automatically and extremely quickly. On the other hand, I am sometimes at a loss for a while when I have to do mental arithmetic.
I’ve never really thought about it before, but I’m pretty sure I “just know” as well, in most cases. I think there’s a bit of ambiguity from P through U, (if you asked me whether Q or T came first, I’d have to think about it for a second), so that suggests that certain parts of the alphabet are easier for my brain to sequence than others.
I also just know it, even with the same range (‘P’–‘U’) of uncertainty. (And yes, I’d composed enough of this reply before reading the parent comment that this is an independent datum.) I sometimes even mix up ‘R’ and ‘S’ after thinking about it. (I never go back to the song, although I certainly do know that too.) I have been known to touch-type the alphabet in order when checking out a new font.
This has been useful to me. As a teacher, I alphabetise papers before recording grades, and it’s handy to be able to do this quickly and correctly. (I’m pretty sure that I just knew it before I started regularly using that knowledge, however.)
I’ve never had the need to be very fine in detail, but I’ve always treated it a an ordered set (much like the numeric values that Benquo suggested, except without as much memorizing). Then I would compare the letter I want with M (being the 13th element, it serves as a useful midpoint), to decide if the element belongs to the first half or the second.
I suppose that doing something similar with the (6th or 7th) letter, and the (19th or 20th) letters could tell you what quadrant of the Alphabet space you were in. So if it comes before F, between F and M, between M and U, or after U, you can focus your attention there. That takes more analysis, but if you are normal in your memorization methods, maybe keeping the alphabet in chunks of 5 to 7 elements could really help your memorization.
Or you could be like Derren Brown, and just use a mnemonic to tie the letters to numbers… searching… he calls them peg words. I use it when jogging to keep track of distance, and he seems to have a way to memorize 52 elements, which could make 26 elements seem pretty trivial.
If you know the alphabet song, the melody naturally (at least to me) separates the alphabet into a few groups: ABCDEFG HIJKLMNOP QRS TUV WX YZ. This may be easier than memorizing divisions.
Although that’s not the only way to divide up the ABCs to sing it to the melody of Baa Baa Black Sheep. You can also do abcd efg hijk lmn opq rst uvw xyz. Took me ages to figure that out after I learned how to sing the alphabet backwards and realized that backwards there was no rushing part.
the melody naturally (at least to me) separates the alphabet into a few groups
It’s not just you! (And FWIW, it’s actually the rhythm: with the exception of W-X, the last letter of each group is held for at least twice as long as any of the others—four times in the case of LMNO-P.)
We don’t have an alphabet song where I’m from, but I simply remember the list of letters. I’ll just mentally recite “a, b, c, d, e...” very fast. If I need to do figure out what letter’s next after one somewhere in the middle I don’t need to recite all of it from the beginning, but I also don’t immediately recall the next letter; I just start reciting it a bit before, e.g. if you’ll ask me what’s after “N” I’ll do a very quick “m,n,o,p” in my mind and then say “O”. I’m not exactly sure how I pick the starting point, it’s automatic; it seems there are some “fixed” starting points for some reason (that come up often) and I usually pick the nearest one; for instance if you asked me what’s after “o” I’ll also start at “m”. Very rarely it happens that I start with a letter following the reference one, then I’ll stop after a few letters and try again with an earlier stop-point.
(I recite the alphabet mentally in my native language, and I suspect the rhythm of the syllables generates some break-points unconsciously, and they probably differ with language. Though I just tried it and it works in English too, it just seems like it takes a bit more time to “think of” a starting point; I wouldn’t be surprised if my brain did a two-way conversion before I could notice it.)
ETA: I just tried singing the song, and I noticed that after H or so I actually have to stop and do it “my way” very fast to remember what’s next. Apparently having to think of the notes (as I said, I’m not used to it sung) is enough to disturb the recall.
Also, this seems to be my an automatic method for memorizing lists; I have terrible memory and it’s very hard for me to memorize abstract things like names, numbers and dates, but the few that I do manage—a few phone numbers and the first 25 or so decimals of π—I remember as a quick list of individual digits. When I have to tell someone my phone number, for example, I’ll recite quickly digit-by-digit in my head and then pronounce it in a more common format (i.e. grouped into tens and hundreds). Similarly to the alphabet, if the translation to groups is slow enough (e.g. if I have to say it in French or something), I’ll start forgetting after a group or two and have to recite it mentally again to keep going.
We don’t have an alphabet song where I’m from, but I simply remember the list of letters. I’ll just mentally recite “a, b, c, d, e...” very fast. If I need to do figure out what letter’s next after one somewhere in the middle I don’t need to recite all of it from the beginning, but I also don’t immediately recall the next letter; I just start reciting it a bit before, e.g. if you’ll ask me what’s after “N” I’ll do a very quick “m,n,o,p” in my mind and then say “O”. I’m not exactly sure how I pick the starting point, it’s automatic; it seems there are some “fixed” starting points for some reason (that come up often) and I usually pick the nearest one; for instance if you asked me what’s after “o” I’ll also start at “m”. Very rarely it happens that I start with a letter following the reference one, then I’ll stop after a few letters and try again with an earlier stop-point.
Me too, and I seem to have a checkpoint at M too.
(I recite the alphabet mentally in my native language, and I suspect the rhythm of the syllables generates some break-points unconsciously, and they probably differ with language. Though I just tried it and it works in English too, it just seems like it takes a bit more time to “think of” a starting point; I wouldn’t be surprised if my brain did a two-way conversion before I could notice it.)
Fun fact: it takes me much shorter (not much longer than my usual reaction times) to translate the words for ‘left’ and ‘right’ across any two languages I know than to actually tell which side is which—I have to imagine I’m holding a pen and that’s the right hand, which can take as long as one second.
ETA: I just tried singing the song, and I noticed that after H or so I actually have to stop and do it “my way” very fast to remember what’s next. Apparently having to think of the notes (as I said, I’m not used to it sung) is enough to disturb the recall.
No problem at all with the song, but it’s still slower than the other way, by about a factor of 2. Also, I don’t have checkpoints with the song, I have to start from A. (Well, I have one at W but it’s not very useful.)
Also, this seems to be my an automatic method for memorizing lists; I have terrible memory and it’s very hard for me to memorize abstract things like names, numbers and dates, but the few that I do manage—a few phone numbers and the first 25 or so decimals of π—I remember as a quick list of individual digits.
Some strings of numbers I remember as sequences of digits spoken, others as sequences of digits written, others as a series of finger movements I make to type them—or in certain cases, to play them on a guitar if they were a tablature. (And I remember the digits of pi through the mnemonic “How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics”.)
OK, this is actually how I do it now. I shouldn’t have said alphabet song, because it’s really more of a list. However, I normally find that I have to start at the beginning.
I think I also do this for other common things: social security number, phone number, I think even spelling words.
For me, after a while, I think of a letter, say, ‘t’, and then know that ‘u’ comes next. I don’t need to sing ‘a, b, c d, e...’ and wait until I get to ‘t’ to know what comes next. Like indexing into an array rather than iterating through a list, if that comparison makes sense to you.
Study math; when mathematicians point letters to things, they typically do it alphabetically. For instance, if we’re naming functions, the first is f, the second is g, the third is h. Vectors go u, v, w, and variables go x, y, z. I’m sure there’s other triples that just aren’t springing to mind.
Anyway, I use triples for fine-tuning and a general sense to know the letters typically used for functions come after the letters typically used for constants, but before the letters typically used for vectors.
Wait; singing the alphabet song is still how I order letters. Is there a more efficient way?
I had a Hebrew teacher who assigned the following exercise on the first day of class: Memorize the alphabet backwards. Once the pupils knew the alphabet backwards and forwards, we were able to look things up quickly in the dictionary.
I became much more familiar with the Latin alphabet after I performed the following exercise: Type out every two-letter string, in alphabetical order. This was laborious because I didn’t know where the keys were on the keyboard; perhaps that contributed to its effectiveness.
I learned the alphabet very early (~2 years old), and when I was about 4 or 5, I learned how to say it backwards without referring to any outside cues. I can remember saying it backwards and really having to focus on visualizing the alphabet while doing it. It’s perhaps because of this forward-backward learning that I know the alphabet in the same way I know the digits 0-9. There is no process to create the list in my mind, it’s just there, permanently.
So, maybe practicing saying the alphabet backwards is a good memory aid. But also, visualizing the letters should also be helpful if you are able to visualize letters at all (some people aren’t).
A similar method works for developing one’s ability at scrabble. The “two letter scrabble words” deck in Anki seems altogether too much like an exhaustive enumeration of permutations.
Inquiry seconded. I have a vague sense of whether certain letters appear early or late in the alphabet (I don’t need to sing to know that B comes before X) but for any finer-grained distinctions I need the song.
You could memorize the numeric values of the letters (A=1, B=2, … , Z=26); if you can figure out which number is bigger without counting, you can figure out which letter is later.
Disclaimer: I have not actually done this, because memorizing 26 separate, individually useless items is a pain.
I did this a few years back while bored at school, and it has actually been surprisingly useful.
I find the easiest and quickest way is to try to write the number in a way that makes it look like the letter; eg for H imagine drawing two lines above and below to make it look like an LCD 8. Using this I thoroughly memorized the letters’ numbers in about 15 minutes. You’d need to periodically rememorize to keep the numbers fresh, though.
Like D Malik, I did this as a kid. I managed to invent modular arithmetic as a game; the big insight for me was that, although I had originally set ‘Z’ = 26, it was also true that ‘Z’ = 0. I suppose that it was doing these arithmetic problems (for fun) that allowed me to actually complete the memorisation.
After deciding that counting should begin with 0, I’ve tried to relearn them, but it didn’t take (it’s easier to just add or subtract 1).
While the song helps to remember the specific order, in order, of the alphabet, I just went ahead and found patterns in the alphabet. Can you remember the vowels? What does the alphabet look like without them? What letters are between a and e? e and i? Which letter is in the middle of the alphabet? Knowing those answers (and others) helps break the entire string up into chunks that you can manage easily and cross reference unconsciously with the entire song memorized so you can recall the relevant information quickly and easily. The practice also familiarizes oneself with the alphabet itself overall and other connections and patterns will be recognized in an out-of-conscious manner.
Oddly enough, I seem to “just know” this automatically and extremely quickly. On the other hand, I am sometimes at a loss for a while when I have to do mental arithmetic.
I’ve never really thought about it before, but I’m pretty sure I “just know” as well, in most cases. I think there’s a bit of ambiguity from P through U, (if you asked me whether Q or T came first, I’d have to think about it for a second), so that suggests that certain parts of the alphabet are easier for my brain to sequence than others.
I also just know it, even with the same range (‘P’–‘U’) of uncertainty. (And yes, I’d composed enough of this reply before reading the parent comment that this is an independent datum.) I sometimes even mix up ‘R’ and ‘S’ after thinking about it. (I never go back to the song, although I certainly do know that too.) I have been known to touch-type the alphabet in order when checking out a new font.
This has been useful to me. As a teacher, I alphabetise papers before recording grades, and it’s handy to be able to do this quickly and correctly. (I’m pretty sure that I just knew it before I started regularly using that knowledge, however.)
I’ve never had the need to be very fine in detail, but I’ve always treated it a an ordered set (much like the numeric values that Benquo suggested, except without as much memorizing). Then I would compare the letter I want with M (being the 13th element, it serves as a useful midpoint), to decide if the element belongs to the first half or the second.
I suppose that doing something similar with the (6th or 7th) letter, and the (19th or 20th) letters could tell you what quadrant of the Alphabet space you were in. So if it comes before F, between F and M, between M and U, or after U, you can focus your attention there. That takes more analysis, but if you are normal in your memorization methods, maybe keeping the alphabet in chunks of 5 to 7 elements could really help your memorization.
Or you could be like Derren Brown, and just use a mnemonic to tie the letters to numbers… searching… he calls them peg words. I use it when jogging to keep track of distance, and he seems to have a way to memorize 52 elements, which could make 26 elements seem pretty trivial.
If you know the alphabet song, the melody naturally (at least to me) separates the alphabet into a few groups: ABCDEFG HIJKLMNOP QRS TUV WX YZ. This may be easier than memorizing divisions.
Today I learnt that the two alphabet songs I was taught in age 7 pre-English aren’t at all what American kids learn.
(For the record, the slower one went: ABCDEFG HIJKLMN OPQRSTUV WXYZ, while the faster one was: ABCDE FGHIJ KLMNO PQRST UVWXYZ.)
And now you know what jokes about the letter “elemenopee” are referring to.
Although that’s not the only way to divide up the ABCs to sing it to the melody of Baa Baa Black Sheep. You can also do abcd efg hijk lmn opq rst uvw xyz. Took me ages to figure that out after I learned how to sing the alphabet backwards and realized that backwards there was no rushing part.
The alphabet song I learned (and Elizabeth is probably referring to) is to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star”.
It’s not just you! (And FWIW, it’s actually the rhythm: with the exception of W-X, the last letter of each group is held for at least twice as long as any of the others—four times in the case of LMNO-P.)
Even W-X is no exception, if you count syllable length instead of letter length.
We don’t have an alphabet song where I’m from, but I simply remember the list of letters. I’ll just mentally recite “a, b, c, d, e...” very fast. If I need to do figure out what letter’s next after one somewhere in the middle I don’t need to recite all of it from the beginning, but I also don’t immediately recall the next letter; I just start reciting it a bit before, e.g. if you’ll ask me what’s after “N” I’ll do a very quick “m,n,o,p” in my mind and then say “O”. I’m not exactly sure how I pick the starting point, it’s automatic; it seems there are some “fixed” starting points for some reason (that come up often) and I usually pick the nearest one; for instance if you asked me what’s after “o” I’ll also start at “m”. Very rarely it happens that I start with a letter following the reference one, then I’ll stop after a few letters and try again with an earlier stop-point.
(I recite the alphabet mentally in my native language, and I suspect the rhythm of the syllables generates some break-points unconsciously, and they probably differ with language. Though I just tried it and it works in English too, it just seems like it takes a bit more time to “think of” a starting point; I wouldn’t be surprised if my brain did a two-way conversion before I could notice it.)
ETA: I just tried singing the song, and I noticed that after H or so I actually have to stop and do it “my way” very fast to remember what’s next. Apparently having to think of the notes (as I said, I’m not used to it sung) is enough to disturb the recall.
Also, this seems to be my an automatic method for memorizing lists; I have terrible memory and it’s very hard for me to memorize abstract things like names, numbers and dates, but the few that I do manage—a few phone numbers and the first 25 or so decimals of π—I remember as a quick list of individual digits. When I have to tell someone my phone number, for example, I’ll recite quickly digit-by-digit in my head and then pronounce it in a more common format (i.e. grouped into tens and hundreds). Similarly to the alphabet, if the translation to groups is slow enough (e.g. if I have to say it in French or something), I’ll start forgetting after a group or two and have to recite it mentally again to keep going.
Me too, and I seem to have a checkpoint at M too.
Fun fact: it takes me much shorter (not much longer than my usual reaction times) to translate the words for ‘left’ and ‘right’ across any two languages I know than to actually tell which side is which—I have to imagine I’m holding a pen and that’s the right hand, which can take as long as one second.
No problem at all with the song, but it’s still slower than the other way, by about a factor of 2. Also, I don’t have checkpoints with the song, I have to start from A. (Well, I have one at W but it’s not very useful.)
Some strings of numbers I remember as sequences of digits spoken, others as sequences of digits written, others as a series of finger movements I make to type them—or in certain cases, to play them on a guitar if they were a tablature. (And I remember the digits of pi through the mnemonic “How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics”.)
OK, this is actually how I do it now. I shouldn’t have said alphabet song, because it’s really more of a list. However, I normally find that I have to start at the beginning.
I think I also do this for other common things: social security number, phone number, I think even spelling words.
For me, after a while, I think of a letter, say, ‘t’, and then know that ‘u’ comes next. I don’t need to sing ‘a, b, c d, e...’ and wait until I get to ‘t’ to know what comes next. Like indexing into an array rather than iterating through a list, if that comparison makes sense to you.
Study math; when mathematicians point letters to things, they typically do it alphabetically. For instance, if we’re naming functions, the first is f, the second is g, the third is h. Vectors go u, v, w, and variables go x, y, z. I’m sure there’s other triples that just aren’t springing to mind.
Anyway, I use triples for fine-tuning and a general sense to know the letters typically used for functions come after the letters typically used for constants, but before the letters typically used for vectors.