How to memorize short lists (3-8 items)?

Anki Help
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I’m a law student preparing to study for a state bar exam. I have to memorize many short lists: duties of general partners, elements of crimes, exceptions to rules, etc. I guess an analogy for medical students would be symptoms or causes or treatments for a disease. Is there a better way to do this than to have a single card with the list on the back and the “What are the [items of the list]?” question on the front?

(I infer from the list of available topic categories that this topic may be too general for this forum. If so, my apology.)

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maybe useful: https://github.com/glutanimate/cloze-overlapper/wiki/Tips#dealing-with-lists-in-anki---an-algorithm

apart from this add-on: my general idea is to organize lists into hierarchical lists so that they are easier to remember and sometimes I make multiple cards, sometimes not.

usually you’ll also get a link to the “20 rules”.

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Thanks! cloze-overlapper looks great, but it’s stuck at Anki 2.1.26, there have been no releases for almost two years, and its developer – who was a hero contributor to the Anki community – has been silent since March.

I have seen the “20 rules”; “rule” 4 about chunking is my motivation with regard to the lists in question. So far, the best solution I’ve come up with is to create mnemonics – item 3.ii in glutanimate’s tips that you linked to. Mnemonic creation can be time-consuming, but so far it’s the best idea I have. So to narrow my question considerably–

What’s a good way to use a mnemonic for list members in Anki, other than cloze-overlapper? (I’m not entirely ruling out cloze-overlapper, but I’d like to find a way to avoid it.) One thought: mention that there’s a mnemonic, without specifying it, along with the question on the front, and highlight the use of the mnemonic integrated with the list on the back.

NB: I definitely need more education about the creation and use of clozes.

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Here you go, hotfix.

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Thanks! As a newbie I hadn’t gotten back that far on the subreddit. I will check out cloze-overlapper with the fix.

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I studied law myself and used this technique to great success: https://www.basiskarten.de/2015/11/04/aufbauschemata-auswendig-lernen-der-ultimative-guide/

Use https://www.deepl.com/en/translator to translate the article.

Basically you build a new word out of the name of the thing you want to remember and the starting syllables of the items in the list. Then you learn that new word.

It’s a slight variation of a technique that Richard Grey proposed in his work Memoria Technica in 1730.

Best of luck!

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Interesting; thanks! In comparing this method with forming a mnemonic word or phrase from the initial letters of the items, my initial impression is that it trades ease of memorizing the mnemonic for ease of producing the items from the mnemonic. This doesn’t imply that it’s an even trade; I can see how the syllables technique might be better. I will definitely do some experimenting!

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