I have the very same problem and, after a preliminary research and my experience from decades of studying against evil material and teachers meant for you not to pass (pulling all the possible tricks to make the material as hard and unnatural for memory as possible, including lots of ordered and unordered lists), Iām going to try with cloze filling for Anki cards like this:
Question 1: Which item is missing from this list?
- Apple
- Orange
- Lemon
- Olive (Item to recall, being blank in the question)
- Grape
- Peach
The answer being āOliveā
Question 2: Which item is missing from this list?
- Apple
- Orange
- Lemon (Item to recall, being blank in the question)
- Olive
- Grape
- Peach
The answer being āLemonā
And so on for each item in the list.
I need to test if this procedure helps with the keys to remember as much as possible from a list for my use case, these are my requirements:
-I need to recognize the items from the list, not from pure memory but to recognize them when reading them
-I need to remember its place in the list, as close as possible
-I need to get the feeling of the related items, which belong to the same list and not to another similar list
-I need to disregard items which donāt belong to the list, even if they are intentionally deceitful
-I need a procedure which doesnāt take forever to write and to test/practice with, because I need to study lots of lists
Disregarding deceitful but wrong items is what my use case needs the most (because I need to beat an evil procedure), I will post my results after testing.
For sane learning (i.e. for actual useful knowledge, not simply to defeat a process designed to make you fail), I think the better approach would be to try to link the items somehow, like following a story or recipe, and focusing on active recall for each step. Like in incremental steps like this:
Question 1: Which was the first item from the list?
- (Being blank in the question) Apple
The answer being āAppleā
Question 2: Which was the second item from the list?
- (Already in the question, to help you recall the next step) Apple
- (Being blank in the question) Orange
The answer being āOrangeā
After being comfortable with partial questions, you could also continue with advanced cards in which you need to recall all items, one by one and not just one, to test for ultimate mastery with the list.
Cloze would bring these very important advantages:
-Making cards is fast and systematic, you only need to do a card for each item from the list in which each item is blank. I didnāt try cloze plugins yet but you can probably just input a list and the cards will be automatically made
-Less taxing while studying and recalling than alternative methods for lists which are based on pure memory, because the other items would trigger your associative memory
-Easier to establish the link between items inside a list than alternative methods for lists, because you will always look at linked items
But if this actually helps to remember the list outside of the Anki practice scenario, at least for me and my use case, is something to be proved (which Iām going to test).
For me, mnemonics is too time consuming to make and to practice, I save it for fewer lists which I ABSOLUTELY need to remember. I think if I used mnemonics for many lists it might lose power as a technique because it wouldnāt be a special trick for a list, but if cloze doesnāt work for me it would be my next method to try.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. The best first step for anyone trying to do this is to figure out what you actually need to know from the list and how youāre going to need to produce it.
