Memory Shortcuts

Through our years of learning English, there have been a lot of techniques that have helped us to remember important things that people teaches us. These techniques are known formally as mnemonic devices.
Also, we have been tested about our English knowledge all life with a lot of different of types of tests to measure different types of memory.
In the following paragraphs of this post we will tell you some examples about how much have this techniques influenced our English learning and memory work.
To begin with, there have been a lot of memorized rhymes and acronyms to help us remember stuff. An example of this is in our English IV - Student Book where they taught us the acronym FAN BOYS to remember the coordinating conjunctions that we must use in compound sentences. Other example is from a long time ago, when we were just little kids. In that time we learned about a Knuckle mnemonic for the number of days in each month of the Gregorian Calendar where each projecting knuckle represents a 31-day month, we've been using it all life and it's very useful.

Some guidelines to memorize stuff easily are mentioned next:
Pay attention and Noticing: This has been very important in our English learning, for example when we watch TV and we try to identify how they pronunciate words and which mistakes are made so we can learn from them. Like the exercise Alejandro told us to do with Sofia Vergara and Modern Family.
Encode information in more than one way: An example of this is from a long time ago too, when we were kids. We learned the alphabet with a popular song that helps us to remember the letters easily and is not a classic way of learning.
Add meaning: One example of this is finding keywords for every phonem in the English language, these words are usually something meaningful for our lives so they're more important to us and are easier to remember.
Use visual imagery: One example of this is remembering the symbols for every phonem like it were a picture, that way we can remember easily the sounds.
Take your time: Through our english learning we've experienced a lot of moments when we've realized that's better to separate a big block of information into smaller pieces and study each piece individually and between large breaktimes.

Measuring Memory

There are a lot of ways to measure memory and test our abilities in English. Some examples are mentioned next:

• Recognition tests: These tests tap the ability to identify information to which you were previously exposed. In our English learning it is very common to have tests that have multiple choice answers or true/false answers when we must match an stimulus with what we have stored in memory. They're simple and are helpful for us to make sure we know things and can remember them easily. One example of this is when a techer does an exam about vocabulary with multiple choice answers.
• Recall tests: These tap the ability to retrieve from memory information that is not currently present. Is like pressing a search button in our memory and try to construct knowledge. An usual example of these tests are those were we have to write essays. In those moments we have to construct knowledge and search for information that is not on the top of our minds. In English learning we've had to make a lot of essays where we've recalled information.
• Relearning tests: This type of researching on memory requires us to relearn information or tasks that we learned earlier but we don't remember. We will probably learn more rapidly the second time than the first one. An example of this is the alphabet song that helped us to learn the alphabet when we were little kids, at first we learned the song but when someone asked us about a single letter we didn't had it in the top of our mind so we had to relearn it to be able to know it singularly.