Card Memorizer

link to Card Memorizer in the App Store

Card Memorizer will help you train the art of Memory and Recall. Like all good things worth learning this method requires practice, but after 20 miutes you’re well on your way to impress your friends and family.

Quick Start

Go to Settings and enable just one suit
Go to Persons and memorize the persons for that suit
Go to Dealer and swipe through the 13 cards
Imagine each person on a route through your house
Go to Recall and imagine going through your house again on the same route
Notice the persons you memorized in your house and choose the corresponding card

Principles

The key to remembering something is storing the information in a way, that makes it easy to remember. In fact when you store the information in this way, it will be hard for you to forget it.

Card Memorizer is built around three principles:

Each card is represented by a person or character
Each person has a related action
A sequence of cards is associated with a route

Persons

Each card is associated with a person, since it is much easier to picture Santa Claus than the King of Hearts. It can be a famous person, a fictitious character, or it can be someone you know personally. For your convenience Card Memorizer has a complete list of widely known persons. You can use this as is, you can change just a few, or you can build your own list from scratch. It is not important which persons are assigned to which card as long as they are characteristic enough for you to remember. When you have decided on a list of persons you should stick with it. Sticking with the same list will make it easier and easier to use this technique.

Actions

In order to add life to your visualizations and make room for more persons, each card should also have an associated action. Instead of visualizing two persons when memorizing two cards, you can visualize the person for the first card and the action for the other card. Most people find it easier to assign an action that relates to the person associated with the card. For instance if Three of Clubs is Sylvester Stallone the action of using a machine gun is easier to remember than knitting a scarf. If King of Hearts is Santa Claus handing out presents is easier to remember than kitesurfing.

So if you want to remember Three of Clubs and King of Hearts, you can picture Sylvester Stallone handing out presents. In Settings you can decide if you want the hints to alternate between persons and actions.

Routes

When visualizing the persons, it is important to do it in a way that makes recall easy. You do this by imagining the persons located along a route. For instance it could be a route inside your home. The route starts at the entrance, where the persons for the first two cards are located. Then it’s the kitchen where the next two persons are located, and so on until all the cards are represented along the route. When you want to recall you start at the entrance and go through your route noticing the persons along the way.

Since all this takes place in your imagination, you decide how close you want to place the persons. You decide the scale and could for instance create a route for all 52 cards on the kitchen table by visualizing the persons as very small.

The only part of this technique that requires a bit of work is remembering which cards are associated with which persons and actions. If that seems daunting at first, here’s a few tips:

Use a theme for each Suit (eg. Family for Clubs, Cartoons for Hearts, Movies for Spades, Literature for Diamonds)
Use characteristic and funny actions.
Practice each suit thoroughly before proceeding to the next suit.

Please drop us a line with questions, suggestions, and comments at Card Memorizer

Enjoy and remember to have fun!