The essence of the memory tips in his book involves the use of pictures in whatever it is you wish to remember.
Why are pictures effective as mnemonic devices?
The memory of certain experiences can be so powerful they can stay with you a lifetime! One says when remembering such experiences that it is seen in their “mind’s eye” and it is so vivid that a common phrase is, “I remember as if it happened yesterday.” Actual memories are incredibly durable. This is especially true when your emotions are involved. Etched in peoples’ minds in my generation is the exact moment they heard President Kennedy was shot or for most Jews and many others, when they heard that the Western Wall in Jerusalem was liberated in 1967.
I still remember the parking space we stopped at when I was traveling with my brother, Walter, in his Mustang to our classes at the University of Miami when we heard the news that the Israelis had captured the Wall. He had to turn off the highway and stop the car, from the emotion of the moment. I still remember it vividly.
At the time my sister, Linda, was in Israel for her junior year of college and we found out later she had been one of the first Jewish civilians into the Old City when it was liberated. The next time I saw her she described how a bullet has whizzed past her with the sound of a butterfly. How is it I remember her using the word butterfly over forty years later? I had pictured a butterfly fluttering past her ear.

As you may know, it is believed that the mind cannot tell the difference between an actual event and an imaginary event that is sufficiently realistically envisioned. In either case it has been memorized in a very powerful way.
Actual events are detected through sensory input in the form of vision, sound, smell, touch and/or hearing. Notice that reading is not one of the senses. By reading, you convert, through imagining the event, the words on the printed page through your imagination to a form of vision and sound and other senses in order to remember the experience. For proof, think of the times you were distracted while you were reading and had to reread the page, perhaps several times before you finally could remember what you had just read. Only by imagining the scene did the printed page enter your memory.
Why is it hard to remember a long sequence of random numbers but a great story, even a very long and complicated one, is not? A well constructed story has vivid images in which we have become emotionally involved and additionally, each part relates to the parts immediately preceding and following it unlike random numbers. These are the keys to a successful memory system.
Therefore, you must turn the printed or spoken Hebrew words into vivid images to remind you of the meaning of that word. More specifically, once you have learned this method, the sound of the Hebrew word will call to your mind, a specific picture that reminds you of its meaning. Once this has become automatic, the picture itself will no longer be needed so that just as when you hear a word in English, its meaning will be called immediately to your mind.
This is not the same as memorizing the English translation of the word. When one memorizes the English translation of a Hebrew word, what actually happens is that the Hebrew word calls into mind the English translation which you then repeat to yourself. My method bypasses the extra step and delay of translating the word to English and allows you to “know” the Hebrew itself.
Just as a scene in a movie is more memorable than a single photograph, if you can provide action along with emotion, and exaggeration they act together to help you remember more effectively than a simple static picture. I call this the “Sounds Like” method because you associate the sound of the Hebrew word with the sound of something that you then use in a picture that reminds you of the meaning of the word. I take no credit for the basic method as it is a common mnemonic device that has been used for centuries if not millennia. I have, though, applied this technique to the study of Hebrew and Jewish Culture and in the process developed a unique method as used later in this book, which, when you are given a Hebrew word, has the ability to create a picture in your mind that:
1 reminds you of its meaning,
2 gives you its proper spelling,
3 reminds you if it is masculine or feminine if it is not
in the typical form,
4 if it is a verb, tells you which of the seven
conjugation forms, known as Binyanim, it takes,
5 when given an English word to translate to Hebrew,
helps you immediately find that Hebrew word in your
memory together with all of the above, in addition to
the Hebrew word’s pronunciation,
6 all while you are having fun doing it!
Once the word is learned, the picture often drops off and you are left with the above information imprinted in your memory.

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