What’s the best way to learn poetry?

In fact, the principle of memorization is different for all people: someone comes up with an association for each line and memorizes a poem as a set of pictures, someone just stupidly sets a timer and teaches for an hour or two. There are even those who eat while memorizing (it would be wrong to say that this does not help). The method that I use gives me the opportunity to learn rather large poems in 30-40 minutes. The principle is that after memorizing each line, you need to repeat everything that you have learned before. Even if this line is in the fourth or fifth quatrain. Thanks to this, learning a part, you do not forget the rest. Of course, everything is purely individual, and you can find another way that helps you exclusively.

Each person’s memory is arranged individually. Here are the ways that help many people:
1. Repeated reading of the poem aloud, dividing into paragraphs / passages, rewriting the poem by hand.
2. Listening to a poem with the correct intonation or with a specific melody (like a song).
3. Drawing parallels with visual images / pictures. For example, a verse about nature can be easier to teach in a green garden than in four walls.
But there is one general rule. It is more effective to learn a verse throughout the day (every 2-3 hours for 5 minutes) than in one hour’s sitting.

Memorizing a poem every day is a good warm-up. Thanks to this, new neural connections arise, and the general ability to learn increases. It is important to understand that this does not mean thoughtless “memorizing”, but, first of all, understanding the meaning of what is being memorized. This technique has a different effect on the brain of a child and an adult. For preschoolers, memorizing poetry allows you to activate thinking, create figurative representations – first objects, then actions and phenomena, concrete and abstract values, ultimately this leads to the development of visual-figurative and logical thinking. Memory and attention act as mediators – they are involved in the process, thanks to them, the development of thinking takes place, so they inevitably train.

For an adult, poems help build new neural connections, but do not replace complex memory training. Memory has a number of properties – volume, storage speed, storage duration, playback speed, and noise immunity. These properties are trained selectively when memorizing poems. The total volume of information storage, the speed of memorizing and reproducing the poems themselves is increasing.

In addition to the fact that not all properties of memory are trained, memorizing poems does not affect all its types: long-term and working memory develops, while short-term memory is not affected.

For the complex development of memory, it is necessary to simultaneously train all its properties and types. Cognitive simulators do an excellent job with this task – tasks in a playful form to develop attention, memory and thinking. Attention is the main “motor” function of the brain, which activates the rest, respectively, without the inclusion of attention does not develop memory. This, by the way, is the main mistake when memorizing poems – often we mechanically memorize the sequence of words (rhythm helps us in this), but we do not use attention.