This is a collection of quotes from two consecutive chapters, Story Time: Making Patterns Memorable and On Arnold Schwarzenegger and Exploding Dogs: Mnemonics for Grammar. It touches upon the difficulty of capturing grammar structure in flashcards; for example, how to easily code gender information of a word, or the appropriate declension for an adjective.

Suppose you could create mnemonic images that meant “this verb follows the same pattern as teach / taught / had taught” or “this Russian adjective follows the same pattern as this other Russian adjective.” You could attach these images to every new word (i.e., caught, thought, and bought) that follows an old pattern (i.e., the teach / taught / had taught pattern) and make your life a lot easier.

Unfortunately, our old mnemonic images won’t work here. They worked fine with nouns—exploding dogs and shattering horses make for memorable stories—but those same images break down if you try to use them with verbs or adjectives. How do you attach exploding—to a verb like catch / caught / had caught? Or shattering to tall? Tall shattering isn’t a vivid, memorable story; it’s a bad e. e. cummings poem.

You can even run into problems with nouns. German nouns have three possible genders and ten possible plural forms. If you’re already using three mnemonic images for gender, how can you add another ten mnemonics for those plural forms? Our poor exploding dog can’t do two things at once. He’s already exploding; we can’t expect him to swim or sing at the same time.

If you want to use mnemonics to help you learn grammar, you’ll need a way to attach multiple mnemonic images to single words, and you’ll need images that can work with verbs and adjectives.

One of the core mnemonic [techniques] is known as the person-action-object (PAO) system, and we’re going to use a simplified version of it to attach mnemonic images to our words. PAO relies upon a simple premise: the three basic ingredients of a story are a person (Arnold Schwarzenegger), an action (explodes), and an object (a dog).

PAO can give you the flexibility you need to connect a mnemonic image to any kind of word. If you want to learn the ten ways to make German plural nouns, for example, you can choose ten people to represent them. Then you can use those people whenever you need them. Arnold Schwarzenegger (plural form 1) explodes (masculine gender) a dog is a weird, vivid, and compact story that could tell you the gender and plural form for our poor German dog. And if German desks follow the same patterns as German dogs (which they do—German desks are masculine, plural form 1), then I’m sure Arnold won’t object to exploding a desk, too.

If you wanted to learn that fight/fought, buy/bought, and think/thought all follow the same pattern, you could put those verbs into the “action” slot of a PAO story. That lets you choose a mnemonic person or a mnemonic object to represent the “past tense ends in -ought” pattern.

For example, if you choose a mnemonic person — say, Patrick Stewart — you could imagine him fighting something, buying something, or thinking about something. If instead you choose an object — a toaster, perhaps — you could imagine fighting a toaster or buying some fancy toaster. Because these stories are visual, they’re much easier to remember than some abstract verb form, especially when you’re trying to learn a lot of verbs at once.

Adjectives can fit into PAO as well, but they’re rarely complex enough to warrant some elaborate story like Bruce Lee eats a large/cold/happy hot dog. Instead, you can just use a simple mnemonic object. For example, French has five adjectives — beautiful, new, crazy, soft, and old — that follow a single, irregular pattern. We can connect them with a single object: a beautiful football, a new football, a crazy football — and easily remember the pattern in the future.