You create a mnemonic story as a way to memorise information. At a peg loci location, you might imagine a farmer throwing a banana at a dinosaur; and that would mean something to you (this is just an example - I have no idea what it might mean to you!).
When you come to recall the facts, you imagine your peg location and hopefully you recall the farmer doing an action to the dinosaur. The action is as important as the objects because it probably means something and it helps to bind the overall story together into something memorable.
Maybe there is a system of 12 actions where each action represents a month of the year (April); so maybe the farmer means the 10th and the dinosaur means 2002AD; and the overall story means the date: the 10th April 2002.
So the actions, as well as the imagined objects, can contribute to the knowledge being stored in the imaginary story taking place at the peg location.
I built quite a big list of actions which I present at the links below. It is a list of 1001 actions and, in most cases, the action relates to a word from the Shorthand system article (a bit further along in this course).
The 1001 subset list of shorthand vocabulary will take time to learn; so there is the added incentive of simultaneously learning an actions memory system as well. About a quarter of the actions do not relate to their associated Shorthand word. After item 000, the next 200 or so Shorthand words relate to words in Chinese called 'radicals' which have their own numbered order; once you get past item 216, there tends to be an alphabetical order to the Shorthand codes.
I like the idea that a student would know a memory system of over 1000 common words; and then, when learning a foreign language, these already known images would be imagined in stories where the spelling or sound of the foreign word is somehow visualised.
Moreover, for some reason, I like studying languages or linguistics. I am intrigued by the question of which minimum vocabulary people could use to be understood; and that has had some effect on the Shorthand system which I developed.
(Note: With those Actions lists, sometimes, the left margin does not state the intended category that words fall into. It is on my list of things to do [noted in Sep 2026].)
I was also motivated by the idea that I could store 100 English words as images at peg locations and then sequentially recall 100 words of a page.
I think that 'Actions' are 'hard to sell' when encouraging a student to spend time on it. It is of great use to someone who is trying to remember numbers bigger than 3 digits because the person in the story can be a number, the action can be a 3 digit number, and the object of the action can be a number as well. (The idea of there being a person, an action and an object is attributed to Dominic O'Brien.)
1258754, seen as 12 587 54 can be pictured as person 12 doing action 587 to person 54.
Actions are also useful for speed memorisation games because the imaginary mnemonic story requires no thinking time to be spent on deciding what story takes place at a peg location: the action is a necessary part of the story since it represents one of the items being memorised.
Eg. The person representing the Queen of Hearts does an action representing the 2 of Clubs to a person representing the Jack of Diamonds.
I think that actions can also be used for memorising vocabulary; for example, 'fromage' means cheese. What if you could imagine a person (who represents 2 letters of the alphabet [FR]) doing an action [OM] (which represents 2 letters of the alphabet) on an image of cheese; effectively, 4 letters of the spelling of 'fromage' would be represented by the story. I don't mean that this gives you instant use of the foreign word in conversational French; I mean that you have a prompt in exam conditions or as a set of revision notes that you can mentally visit.
Actions as letter pairs
I think that actions are excellent as spelling prompts; and that is the main reason why I would want to use them. One way of seeing the digits as spelling prompts would be to interpret them like I explian in the 'Coloured Actions and Male 1000 Spelling Prompts' article; but actions can also be used as an AA-ZZ system; or actually an AA-ZZ system that also treats the following as if they are letters: Ch,Sh and Th.
An AA-ZZ system of actions can be made by saying that all letter A letter pairs begin at a particular number position in the 1000 action system;
So at action 001, let's say that it equates to "AA" spelling prompt; and 002 can be "AB" spelling prompt.
So, action 026 would be AZ, action 027 is ACh, action 028 is ASh and action 029 is ATh; then we move on to 031 as Ba, 032 as BB, 033 as BC, etc.; then we move on to 061 as CA, 062 as CB, 063 as CC. This approach leads to a left side letter pair of A to Z and including Ch, Sh, Th; and a right side letter that is A-Z and including Ch, Sh, Th. That is 29 x 29 spelling prompts; although often two consonants together are unlikely to be part of a spelling of a real word. Eg. In Englidh, "KK" is not the first two leeters of any normal words.
Actions versus Loci
Actions allow a lot of data to occur at just one loci location. So you do not use up your limited supply of scenes quickly. But here is another way to store the same data: by storing parts of it at different loci places:
Maybe two imaginary scenes can be used in sequence to represent a long chunk of information.
Maybe at peg location 1, you could memorise an image that just means "Date Of Birth"; then
At peg location 2, you continue to provide the date of birth as a visual story occurring at location 2.
So the meaning of the story at location 2 is guided by visiting the story at location 1, first.
Memorising an action's number
How would I know which action action 345 is? Do I have to rote learn it?
Do I need to learn the actions in sequence; and rote learn what action 300 is; and then count 45 actions from there?
This has always felt unsatisfactory. One solution is to have a 1000 place system where I can know the number of the location easily; and then recall what action takes place at that location; but wouldn't I rather have those 1000 places for memorising exam facts rather than dedicating them to learning the 1000 actions?
There is an article about cartoon humanoid animals in this course; and I decided to use them as a way to associate ordinal position for actions; I then expanded it into a 1024 action system..
Actions for Memorising Vocabulary
The big pay off for learning 1000 or so actions is that they can each represent a pair of letters; so when the action happens in a visualised story, the perosn doing the action can be a standard person for meaning a particular dictionary word; and the action is the first clue as to how to spell it in a foreign language; the recipient of the action is a further spelling prompt of more letters of the foreign word. E.g. A hero character could represent the next 2 letters of the spelling of the foreign word.
And if the vocabulary word is not a person but an inanimate object then the doer of the action can be the first spelling prompt of how to say the word in a foreign language - probably one of the hero characters from the AA-ZZ Hero system; and the action done to the inanimate object is the spelling prompt for the next couple of letters of the foreign word.