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By
Ultimate Memory
If traveling is your hobby, you're undoubtedly already good at memorizing
routes in an unfamiliar city or state. If not, then you could easily get
confused when you go to different places, especially cities that have roads
weaving around in a serpentine fashion instead of running straight north and
south.
A good sense of navigation and direction are not easy skills to master,
to begin with. To do so, it's very important to
improve memory
and know some tricks for memorizing routes and landmarks. Here are some tips
to follow so you don't get lost in an unfamiliar city.
Understanding navigation
Navigation is a process. It's a multisensory process that involves not
only your eyes, but also muscle memory. The mind is always aware of a
person's surroundings, taking discrete but important notes of the tiny
details that makes every place unique. This instinctive graphic imagery of
the place is what the mind uses to remember the location and find it again
in the future.
Depending on the situation and focus of the person doing the traveling,
the graphic imagery might only be stored as short-term memory, and the
person will soon forget about the place. This is the problem that people
often face when traveling to unfamiliar destinations.
Since their singular focus as a tourist is usually just to enjoy their
surroundings, no matter how that's related to taking note of the landmarks,
it still becomes difficult to keep a long-term memory of the graphic detail
of a certain place. In situations like this, a person can use a more
straightforward method of remembering a place: through the name.
In larger cities, there are as many signs as there are landmarks.
Memorizing a sign, a street name, a road number or an address is, in fact, a
lot easier than remembering details about the landmarks, even though the
human mind still keeps tabs on what the place looks like. Either way, trying
to improve memory
helps you familiarize the names of places and the landmarks.
The problem is, not all people have
ultimate memory
skills that allow them to instantly memorize names and places. It gets even
harder when traveling in Europe, for example. Despite being able to
understand a few foreign words, you might not be able to remember every
street name, route and landmark. What, then?
Techy solution: an electronic translator
An electronic translator or electronic dictionary contains a huge library
of foreign words, their meanings, etymologies, and spellings. The most
important part is that these devices can easily translate names of places,
too. An electronic translator helps dissolve the language barrier, making it
easy for you to remember unfamiliar cities by their foreign street names.
Further, an electronic translator lets you communicate with people more
easily, which makes it possible to ask directions if you do get lost.
Global Positioning System - GPS-enabled translators
Today, you can find translators that are equipped with GPS tracking
features. These would be the Ectaco iTravl and 900 series, for example, if
you purchase the GPS module and a GPS map card. This extra feature allows
you to find your physical location on the map, and, at the same time,
translate the foreign street names.
What to do now
For a quick recap, navigation is a mental process that comes naturally to
people. There are certain problems that will hinder this process, though,
such as language barrier problems when you travel to different places. In
that case, an electronic translator device is always good to have in your
pocket.
So if you're thinking about taking a trip to a foreign destination, buy a
pocket translator and become familiar with it. And don't think of this as a
one-shot added cost for that trip. Many of these translators have language
learning programs and other useful tools on them.
Another feature that helps you leverage your investment is you can change
the language set from the one you bought to a new one, using an inexpensive
SD card. How does that work? If you go to Germany, you bring along your
German 900-series translator. But now that you're back you don't have a need
for German translation and don't plan another trip to Germany. So you
purchase the inexpensive Spanish card, swap out the German card that was in
your 900-series translator for this new card, and now you have a Spanish 900
translator.
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