many forms, styles, techniques...

[Falcor]

I have a questions for people who study/have studied multiple systems, or styles with many forms. Do you find that you forget some of these forms, and if not, how do you manage to remember them all (given life, work, sleep, etc)? And if you do, do you find that you prioritize them such that your "favorite" forms or entire systems are what you practice, and others are more "yeah, I know them, but I'm not that good at it anymore" status? I would be most interested to hear from teachers who teach multiple systems.
Thanks.

[norther practitioner]

I know about 17 forms, 13 of which are from my current school. I have to regularly teach the beginning forms, and practice most of the rest regularly. 3 I have finished learning in the last few months so I practice those maybe 2 or 3 days a week, and teach 4 of the other ones at least once a week, and most of us in my school do the others fairly regularly. There is one that I always seem to foget a spot or two in, but I'll start having to teach that one soon, and that should just come back. As far as multiple styles etc... some of those are taiji forms, most of them are long fist forms and one is a lama fist form. I also am at the school at lot though (about 5 days a week now), so I do have time to practice them. What we do for the beginners though is every 3rd or 4th class we do a review. We'll go over all the forms that they have learned, all of the aps, chi na, etc... That helps them (and me) out a lot. What I want to do starting soon though is go through about 4-5 forms each day to keep them all fresh and pump up the workout before a few tournies that I'm going to go to in the next year.

[Judge Pen]

Ahh. Several forms. :)

Much like NP the basic forms are performed every week in our normal class so that maintains these in my mind. We also routinely rotate forms to do in class as well so we can all go through them with our teacher so that he is available if we have a question. This covers all of our rank advancement up to first black.

I go through the current forms I will be testing on at least every other day. I also perform my internal forms at least once or twice a week. I will do the rest of my forms at least once a month to make sure that I am retaining them properly.

I have 49 forms right now.

[Brad]

I have a questions for people who study/have studied multiple systems, or styles with many forms. Do you find that you forget some of these forms, and if not, how do you manage to remember them all (given life, work, sleep, etc)? And if you do, do you find that you prioritize them such that your "favorite" forms or entire systems are what you practice, and others are more "yeah, I know them, but I'm not that good at it anymore" status? I would be most interested to hear from teachers who teach multiple systems.
Thanks.
I try to memorize them, but am not allways 100% sucessful :P The best way for me to memorize them is to practice it over and over and over until it's really ingraned before taking on another one. It also helps to get your forms on tape or written/drawn. Lots and lots of basics help too. If you have all the techniques and way of movement ingrained in you, it's fairly easy to re-learn a forgoten form from old notes or video. There's a lot of forms that I don't bother to practice anymore because all the techniques are within' another form that I may have learned latter on :)

[Laughing Cow]

In my current style we got few forms from my previous styles I hardly remember the forms, but got msot of them written down or on VCD for refresher purpose.

If you don't practice them it is unlikely that you will remember them.

Cheers.

[No_Know]

If I wrote them down I might feel less need to have them . They are on paper therefore I don't have to learn them as good. If I forget I can always look back(if I can find the papers or they do not get lost or destroyed. Perhaps I should make copies...but I would still have to find the copies and I might not care too much about the papers thinking it's taken care of because there are copies...)

Four forms from a School. Several from books. I can recall as far as I practiced. Where the practice faded the recollection now does..

If I find a place that is faded, I find that going over the parts before several times going as far as I can each time with out trying, the faded piece refreshes itself because they were learned together one after the other. When I start at one place and go forward like pulling a rope from merky waters. If I start at the clear end and keep pulling I can get to the rest of the string/rope though I might get stuck some. Give it some slack, start a-ways-back, pull and tug again.~ Then I find the anchor of having the whole string/rope.

Learning pieces as parts that should come next helped me so far to retain form preformability.

I would think that there might be actual physical brain configurations that help one do well or not, at recalling or learning forms including distinguishing one form from another.

Perhaps some might say some-such.