Quote Originally Posted by Seraph View Post
This horizontal way is like a faster algo.
I totally agree that your horizontal method is beautifully fast and efficient, Seraph. It would've worked perfectly for me when I was first studying Russian in college -- I had taken four years of Latin in high school, so I already had a very clear understanding of how noun declensional paradigms work. (Latin is very "gendered," like Russian, and even has four of the same cases as Russian: Nom, Gen, Dat, Acc.) Since I already knew what the "genitive case" means, and already knew that nouns can have different genders with different case endings, your example of "Genitive => jаnыtиv" immediately makes sense.

On the other hand, if I not studied Latin and therefore had come to Russian as a typical English speaker with no concept of noun inflection and gender categories, then "омstrойmюntal" might have seemed much too abstract for me.

In that case, I would've needed something less compact/efficient but with more detailed information, like my example above of The ol' cowboy with his девушкой played an instrumental version of "Ode to Joy" This rhyme doesn't give you any help for the masc. and i-dec endings, but if you're a beginning student, it does give you the name of the case (instrumental), an example of how the case is used ("with the girl"), and the case ending for a "hard feminine" noun ("-ой").

So, the point is that you can use different approaches to "mnemonic devices" as you progress in Russian -- you may find that in the beginning you benefit from the slow approach of chanting the rhymes, but later you may outgrow this method and find that the quick, efficient algorithm will be most helpful.