- A secure password (hard to guess) for all online banking/ebay/paypal/etc.

- A less secure password for my ISP/email accounts/hosting/etc

- A password for everything else

I tend to to just use a word thats quick to type, with a number or 2 embedded and added to the word. eg: 1d0ggy77 (1 doggy 77).

Its not as secure as your method, but it works well given that I often need to share passwords with my wife (so I need to minimise any chance of confusion)

I have very basic knowledge of a couple of foreign languages. Basically when I look at the name or the nature of a site which requires a password, I roughly translate that name into a word or 2 words that I know well in another language. If I don’t particularly care if the password is terribly strong, I then listen to the sound of the foreign words and decide what English word or pair of words I can substitute that sounds the most like them, and use that for my password.

If I want a stronger password, I use the words I thought of in the foreign language, plus using a numbering system for the foreign alphabet I come up with a number to append, insert, or interlace into the password, depending upon how strong I feel it should be. Sometimes I use the “sounds-like” strategem together with numbers, or combine foreign-language syllables with English sound-alikes. If I do this, I’ll mentally tie the method I use to a particular unique and salient feature of the site in my memory, so that when I return, I will see it and remember. For example, for Ebay, using this method, I would zero in on a feature that stands out for me–the bidding/watching page. Then I would think, “bidding *sounds like* something, combined with watching a *foreign* film”. Repeat this verbally in my mind or aloud a few times, imagining a picture of those activities around the words “bidding/watching”, and then I won’t forget even if I come back months later that “oh, bidding/watching, I did the “sounds-like combined with foreign” method for the password.

As for the password, supposing that Spanish were the foreign language, I would think Bay=Bahia. Since that might be too obvious, I think of the next word *I* think of after Bahia that no one else would think of–in this case, the most common word in the *other* of the 2 catchiest tunes in the movie that “Bahia” makes me think of, and that word is “Yaya”. The closest English sound-alike thing I could think of to “Bahia” would be someone saying “buy here” in an extraordinarily thick New Jersey accent, so the password could be YayaNJbuyhere or better yet YayaNJbaheah (since “buy here” coincidentally has a little obviously too much to with the site in question). I could then use a *number* based on Bahia, the word *not* in the password, to insert in there–2+1+5+9+1=18– and make it Y2a1y5a9N1J1b8aheah, if I really felt I wanted some extreme security here.

So should I come back to the site months and months later, I just look at it, let those first-impression words pop up in my mind, remember how protective I feel toward that password, and manipulate the words accordingly.

The key of course is knowing yourself well enough to choose what will most reliably pop up in your head, internally, especially stuff you normally wouldn’t say or discuss but stays prominent in your mind. That way all those impressions and connections too banal and/or silly to be uttered that often swirl around in our heads could be actually put to good use to really make those passwords ones that you will not forget (or that you could reconstruct even if you did forget) and no one else would guess or tease out with algorithms.