Remembering language

Techniques > Memory methods > Remembering language

Usage | Description | Example | Discussion | See also

Usage

Use when you are visiting a country or where you want to pick up the basics of a language.

Description

Identify the words that you want to learn. It has been said that a basic working vocabulary can be gained with just 1000 words (languages often contain 30,000 or so words). Common words can be found in phrase books and include such as those used in buying, talking about people, food, places and so on.

For each word to learn, identify an image that includes both the meaning of the word (in English) and the word itself (in the other language). As with other methods, the cornier and more ridiculous you make this association, the easier it will be to remember.

For words that refer to physical things and places, you can use things you already know about, for example you could imagine your local local cake-shop with a 'patisserie' sign on it. You can do the same with verbs, for example associating the word 'manger' with a person eating.

Where you need to remember gender, one way is to make male things blue and female things pink. Another way is to have a 'male' and 'female' parts of your imaginary town.

Phrases can be remembered in a similar way, translating them in as strange and memorable way as possible.

Foreign words are seldom pronounced in the way they are spelled (at least to an English reader). To help with this you can associate with sounds, thinking first about the pronunciation in English.

You can also remember the word as a silly mispronunciation of the word or phrase. Thus I remember 'S'il vous plait' as 'silver plate'.

Example

French for bee is 'chapeau'. This can remembered as a chap wearing a hat, shaping the word 'Oh' with his lips.

French for 'What time is it' is 'Quelle heure est il'. This could be translated as 'Killer at heel' and remembered as a dog called 'killer', wearing a watch around its neck and walking to heel and biting your heel too.

Discussion

As with other memory methods, there are two main parts to making it work: setting up the system and then practicing diligently until it sinks permanently into your memory.