Be Happy – Improve Your Memory (Part 10)

How it would be nice if you can speak some foreign language apart from your mother tongue, regional language and/or national language! Your mother tongue, regional language and national language can be one language or two but learning a foreign language has its own charm. But due to weak memory, many of us are not able to accomplish the dream of mastering over some foreign language. This becomes more painful when we have been seeing influx of tourists from other countries and we find ourselves unable to exchange our views with them due to our weakness to speak in their language. We need to learn some foreign language.

How to Learn a Foreign Language

Systems Needed:

• Link Method
• Roman Room Mnemonic

Using the Tools:

Foreign languages are the ideal subject area for the use of memory techniques. Learning vocabulary is often a matter of associating a meaningless collection of syllables with a word in your own language.

Traditionally, people have associated these words by repetition - by saying the word in their own language and the foreign language again and again. You can improve on this tedious way of learning by using three good techniques:

1. Using Mnemonics to Link Words

This is a simple extension of the link method. Here, you are using images to link a word in your own language with a word in a foreign language.

For example, in learning English/French vocabulary:

• English: rug/carpet - French: tapis - imagine an ornate oriental carpet with a tap as the central design woven in chrome thread
• English: grumpy - French: grognon - a grumpy man groaning with irritation
• English: to tease - French: taquiner - a woman teasing her husband as she takes in the washing.

This technique was formalized by Dr. Michael Gruneberg, and is known as the 'LinkWord' technique. He has produced language books (an example is German by Association) in many language pairs to help students acquire the basic vocabulary needed to get by in the language (usually about 1000 words). It is claimed that using this technique this basic vocabulary can be learned in just 10 hours.

2. The Town Language Mnemonic

This is a very elegant, effective mnemonic that fuses a sophisticated variant of the Roman Room system with the system described above.

This depends on the fact that the basic vocabulary of a language relates to everyday things: things that you can usually find in a city, town or village. To use the technique, choose a town that you are very familiar with. Use objects within that place as the cues to recall the images that link to foreign words.

Nouns in the town:
Nouns should be associated to the most relevant locations: for example, the image coding the foreign word for book could be associated with a book on a shelf in the library. You could associate the word for bread with an image of a loaf in a baker's shop. Words for vegetables could be associated with parts of a display outside a greengrocer's. Perhaps there is a farm just outside the town that allows all the animal name associations to be made.

Adjectives in the park:
Adjectives can be associated with a garden or park within the town: words such as green, smelly, bright, small, cold, etc. can be easily related to objects in a park. Perhaps there is a pond there, or a small wood, or perhaps people with different characteristics are walking around.

Verbs in the sports center:
Verbs can most easily be associated with a sports center or playing field. This allows us all the associations of lifting, running, walking, hitting, eating, swimming, driving, etc.

Remembering Genders
In a language where gender is important, a very good method of remembering this is to divide your town into two main zones. In one zone you code information on masculine gender nouns, while in the other zone you code information on feminine nouns. Where the language has a neutral gender, then use three zones. You can separate these areas with busy roads, rivers, etc. To fix the gender of a noun, simply associate its image with a place in the correct part of town. This makes remembering genders easy!

Many Languages, many towns
Another elegant spin-off of the technique comes when learning several languages: normally this can cause confusion. With the town mnemonic, all you need do is choose a different city, town or village for each language to be learned. Ideally this might be in the relevant country. Practically, however, you might just decide to use a local town with the appropriate foreign flavor.

3. The 100 Most Common Words

Tony Buzan, in his book 'Using your Memory', points out that just 100 words comprise 50% of all words used in conversation in a language. Learning this core 100 words gets you a long way towards being able to speak in that language, albeit at a basic level.

Summary

The four approaches to learning foreign languages shown here can be very effective. They help to:

• Point out the most important words to learn
• Show how to link words in your own language to words in a foreign language, and
• Show how to structure recall of the language through use of the town mnemonic.
• Try to develop friendship with someone who already knows the language you wish to learn. You can learn the language more easily by frequent interaction with your friend after you get knowledge of the basics of the foreign language.
  

Try and Try Again. You can learn foreign language easily by strong determination and improvement in your memory skills.