Topic 5: Remembering Foreign Vocabulary - Introduction
In the previous section you learned how to remember names and faces by associating a person's name to his or her face. In doing this there were two factors involved - the name and the face.
Most memory tasks can in fact be viewed as associating together two factors - a name to a face, an author to a book, a composer to a piece of music, a telephone number to a person or organisation, a capital city to a country, and so on. Even when forming a long Link, for example when you memorised the imaginary shopping list, you were still basically working with just two items at a time.
The same principle can be applied to remembering foreign vocabulary. In order to memorise any foreign word, you simply associate the word to its meaning in English. To do this you will first need to form a Substitute Word or Phrase to help you picture the foreign word.
For example, to remember a simple French word like poulet (chicken), you could picture a gigantic chicken which is operating a pulley. To make the picture more vivid you could picture some buckets at the other end of the pulley, each of which contains another chicken.
For the French word poisson (fish) you might see yourself sitting at a dining table - someone hands you a huge, monstrous, evil-smelling fish on a plate which you pass on to the person sitting beside you. Picture that fish being continuously handed around the table, each person passing it on to their neighbour. To remember that escargots is French for snails, you could visualise an enormous snail pulling a trailer down the road. The trailer contains a cargo of letter S's - it is an 'S' cargo.
If you really try to see those absurd pictures, the system just must work for you, for the reasons you have already learned. In trying to form these images you are concentrating hard on the foreign word, and thus forcing Initial Awareness. It is impossible to apply the Substitute Word system to a foreign word without using your imagination and really concentrating on both the word and its English meaning.
The beauty of the Substitute Word system for remembering foreign vocabulary is that it can be applied to absolutely any language. To remember that the Esperanto word for 'happy' is felica (pronounced fell-eetch'ah), you might picture yourself being very happy (laughing) when you begin to feel itchy. You start to scratch yourself where you are itching, but you are still very happy, laughing loudly.
To remember the Welsh word for carrot, moron, you could see yourself in a restaurant, being served carrots. The waiter serves a plateful of carrots, but then puts more on, and more on, until you are absolutely up to your neck in carrots.
When you have formed your silly mental picture, just thinking of that picture must remind you of the two things you need to know - the foreign word and its English meaning.
Of course, it does take a little time to come up with appropriate Substitute Words and silly associations. But, if you have ever tried to learn foreign vocabulary from a text book or phrase book without a system, then you will appreciate how valuable it can be to have a system, especially one that really does work! Also, you will find that after a small amount of practice at creating Substitute Words and zany associations, you will be able to come up with them almost instantly.
Tutorial 6 takes you through a detailed example of memorising ten Spanish words and their
English meanings.
Tutorial 7 demonstrates that the system works not just for foreign words, but
also for foreign phrases.