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Color: Can it help you learn a language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| josht Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6381 days ago 635 posts - 857 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Spanish, Russian, Dutch | Message 9 of 27 18 October 2008 at 8:36am | IP Logged | |||||
Good question. I chose it because the color felt cool to me, whereas red was naturally warm. Now, why I felt that masculine nouns were "warm" and feminine nouns were "cool", I've honestly no idea. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6829 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 27 18 October 2008 at 9:23am | IP Logged | |||||
That was my reaction too. To me masculine would just have to be blue, and feminine red. In my mind those two colours clearly represent male and feminine gender respectively. Using anything else would mess things up completely. For neuter it might be yellow or green. But that's just me, and we are all different of course. I read somewhere about colours being used to represent the five tonalities in mandarin, but I haven't tried it myself. It would certainly mean a considerable amount of extra work to prepare your own colour material and I am dedicating loads of time and energy to preparation as it is. I imagine there might be some benefit but it's hard to tell whether it would be worth the effort. If there were any existing such material out there that was right for my level I'd be prepared to try it out though. Edited by Hencke on 18 October 2008 at 10:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kadphises Diglot Newbie Taiwan Joined 6084 days ago 15 posts - 17 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 11 of 27 18 October 2008 at 3:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was also wondering why you had chosen blue for feminine and red for masculine. For me, too, it would have been the other way around. This might be a purely individual difference, but I doubt it. If there's no genetic predisposition, then it appears to me that it is common to our Western cultures (or at least those speaking Germanic languages) to associate red (and definitely pink) with female and blue with male. So, I guess, the colour system was rather counterproductive to you, because you mixed up with the culturally imprinted associations or there was no clear-cut association of colours with genders for you.
(It would be interesting to see whether these colour associations are culture-dependent or more universal. It's well possible that for speakers of Romance languages or Chinese languages embedded in the Yin-Yang system, the association would be rather like yours: sun - red-orange - hot/warm - male/masculine, moon/night - blue - cold/cool - feminine; for me, a mother is the archetype of a loving, warm person, women can be hot, they wear red lipstick, men should be cool, blue is for boys, pink or red is for girls etc.) So, if colour doesn't work for you, try other kinds of visualizations, if specific properties of a word don't stick. For the gender in German for example, draw an image visualizing the concrete meaning or the concept of the word with (in your eyes) gender-specific attributes. For example draw a fish, smoking a big cigar and having a beard (with colours or without), to remember it's masculine in German. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5969 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 12 of 27 18 October 2008 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Blue is a "male colour" for me too... But red is also distinctly masculine. Pink is in a way "the opposite of Blue" and it is female.
Obviously everybody has a different opinion about this. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5977 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 13 of 27 18 October 2008 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
Maybe it's not the colors themselves that help but the extra time you spend preparing the word lists??? It probably also depends on what type of learner you are. I usually just learn the article as part of the word so for example instead of telling my self that Mann (Man) is masculine and Frau (Woman) is feminine in German I just learn Dermann and Diefrau as if the article and the noun were one word. I do the same with Greek.Does anyone know of any preprepared color coded learning material on the internet? Oh and according to this article pink used to be a boys color. At the time red was a masculine color and pink was considered to be like a watered down red!!! Blue was feminine. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=238733 Edited by John Smith on 18 October 2008 at 6:58pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6638 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 27 19 October 2008 at 12:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When I make word lists for memorization I always use two different colours for the two languages, and the darkest is usually reserved for the target language because it is easier to read. The two colours make it easy to distinguish the two languages, especially when the columns partiallly overlap, and this makes it easy to run through items in one language for repetition.
Besides my selfmade morphological tables rely heavily on colours to mark endings and infixes. But to mark gender or other morphological parameters I prefer simple graphical signs, numbers or letters. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6207 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 15 of 27 23 October 2008 at 6:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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I am not very systematic about it, but I often use fluorescent highlighter to draw my eye to vocabulary I want to learn - the more brightly coloured, the better (typically orange or yellow). I also use coloured pencil in the same way, especially red but also blue, green, violet and other colours. Visual stimulus is important for me, and much of it is from colour.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| crackpot Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6236 days ago 144 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 16 of 27 23 October 2008 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When I was learning French I colored in a map of the world, blue for masculine countries, pink for feminine countries.
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