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Interference L1 - L2 // Mnemonics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Earnie Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 5813 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Portuguese | Message 1 of 22 10 March 2009 at 2:01am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm leaving my portuguese bubble (I'm living now for a week in it, inspired bei "All Japanese All The Time") for a few minutes to start a discussion. I try to avoid using my native tongue during my studies of portuguese, as much as it's possible. Right now I'm facing the need to build up my vocabulary. That got me thinking: Many of you seem to be using mental images to learn vocabulary. Doen't that cause one to automatically think of the word that represents the picture in one's native tongue? That may be consciously or unconsciously, but doesn't it build a bridge back to the native tongue? For example: I hear the portuguese word for cat, which is 'gato'. I picture a cat to merge the image of a cat with the word 'gato'. But the picture is already linked to the word 'Katze' in my native tongue German. Have you ever experencied this interference effect while using a mnemonic aid like a mental picture? I hope I got my point across. And I also hope this hasn't been discussed before.
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5953 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 22 10 March 2009 at 1:28pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm with you on this. Trying to avoid the native language word is, in my opinion, a fool's errand. The word and the concept are linked. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| !LH@N Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6763 days ago 487 posts - 531 votes Speaks: German, Turkish*, English Studies: Serbo-Croatian, Spanish | Message 3 of 22 10 March 2009 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know, if I think back at it, I didn't have that problem too often I think.
I think my own mnemonic devices are pretty weird. For example, when I try to remember the word for marvelous (which is divan/divno/divna) I imagine a high court/council (divan in Turkish) and I remember marvelous. I would use something like that for the Portuguese word for cat. Since it's gato, I would imagine a cat drinking gatorade out of the bottle, and I could see the words "GATO" on that bottle and wonder "What...a cat drinking gatorade???" Regards, Ilhan 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shapd Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6091 days ago 126 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Modern Hebrew, French, Russian | Message 4 of 22 10 March 2009 at 3:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Earnie, what you describe isn't really a mnemonic. What !LH@N uses is. It needs an image and a story which links this to the sound of the L2 word you are trying to remember - like GATOrade for gato.
Slucido gave a link a few weeks ago (which I can't find now) to a thesis which studied mnemonics. This found that mnemonics were highly effective, but that it was such a pain to make up good ones that hardly anyone could be bothered! They are fine if someone else gives you ideas to take or modify as you see fit, like Linkwords or the Heisig method for kanji, but it can take so much effort that you could have learnt the word anyway just by rote repetition. I tend only to use them if there are particular words which won't stick any other way. If the phonetics are too dissimilar from English it is just too difficult to find anything usable. Hopefully once you are past the initial learning phase and have seen the word many times in many different contexts, the picture of a cat will bring up gato immediately without having to go through the Katze intermediate, but it will take time. That is why I have never been able to use the Iverson word list method successfully. I need to see or hear the word in several different contexts at different times before it sinks in. There is some evidence that this is the method children use to learn new words. They don't immediately remember them on first encounter. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| !LH@N Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6763 days ago 487 posts - 531 votes Speaks: German, Turkish*, English Studies: Serbo-Croatian, Spanish | Message 5 of 22 10 March 2009 at 3:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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You can also try Anki if you haven't yet, I found it highly useful!
Regards, Ilhan 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Earnie Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 5813 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Portuguese | Message 8 of 22 10 March 2009 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's just that I got the impression that I make an irreversible mistake when I rely on my native tongue. I've read an article on the fact that even advanced learners rely subconsciously on L1.
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