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Enhancing memory and using mnemonics

  Tags: Memory
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
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Emomilol
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Norway
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Speaks: Norwegian*, English
Studies: German

 
 Message 1 of 10
08 July 2009 at 11:32am | IP Logged 
How many of you are using - and benfitting from - mnemonics (memory techniques)?

I have read "Your Memory: How It Works & How To Improve It", which is an excellent book on memory. It's written by Ph.D. Kenneth Higbee, and debunks many myths ("Some have a bad memory", "Memory benefits from excercise" etc.) and gives good advice and techniques on remembering material. (E.g. look up "The Loci System.")

To the extent I've been using mnemonics to remember grammatical endings in German (and I assume the same could easily be applied to e.g. Russian or Latin or any heavily inflected language with regular endings), I have little practice using it, and would very much benefit from your experiences.
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Le dacquois
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France
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Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Spanish, German

 
 Message 2 of 10
08 July 2009 at 2:13pm | IP Logged 
I've been doing this for a long time, but only for words I struggle with.

Such as éventail. It might seem weird, but I imagine a girl I know called Yvonne (éven) who is tied (tail) down and being tickled with a fan. It really helped me to remember the word and I have plenty of other bits of weirdness in my head.

Yes, it definitely helps.
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Le dacquois
Diglot
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France
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 Message 4 of 10
08 July 2009 at 5:36pm | IP Logged 
Humbert, you're probably right. That way you could learn a great deal of other similar words based on the root. However, that's not what mnemonics is.
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Cainntear
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Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
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 Message 5 of 10
12 July 2009 at 6:21pm | IP Logged 
Le dacquois wrote:
Humbert, you're probably right. That way you could learn a great deal of other similar words based on the root. However, that's not what mnemonics is.

Exactly, which is why mnemonics should be avoided at all costs. If you learn the internal logic of a language, it can be reused, reordered and reformulated at will -- if you memorise individual words using a logic external to the language, it will not help you in the long run.
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Bao
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Germany
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Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin

 
 Message 6 of 10
12 July 2009 at 10:43pm | IP Logged 
習う THE SCARY CLOWN - oh, it's narau.

The katakana ア is anchored in my brain with the following incident: I was drilling kana and had forgotten how to write it. I asked my friend how it looks like and she replied: "Well. It looks like a katakana A. You know. A katakana A." Then she drew it for me and since then a katakana ア looks exactly like a katakana ア.

However, inventing menmonics that do not immediately present themselves from context or the situation doesn't seem to be worth the effort to me.


Humbert, Cainntear - what about all the words and derivations and sentence patterns that follow a pattern that still is to strange for a fairly new learner of the language to grasp it? (I am reluctant to use the word logic in such a context.)
Personally, I don't mind forgetting phrases that make little sense to me at that time, because I enjoy the moments when suddenly a long-ignored bit of information falls into place - but how many people have the freedom to willfully forget or ignore information they were presented with?

Edited by Bao on 12 July 2009 at 10:44pm

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Bao
Diglot
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Germany
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 Message 8 of 10
12 July 2009 at 10:54pm | IP Logged 
turaisiawase wrote:
Bao wrote:
習う THE SCARY CLOWN - oh, it's narau.



Bao, you're a damn funny fellow, but you can't beat me.

Mnemonics has something to do with Mnemosyne. Oh, Gods... they are so many of them!


I'm not trying to be funny. Thanks to a (slight ...?) phobia of clowns, the pattern searching part of my brain is very keen on finding all possibly dangerous clowns.


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