Mnemonics for learning a second language are a little different than what you might remember doing in elementary school as you tried to cram for your next spelling test. There are a few characteristics of mnemonic devices that aid in effectively solidifying new L2 terms into your long-term memory.
The best mnemonics are visual and self-generated. I’m going to extend the idea of “visual” mnemonics from an actual image that you can see with your eyes to one that you can imagine, as in a memory or scenario. The keyword technique, which is the process of connecting imagery to a target term, will help you remember words better.
Here’s an example of imagery superficially associated with a target term in Korean. (Pardon my inadequate image editing skills!)
The target term is 판단 (pandan – judgment), and the imagery is of a panda as a judge (handing out his judgment). When you use this technique, be careful of pseudo-cognates, as they’re false friends and you may get confused and actually think that 판단 means “panda” in Korean. Another mistake would be to confuse the image of a judge with the term “judge” when the term 판단 doesn’t refer to a person but an act. But thinking about all of this actually improves cognitive depth.
Cognitive depth helps you internalize target terms by thinking about them on different linguistic levels. For example, hearing a word, seeing it written, focusing on its spelling/writing, visualizing it in use, considering its part of speech, and observing its collocation with other terms. Relating the target term to all of these characteristics, and associating it with mnemonics, will aid in network building for your personal lexicon.
It may be useful to get some hints on mnemonic associations for target vocabulary terms, but I’ve tried to explain here that it’s best if you build the associations by yourself from the ground up.
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Nice post about mnemonics for second languages. It makes a huge amount of sense. Agree that the best mnemonics are ones you come up with yourself. However, the whole process of coming up with mnemonics and organising your effort can be a lot of work, something we recognise is a big problem at Memorista.com in using the mnemonic technique.
To help with this workload, we do two things on our website: firstly, we provide a system for building and learning mnemonics; and second, we provide ready-made mnemonics, usually more than one for each word or phrase, so you can choose what’s best for you, or you can construct your own if it doesn’t suit.
Have a look at http://www.memorista.com – it’s all for free, we cover five languages currently, but this will expand in the future.
You’ve got an interesting site that is probably helpful for specific learner-types. However, I feel that the workload in building mnemonics from the ground up for yourself is the most important part – It’s what pushes cognitive depth and helps in network building.
I agree. It’s the same with flashcards—as much as I love shiny White Rabbit Press ones (and they really are great), it’s much better to take the time to make my own (even if it’s on a website like smart.fm, although I supplement with writing practice on paper).
Looking forward to reading more of your blog, by the way. I’ve been getting the L2 linguistics bug again lately, although I have a great job so I’m not about to run off and apply for JET, sigh. My link to is my Japanese study blog/respository for mediocre n00b translation projects. Slow going…