How to Learn Any Language 25
Reinforcement
You now have a brand new “closet,” a foreign language vocabulary memory system that lets you hang up new words as if they were new clothes. The system just presented will work even better for you if you keep a few tips in mind.
Every example given above is clean in word, deed, and thought. Every one could have been presented from the stage in Yadkinville, North Carolina, YMCA during Foreign Language Week. I refuse to do any dirty writing, so you have to do some dirty thinking (if you will) to get maximum benefit from the system.
The more vivid, in fact, the more vulgar, your associations are, the more readily they will probably come to mind. Feel free, in your mental imagery, to take clothes off. Get people naked. Get everybody into bed, in the tub, swinging from vines, or making nominating speeches immersed in bubbling Romanian mud. Get them wherever you need them so that the association you want is readily retrievable. X-rated images come readily to mind, even to the minds of nice people. Make your associative images lurid and unforgettable.
We’ve refrained in our model examples from using names and places to buttress our associations. In a book or a class, we can’t. Except for famous figures and places we all know in common, names and places don’t mean the same things to everybody. As individuals, however, we can haul off and use any and every proper name we know, whether from our personal lives or from stage, screen, radio, video, song, literature, and legend.
Does the foreign word demand the sound – or any part of the sound – of a Harry, an Edna, a Philip, an Art, a Harold, a Doreen, a Billy, a Lance? If that name belongs to someone you actually know, your associations will come to you more rapidly and last longer.
Did you grow up around a Reidsville, a Colfax, a Burlington, a Charlotte, a Haw River, or a Mt. Pisgah? Your associations with the foreign words can be enriched by place names that sounds like or almost like your target words. You don’t actually have to have those places in your biography, so long as you know them and can visualise them and use them as lassos to haul in and hog tie similar sounding words. I’ve never been to Nantucket, but when attacking the Indonesian word for “tired” (NAN-tuk), I imagine getting so tired on my initial visit to Nantucket that I collapse into bed exhausted shortly after lunch.
Yet another asset to you is the body of words you already know in another foreign language, or even in the language you’re learning. Those who know many languages may conquer a four syllable word by bringing in sounds from four different languages. This is a classic case of the rich getting richer. Every new word you learn is one more potential hook for grabbing still newer words.
Don’t fight to forge a winning association. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then give up! Not all words can be forced into the system, and you’re better off
not wasting good language learning time trying to mash an ill fitting shoe onto Cinderella’s sister’s foot. Over ninety percent will fit, automatically, neatly, or after some effort. The others, the holdouts, will have to be learned by old familiar rote learning.
Don’t forget: make your associations vivid, even if that means making them vulgar.
You’ll find that so many truly comical cartoons will dance through your head as you craft your associative images, you’ll find yourself constantly having to explain “What’s so funny?” to native speakers who wonder what’s so hilarious about those ordinary words they’re teaching you in their language!
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