This technique facilitates quick and lasting vocabulary retention.
It is adapted from p38-49 of The Memory Book, by Lorayne and Lucas.
“The Substitute word idea can be applied to any word of any language. There is no word that does not sound like, or make you think of, something in your own language. To remember the meaning of a simple French word like père (father), you might picture a gigantic pear being your father… the French word for grapefruit is pamplemousse. Picture huge yellow pimples all over a moose; each pimple is actually a grapefruit. If you try to see any of these silly pictures, the system must work.”
Sometimes interpreters have a large number of quite unusual or technical terms to learn (and activate) for an interpreting assignment, for example the names of fish, animals or plants or technical components. This technique can help.
The idea is to create an surreal and memorable image from the two words in each language. But the associations used to create the images don’t necessarily need to be linked to the actual meaning of the words. Also those associations can cross language barriers (meaning we can deconstruct a word in L2 to make it look like a word from L1 and create an image from that). For interpreters with several languages that offers lots of possibilities, as shown below. Let’s look at some examples.
Example 1
| EN | ES |
| bus stop | parada |
With EN as your A language we try to create an image and association from “parada” in Spanish. So for example, I see, in my mind’s eye, a bus stop. In front of the bus stop is passing a “parade”… kids marching, girls twirling batons and/or pompons. When I hear either “bus stop” or “parada” I am instantly reminded of this picture, which contains BOTH language versions. So I am reminded of the OTHER language version that I am looking for.
This works not only for pairs, but groups. I created 3 language versions as a picture for each fish – EN, FR and PL. Fish species are abstract enough to be hard to remember… but are frequently discussed in EU meetings, amongst others.
Example 2
| EN | FR | PL |
| dab | limande | zimnica |
Picture a person standing at an easel, painting. But instead of making strokes with the brushing, they are dabbing lightly against the canvas. And they are not dabbing with a brush, but a lemon (which is enough to remind us of “limande”). At the same time it is snowing heavily in this scene (in Polish “zima” is winter and ” zimno” is cold, which gets me to “zimnica”).
(Notice that in the image above AI is less able to create a truly abstract and odd image exactly as I describe it! )
Example 3
| EN | FR | PL | DE |
| ventricle | ventricule | komora | Kammer |
I see a ventilation grill in a wall from which water is trickling (vent + trickle). The same vent is also blowing cold air very fast (vent + cool). The water trickling from this vent is landing on a gangster’s head, standing below the vent (Camorra becomes komora). Finally the gangster is combing the water through his hair (Kamm in German means “comb” so “comber” leads us to “Kammer”.
This technique does require some imagination… and works better for shorter words than multi-syllablic ones (I find). But if it works for you, use it. If not, don’t!
Most mnemonic (memory) techniques you usually have to start with an anchor, something you cannot and will never forget, to which you attach the specific thing you would like to remember. This is because the items to be remembered are recalled without a prompt and in order, so the anchor is required to be the prompt, a prompt you can always find.
With vocabulary however, we do not need to recall in order and the prompt is always given. It is one half of the language pair. We never need to recall the German for the fish “brill” out of the void. We only need it when we hear the German “Glattbutt”. And vice versa. So for vocab we don’t need the anchor, only the language versions in a single image.
This technique is adapted from the linking and visualisation techniques here
… and was first broad to the public at large’s attention by the UK magician and TV personality, Paul Daniels, who despite not being a great linguist, was able to recall vocabulary incredibly well. You can see his demonstration of this technique below.
The technique is also described here
http://www.200words-a-day.com/language-learning.html