What do you think of my stories? They are absolutely ridiculous, with lots of irrelevant background information and emotions thrown in. You have to be as graphic and expressive as possible; that’s what makes them so easy to remember!! I can’t just put Garfield sitting and doing nothing in some non-descript train station and expect to remember that! In fact, if you have read these stories, I doubt you will forget what these two words mean in a hurry… so I actually try to do this to most new difficult words that I need to learn.
You may think that this is a lot of work; it took you several minutes to read my stories for just two words! It certainly took me longer than that to write them down, but we are talking about your imagination! I came up with all the details of each of these stories in just a few seconds (describing them to another person does indeed take time, but you’ll never need to do that; and the speed of thought is much quicker than the speed of speech or typing words-per-minute!!). I find both stories amusing so it was actually fun trying to come up with an association, and I will very easily remember both of these with very little effort. The best part is that you only actually only need these stories a couple of times; then the word really does get “burned” into your memory and you will remember them naturally; especially once they have come up in conversation a small number of times (each time requiring maybe just one second to recall the word; a lot better than scratching your head and desperately trying to remember something that you may have learned in a less efficient way).
In this way, going through lists of vocabulary does not have to be so dull – you can at least try to enjoy yourself! It’s hard to be very imaginative at first, and certainly took me a lot of practise (at first it did take me maybe a about minute to create each story), but soon your expressive childhood imagination will come back to you, and you can use funny images from cartoons, TV shows, books, movies etc. in your mini-stories to make them more funny and personally relevant to you. In a short time this quick story-making talent actually becomes second nature and you start to do it much quicker… and you can actually go through a list of dozens of words in just a minute or two, and others may just think that you have an amazing memory! Similar techniques are used to remember large shopping lists, dates of friends’ birthdays and phone-numbers etc., so a “naturally” good memory isn’t that far out of reach for those of us who are more forgetful! A little Googling into mnemonics and associations for memorising things will give you some more ideas; any useful links or other interesting memory techniques appreciated in the comments!
So what do you think? Am I crazy in trying to make a story for each word? In most Western European languages, you don’t even need to do this with a lot of words, since there are so many words that are already similar to English (I’ll talk specifically about these later), but for the non-similar words, this is what I do! Perhaps you have an even more interesting (or efficient) method? Please do share in the comments! And if you think your other language learning friends may benefit from this advice, please do share this post in twitter, facebook and Stumbleupon! :)