Hi all,
Currently I am learning Japanese and broaden my English vocabulary. I use the linking method. I don’t if this is the right name. Basicly I make a key word and link that with the definition to memorize the word. However I have notice it is not always possible. The other thing sometimes it doesn’t stick in my memory.
Therefor I was wondering what methodes do you guys use to memorize words?
Here is how I memorize words.
Basic principle is that I link the foreign word to the English word or whatever your mother tongue is.
Let’s take the Japanese word for woman: Josei or 女性
The first thing that I notice it that the characters are the same in Chinese.
The first character is the character for woman or female.
The second is ‘sex’ or ‘gender’.
Memrise has good recourses for learning characters.
If you know the character, you need to know the pronunciation.
For me, ‘josei’ sounds a bit like Joyce.
If you know a Joyce, use her as the image.
Make it so that ‘woman’ in Japanese reminds you of Joyce, which reminds you of Josei.
Can you give an example when this is not possible?
^^This^^
Even if you have to make tenuous and idiosyncratic connections, and even if you have to take a lot of liberty with the pronunciation of a word, something can always be done if you think about it for long enough. Even if all you can think to do connect a Japanese word to an English word with the same first letter, having that extra connection in your mind will be helpful.
A few years ago I came across the word “perfidy,” which means treachery, for the first time. I imagined the rapper Fifty Cent as the captain of a mutinied ship because I think I have heard him referred to as “Fiddy” somewhere. Worked like a charm. I’m sure I could think of some even worse examples that have worked just as well if I thought about it a bit.
An example:
English: Incongruous
Japanese: Ikari, Nayamu, tsumaranasou
I can’t make a key word of them and link them to the definition.
Sometimes I can make a key word of them, but the don’t stick in my head. Sometimes I try to imagine it, but it just wont stick.
Incongruous- I would probably use my image for The Republic of the Congo, which is a gold racoon(almost completely arbitrary). I would imagine being inside of it. In-congo. Or even add a rose inside of it, to get the final ruous sound.
Another thing I could do is imagine my friend Nick standing on ground(really focusing on the dirt). nickonground-incongruous
Or a conman that I’ve seen growling. Con grr- incongruous
Or imaging myself In-congress(or just the building for it).
Et cetera.
Ikari- Reminds me of iPhone or other things starting with i that are made by apple. A car made by apple. iCar
Nayamu- Bill Nye(recent debate) moo-ing or with a cow. Nye-Moo
Tsumaranasou- First thing I think of is tsunami. Tsunami-mayonnaise. Or a maroon coloured tsunami. Tsu-maroon
Imagination. Sometimes you have to stretch some sounds, but it’s always possible.
Edit: Now I wonder how many images total I could come up with in total to represent incongruous… The associations would probably get weaker and weaker. I just thought of another one: Ink on grass…
I agree. And everybody will come up with different ways.
Here are mine.
Ikari - I care. Or, of I want to capture the last I: I care (for) it.
Nayamu - Nay, I am you. Or: No, I and you. Or even: no ammo (ammunition).
Tsumaranasou - It’s soup, marinated soup!
If you use mine you might forget the words.
If you create your own, you will not quickly forget them.
Because the creative process is part of the memorization.
Agree with others on giving yourself creative liberties. It’s your personal system so experiment and don’t feel the need to give yourself rules. No-one is judging your system (they can’t see inside your head!).
I’m having some fun re-learning Chinese lately and enjoy being playful with my mnemonics (http://www.decision108/chinese).
I’m also teaching SAT vocab to a high school mentee of mine (check same website above). He’s a freshman and wants to go to college. I decided an easy way to teach him would be to use video game examples (in video format).
There is a wiki page that lists some different ways of creating mnemonic images from words. It’s unfinished, but feel free to jump in and edit the page if you have ideas for it. 
First say the English word aloud. What image or feeling does it bring into your mind? Try to link that with the image you have formed from the target language. Make the mental image kind of like a short video. Try to think what may have happened to lead up to that moment. Try to think what may happen. Include this in you image-video. Use Anki a lot and try to stay motivated. It you need extreme motivation try to hypnotize youself: 5 Ways to Hypnotize Yourself Using the Best Me Technique - wikiHow .
About mine and Kinma’s first post above:
I learned over 3000 English words that I did not know or did not know well this way to increase my score on the GRE, most of which I could recall word-for-word by definition. It took time, but I did it. The verbal section depends almost entirely on vocabulary, so if you know them you get the score. That’s THE reason my score was almost perfect in verbal. All of the mistakes were definitely in the smaller portion that remained. This method is awesome.
Did you know that the word belie has two meanings opposite each other? “Your shaking hands belie the nervousness that you attempt to conceal.” That means “betray,” right? “Your stoic countenance has belied the nervousness that you successfully concealed.” Which means conceal, hmm.
And cleave can either be a point of conjunction or the splitting of an object.
English you don’t know yet is like Japanese in important ways.
Well done, Lance!
How much time did it take you to learn the 3000 words?
When I memorize words with Anki, I tend to forget some words before the first day. I got around this problem by using a memory palace to store the words temporarily. This ensures that I never forget a word before Anki can drill it in to my head. Now I am always above 200% concerning ease.
I’ve found that if I’m 100% consistent in how I create my mnemonics, it helps me trigger the right meaning from the word every single time. So what I do is I ALWAYS create my vocabulary mnemonic based on the stressed syllable of the word. I basically ignore the rest of the word except to help distinguish it from other words with identical stressed syllables.
This also helps with being able to create a mnemonic quickly, and best of all, it makes pronunciation a breeze. If you just focus on getting the pronunciation of stressed syllables right, you’re going to be ahead of most people learning a foreign language. (I strongly believe in 80/20-ing pronunciation.)
So here are some Spanish examples:
otro: oat
estar: star
haber: bear
alguno: goon
cuando: won
mucho: mooch
poder: dare
pero: pear
I’ve used this technique to learn 50 new words a day in under half an hour. I learned the most frequent 1000 Spanish words with just a few total hours of study time (I timed myself and it was well under 10 total hours). I may not be setting any records, but I’m not a seasoned language-learning expert. You might give it a try.