I am sure this has been discussed in the past, but I could not find anything general as opposed to topics discussing the use of certain techniques and their use in language aquisition.
Language learning has been one of my main hobbies since a couple of years. Mnemonics only came to be one recently. I study about 1.5 hours of arabic every day, and try to maintain my English, Italian, Spanish, a bit of Japanese and Greek/Latin for translating philosophy. I always considered it to be the most self-evident application of natural language training, maybe besides poetry learning, and a major weapon in fighting dementia, cause your brain has to rebuild its structure in order to apply words.
However, as I have started systematic memory training of course I started to memeorize difficult words with pictures, trying to replace them as quickly as possible by a moire ânaturalâ link.
I wanted to ask you for your experiences. From the past weeks I can tell the following for myself:
- It takes significantly longer to recall artificial memory vocabulary, as I have to go there and pull them out from my memory palaces. It makes them virtually useless in a conversational situation, I just seem like a very slow thinker.
This is especially the case with verbs, that all have a similar build and cannot be very well differentiated with pictures alone. An exception are words like barad (fridge) which reminds me visually of barid (cold) etc., so words which have a semantic connection.
- I am slower with creating them. While I can remember 35 vocabs on an average day with my natural memory, I can only remember 20 or so artificial pics, which makes it questionable for me.
- It is not a physical ability that naturally evolves and gets quicker. I feel that my organic language memory gets faster as I know the language better, this doesnât seem to be the case with artificial memory. It stays at 20 objects more or less, as it just takes time to produce them in the first place.
I wanted to ask your opinion on this. Is it really much faster or faster at all to use mnemonics for language aquisition?