Is mnemonics useful to learn languages?

[bjoern.gumboldt (Бьёрн Гумбольдт)]

@sprachspiel

Is it really much faster or faster at all to use mnemonics for language aquisition?

That depends on what you mean by language acquisition exactly…

@cameri

You were hit by lightning and forgot everything about a given subject. […] You remember all memory techniques and lost none of the skills involved. How would you start to use these to re-remember it all?

@bjoern.gumboldt

[…] re-memorize the Proto-Indo-European language tree. After that down the Italic and Germanic branches. Frequency dictionary for use with memory towns to get the first 200-300 words down. After that, kick back and watch some tv shows and movies in each language until things start making sense.

I wouldn’t use mnemonics for every single word, but if you are learning a new language, you can quickly do a couple of hundred words over a weekend and then move on to tv shows or movies from there… hitting the ground running. So YES to language acquisition in general, but NO to every single word of vocabulary you are learning.

@sprachspiel

An exception are words like barad (fridge) which reminds me visually of barid (cold) etc., so words which have a semantic connection.

They should always have that connection… how else are they supposed to link the two languages otherwise? Here’s an example for Wednesday in French.

@bjoern.gumboldt

Using a French example for Wednesday = Mercredi:
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&tl=fr&text=sea credit Wednesday

Click on the sound button to let the French voice speak the words for you. There is only a slight difference in the pronunciation, so you can now use “sea” and “credit” to reason that you need to get a credit from the bank if you want to buy a house by the sea. (Plus you learnt two new words.)

So much for the French translation itself; and Wednesday understood as “wetness day” then nicely links “mer crédit” back to “wetness” because the “sea” (mer) is “wet”; so it can’t be any other day (the two are now logically connected).