Hi guys! I’m currently trying to learn Brazilian Portuguese. I am a native English speaker. My technique so far has been pretty simple I’ll take a word and depending on how it sounds I’ll create an image that includes the meaning and the pronunciation and then insert it into a loci.
My problems currently are the fact that I have to assign both the pronunciation and the meaning to just one image so if I forget a part of it I forget the whole thing. Moreover, It takes up a ton of space because of the fact that each image is only one word meaning that I need a lot of loci. I considered making a type of PAO system for each letter and then using that to create and image but I found that had it’s own problems as well.
I’m looking for other methods or ways to condense it so it doesn’t take up as much space and there’s less of a chance of me forgetting it. Are there other methods in place that work faster or better?
there are lots of posts on here about languages. look up posts by kinma, as one example, as there is a lot of very useful information in those posts and kinma has learnt quite a few languages. i dont think kinma advocates using MPs, only if the words are very hard to remember.
its completely inappropriate for me to give you advice on learning languages as my opinions are completely untested and untried apart from some fun experiments to cram words to see how many i can learn. although if you want my opinions on how i would go about it if i was learning a language i could tell you
I’ve shared my thoughts on this extensively on other posts on this forum: for learning languages don’t use loci but use flashcards (SRS like Anki if you like).
Brief reason why: communicating in a language requires immediate recall, and memory palaces don’t provide fast recall. So at best, memory palaces are a cumbersome way to eventually learn the associations that flashcards/SRS/Anki is optimized to do.
Use ad hoc mnemonics for random words that don’t stick. And try to use the words you learn in context to build real connections between vocabulary and context, which also directly helps with fluency.
[Source: I use memory palaces for other purposes, and I learned Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish, successfully by myself as an adult.]
Hi. I dont know much about palaces.but I think you could learn a lot without using them. You can reserve it to important things. I speak spanish. Brazilian.at least the easy things is Easy for Us. Maybe for a english speaker is not son easy because of the verbs.i think yo can use the words into phrases. And then yes put in the palace.
So, I’m not sure how to solve that with mnemonics, but it occurs to me that maybe you could forgo memorizing the pronunciation and just keep the meaning; as I’m sure you noticed, Portuguese has very regular phonetic rules (rlly different from English in that regard), so it might be easier to study those rules than memorize hundreds of pronunciations.
Hi. For pronunciation. He can use phonetic símbols or ask chatgpt. It can explain with símbols or Just explaining. Like: voce e o melhor do mundo. Mundo could be moondo with the last o very short. I dont know how it exolains to an english speaker. But it does. Besides now he could use recording the pronunciation with the cellphone or using Google translator. I dont think its useful to use mnemonics for that. Yes its useful to remember the words and the meaning. That itself is very difficult.
Just quoting this for emphasis, as it’s absolutely correct
If you learn the pronunciation of the individual letters, and a few combinations like ‘nh’ and ‘ce’, and the simple rule for which syllable carries the emphasis, then you can accurately pronounce any Portuguese word or name.
Portuguese is regular enough that this mostly works the other way too: if you know how to pronounce something, you’ll usually know how to spell it too, with a few minor errors e.g. ç/s and ce/se and nha/nia.
Ok I see. So in turn the better method for learning Portuguese would be more about anki with spaced repetition rather than making a image and loci for every word. Is there things I can add on to make it feel less like route learning though?
I think you could use an image per phrase not for word. And use anki and spaced repetition too. Using phrases is better that words. So you can see how it’s used the words. You could use Duolingo to practise too.
Hey it’s been a little while but I found some stuff that might help. I recommend you read Mert13’s post first (it’s annexed bellow) because it’s very straightforward and synthesizes the idea
Hi! I’m Brazilian and I think it’s very cool that other people would like to learn our language! For the memory techniques, try the one below. I learned French and German by using almost everything he teaches, so it may work for you!
