Does anyone have any ‘pro tips’ for learning phrases in a foreign language.
I don’t really want to go for a straight word-word mnemonic image set on both the (in my case) English and French.
By way of example, although I am most interested in a generic method, how would you memorise this short example:
CAN YOU HELP ME POUVEZ-VOUS M’AIDER
And bear in mind many common phrases will have many more words. I guess I am thinking that if I already know the basic vocabulary meanings of each word individually, then there ought to be an elegant method of putting it all together…perhaps imagining myself in a situation/location relevant to saying the English words and then some mnemonics for the French…somehow still seems like ‘double counting’ though.
Mnemonics for this seems to be over the top. Just imagine yourself in a shop in France asking the sales assistant for help. “Excusez-moi, mademoiselle? Pouvez-vous m’aider avec quelque chose?”
The rationale is that I will be in France in 6 weeks time and think it would be really useful to have a bank of stock phrases that I can call on (a la phrase book) to supplement a recently learnt and probably shaky vocabulary of individual words. Realistically I am only going to get up to about 1000 - 1200 words by then and many will not be second nature.
If you already have a knowledge of grammar and verb conjugations, then you can probably construct sentences on the fly with a good knowledge of vocabulary.
If not, the phrase book is a necessity. I doubt you’ll need to change your approach, though - no need to memorise the phrase verbatim, just enough of a reminder to spark off the rest of the phrase.
Definitely learn “Can you repeat that more slowly, please?”. My most used phrase when talking to the French, haha.
If you know a little bit of grammar, like Hype says, this is easy.
Let’s start with the last part: m’aider. This is short for ‘me aider’.
‘Aid me’ is help me. ‘Aid me’ -> ‘me aid’ -> ‘m’aider’.
Avoir, être and pouvoir are the most common French verbs, so pouvez-vous should not be a problem.
However, if it were, there is a different route.
You make up a sentence in English that sounds close to the French and that (preferably) is difficult to forget.
Like:
How about -> Pave thou maid eh! (I had to really think hard to come up with this!)
This sounds a (tiny) bit like the sentence you mentioned. Not exactly - that is usually too difficult - but close.
Now with ‘paving the maid’ I can come up with a thousand interesting images.
