@bjoern.gumboldt, I am very interested in using mnemonics in a way that ties into grammar.
Prepostions are an important feature. I am still working on my methods, so I am not sure if I can say anything helpful. Perhaps if I mention a few random thoughts, you can let me know if anything happens to be of interest.
I started thinking about prepositions many years ago, when I was trying to help a Spanish speaking friend learn English, I started thinking about phrasal verbs, which are part of our Germanic heritage. We normally think of verbs as a single word, e.g.: look, talk, kick. English verbs often get lonely without a preposition. For example, here are some sentences where verbs need help from prepositions:
When you are in town, please look me up.
My car is acting up again. Could you please look it over?
The police officer wrote the license number down.
The police officer asked for my license, then proceeded to write me up.
The verb ‘to look’ can mean one think by itself. But when we want to specify that it is a search, we can add the preposition ‘up’. But, if we want to specify that we are examining something, we add the preposition ‘over’ instead.
Likewise, the very ‘to write’ can stand by itself, but it becomes more specific by adding a preposition. When want to say we are recording something on paper, we add the preposition ‘down’ When we want to specify that we are writing somebody a parking ticket, we would instead add the preposition ‘up’.
There is not always an obvious reason why one preposition is rather than another. Mostly it is random. We normally think of up being the opposite of down. However, I don’t think anybody would say writing something down is the opposite of writing somebody up. My point is just to emphasize how there seems to be a random factor in how each phrasal verb gets associated with its preposition.
Anyway, back in the day, my Spanish speaking friend was making mistakes around phrasal verbs. I tried to convince her to greatly exaggerate the role of each preposition in a phrasal verb. So, each time she would say ‘please look me up’, her task was to physically look upwards in an exaggerated manner, all the way up to the ceiling. Likewise, anytime she was going to ‘write something down’, I wanted her to pretend to put the paper down on the floor then get down on the ground to write it.
Of course, the point of the exercise was to try to sensitize her to the peculiarities of our language.
BTW, there are lots of other examples where we use verbs with random prepositions. I was trying to get her to do the same exercise pretty much every where prepositions are used. We say we get ‘in’ touch with somebody. So, I would ask her to actually try to visualize touch as a thing you could actually ‘get into’.
In the end, my would-be student didn’t stick with the exercise. I guess she found my ideas too weird. No problem. Of course, the last time I saw her, she was still making a lot of mistakes in her choice of prepositions.
For my part, I no longer try to coach people to learn English, but I did hang on to my interest in prepositions. I think about them a lot when I am memorizing sentences. Not just phrasal verbs. There are several prepositions that come up a lot. For example: from, of, for, to, at, by, on, in.
Whenever I encounter such prepositions, I perform a mental subroutine that involves an exaggerated image or thought. For instance, the preposition ‘from’ will typically trigger a thought about a farm. In the crazy universe inside my head, everything that comes from a farm. (Did you notice that the word from and farm sound a little bit alike?)
So, imagine I read something like the following: “Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University recently published the results of a double blind study on the effects of probiotic yogurt on gut bacteria…”
In this case, I might imagine a story about researchers studying yogurt and gut-bacteria, but I would also imagine a mental flashback to a farm where there are huge melons. As I said, in my crazy mnemonic universe, all things come from a farm.
That’s it for now. It’s late and I need to sleep. If I had a point, I have forgotten it, but prepositions are interesting from a mnemonic point of view.
