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Harry Lorayne's Magic Memory Aid How does a farmhand feel the day the tractor arrives, after he's plowed by hand for thirty-one years? Undoubtedly the waay I felt when, after decades of memorising foreign vocabulary the old way, I suddenly discovered Harry Lorayne and his methods. Harry Lorayne became well known some years ago as the world's leading "memory magician." His feats of memory for names and faces, complex numbers, and hundreds of objects he could repeat forward, backward, or in scrambled order enlivened many a late night TV show. Harry Lorayne was to be a guest on my WOR radio show one night to talk about his book on improving memory. It was his seventeenth or eighteenth book on memory and, as I was looking it over, I saw a short, almost hidden chapter entitled "Memorising Foreign Language Vocabulary." I sped to that chapter and my language learning life changed completely from that moment forward. I think I actually cried in rage at all the time I'd wasted attempting rote memory of foreign words during the thirty-one years I had studied languages before I met Harry Lorayne! Let me invite you now to pay one last visit to the old way of learning foreign language vocabulary before we wave it an untearful goodbye. Imagine facing a page containing a hundred words in a foreign language. You only know eight or nine of them, you have a test tomorrow morning at eight o'clock, and your roommate is playing the radio too loud. You sit there with your palms pressed over your ears repeating those unrelenting syllables over and over, hoping enough of them will stick by dawn to give you a passing grade. Did you enjoy that kind of learning? Are you nostalgic for it? If so, enjoy the recollection now. After the following pages you will never tackle new vocabulary that way again.
In the
fourth or fifth grade, when Miss Hobbs was teaching us the rudiments
of music, my class accomplished an amazing feat of memory in
one flash (many of you
probably had the same experience). The notes on the five line music staff, E, G, B, D, and F, could easily be remembered with the help of a simple phrase, "Every Good Boy Does Fine." What's more, we learned that the notes in the spaces between the lines were F, A, C, and E, or, as we ten year olds guessed, the word "face." Who could ask for anything more? Harry Lorayne teaches us we can ask for everything more! He teaches a system of association called mnemonics that allows you to almost always bring forth any word in conversation whenever you want it. The way to capture and retain a new word in a foreign language is to sling a vivid association around the word that makes it impossible to forget. Lasso the unfamiliar with a lariat woven from the familiar. We'll now take a random assortment of words in various languages and demonstrate how it works. The Spanish word for "old" is viejo, pronounced vee-A-ho, the middle syllable rhyming with "hay." Imagine a Veterans Administration hospital a VA hospital that's so old and decrepit they have to tear it down and build a new one. Before they lay the dynamite the crew foreman calls the contractor and tells him, "We don't have to waste dynamite on this VA hospital. It's so old we can knock it over with a hoe! " Got it? A VA hospital so old you can knock it over with a hoe. And that gives us viejo. (Viejo is stressed on the next to last syllable: vi-E jo; in our code, v-,4-hoe.) Readers of much skepticism and little faith will worry that spinning such an involved yarn to capture one word is less productive than spending that same amount of time simply repeating the word to yourself over and over again. Wrong. The yarn, like a dream, takes much longer to tell or read than it does to imagine. And you'll quickly see for yourself how helpful the yarn is when it comes time to retrieve the word and use it. As you continue now through further demonstrations of this technique, try to challenge the examples. See if you can think of better ones. A "better" one is simply one that works better for you. We're going to swing headlong now into dozens of sample "lassos," associations designed to rope your target word and bring it obediently to your feet, never again to part. Ignore the fact that many of the examples that follow teach words in languages you're not trying to learn. Never mind, I tell you, never mind! Learn the system and you will use it happily and effectively ever after in the language of your choice. The French word for "anger" is colere, pronounced cole-MR. Strange, we associate anger with heat. We say "in the heat of anger", but when someone is angry at us, we say he's "cold," "chilly," "giving us the cold shoulder." It's not too much of a leap to imagine an angry person radiating his anger, spilling it off in all directions, in the form of cold air. You hope he's not angry, but when you enter his office, you know your hopes were in vain because you can feel the colere, the "col' air" (cole'-AZx). The Russian word for "house" is dom, pronounced dome. Imagine your amazement upon landing in Moscow and seeing all the houses with dome type roofs. Or imagine marveling at how domestic the Russian men are. The Italian word for "chicken" is pollo, pronounced exactly like the English "polo" (Po-lo). Imagine your Italian host urging you to join him for an unbelievable spectacle. An Italian impresario with a gift for animal training has staged the world's first polo match between teams of chickens! You're thrilled that you're going to be able to go back to Gaffney, South Carolina, and tell your friends you saw chickens playing polo! The Italian word for "wife" is moglie, pronounced moLE yay. Imagine you're a man about to get married and you get a friendly tip from an indiscreet clergyman that your bride to be is known to have a strange animal as a pet and fully intends to bring that animal into your home after the nuptials. You're torn! It's too late to call off the marriage. All the relatives have been invited and the paperwork is all in. Besides, you love her. You decide to barrel forward and hope for the best. As the organ plays and the preacher intones the vows, all you can think of is, "What kind of animal is it? Is it a lion? Is it a tiger? Is it a slick and sneaky snake? A giraffe?" When the two of you arrive at your threshold after the honeymoon, the suspense ends. She brings forth a pleasant little cage containing a cute, furry little creature. "This is my pet mole," she says. "He's going to live with us." You cry forth your relief. "Hooray!" you shout. "It's only a mole. It's only a mole! " you cheer, "Yay! " It's only a mole yay. Your wife's secret animal is nothing more than a mole, therefore, "Yay! " "Wife" equals moLE yay.
WAIT A MINUTE!
An enemy, a skeptic, even a queasy ally at this point could say, "Wait a minute. I'm trying to learn a language. I'm not sure I want to walk around with a headful of images of wives who keep moles, chickens that play polo, angry people emitting cold air, and VA hospitals you can knock over with a hoe!" You won't! One beauty of the system is, the association that helps you capture the word falls away and disintegrates. Once you've learned the words, the "crutch" obligingly disappears. A common form of the verb "to speak" in Hebrew is medaber, pronounced > meda-BEAR. There it is: you were walking through the newly planted forests of Israel and suddenly you "med " a bear who could speak! In Indonesian, "movie screen" is lajar, pronounced almost exactly like "liar" (Liar). Easy. The man is rapidly winning the woman's heart in the movie, but you don't wish him well because he's such a lajar! "Horse" in Russian, transliterated into English script, is to-shod, pronounced almost exactly like LAw--shod. You try to bring your own horse with you into the Soviet Union, but at the border the Soviet customs officer tells you Sorry, he'd like to accommodate you, but your horse doesn't have horseshoes and, according to Soviet law, all horses must be shod. "Horse" equals LAw-shod. The Greek word for "grape" in English transliteration is stafilya, pronounced sta‑ FEEL ya. You're in a Greek vineyard in the mountains near Albania. You see the most luscious grape you've ever laid eyes on. As you reach for it, the air is split with a squeaky voice screaming "Don't touch me!" "I'm sorry," you sputter, retreating in shock and shame. "I wasn't going to eat you. It was just to FEEL you (jus' sta-FEEL ya)." Grape equals sta-FEEL ya. The Serbo-Croatian word for "lunch" is ru obak, pronounced almost exactly like RUE-chuck. You're having lunch in a restaurant in Yugoslavia. The waiter overhears you making a political remark he doesn't appreciate, so he throws you out bodily. Never one to go quietly, you pick yourself up out of the gutter, dust yourself off, and, just before you head for the American Embassy to protest, you shake your first at the waiter through the window and vow he'll rue the day he chucked you out while you were having lunch. "Lunch" equals RUE-chuck. "Plate" in Indonesian is pining, pronounced exactly like the English "peering" PEER-ing). Your Indonesian restaurant experience is a bit more pleasant than the one in Yugoslavia. You walk in and find yourself suddenly becalmed by the serenity of the dining room. All the Indonesians seem to have their heads bowed in prayer. You ask the headwaiter if you've interrupted some sort of religious service. "Not at all," he assures you. "They're not praying. We just got our new plates with mirrored surfaces and they're all peering at themselves to see how they look!" "Plate" equals PEER-ing. The Farsi word for "cheaper" transliterated into English is arzontar, pronounced our-zone-TAR. The hotel in Tehran is filled, but the clerk tells you it's a warm night and he'd be happy to rent you sleeping space on the roof. You're delighted to learn you're paying only half what the other roof sleepers are paying, until you get to your designated spot on the roof, at which point you exclaim to your spouse, "Now I see why our spot is cheaper. All the other tourists are sleeping on those nice ceramic tiles. Our zone, the spot assigned to us, however, is tar!" "Cheaper" equals our-zone-TAR.< "Potato" in German is kartoffel, pronounced exaactly like cart-Awful. You buy potatoes from a cart and they turn out to be awful. "Potato" equals cart-Aw ful. Stop right here! Do you remember the Spanish word for "old?" Or the French word for "anger," the Italian word for "wife," the Serbo-Croatian word for "lunch," or the Indonesian word for "movie screen?" When we display this system of word capturing at seminars for the Learning Annex, there's a collective gasp when, after spelling out an association to capture the tenth word, we suddenly stop and ask how many can recall word number one, four, and so on. At no point did we suggest that the students try to recall the words used as examples as we laid out the system. When they see that almost everybody recalls every single one of them anyhow, the students realise this system contrasts well with the kind of rote learning they'd tried earlier. One grateful participant exclaimed, "This system teaches you words you're not even trying to learn. The old way doesn't teach you no matter how hard you try!" The skeptic has one shot left before he's wiped out by the power of the method. He can, at this point, say, "Hold it! Every word you've used to demonstrate the system so far falls much too neatly into our lap liar, mole yay. It's a setup. It's not real. Very few words will cooperate with the system once you tackle the real world!" And he's right! The words we've been subjecting to the memory system so far are automatics. They fall right into your lap with self suggesting images. Only a small percentage of words will fall into the system as facilely as the automatics. More, many more than you imagine, will fit automatically into the system, but far from enough to conquer another language. Never mind! Behind the words that fit neatly into the system are many times that number of words that, while fitting nowhere nearly as neatly, can nonetheless take you so close to the target word that true memory can easily complete the job. We call those words almosters. Of our four groups automatics, almosters, toughies, and impossibles the almosters make up by far the single biggest category. Let's demonstrate.
The Chinese word for "lobster" is transliterated as low-shah, pronounced very much like LoAN shark. If you imagine that lobster is so expensive you need a loan shark to negotiate a lobster lunch, true memory will easily putt you from loan-shark to low-shah. Shrimp in Indonesian is gambiri, pronounced gam to rhyme with "Tom" followed by "beery" (gam-BZ--ri). You complain to your waiter in Indonnesia that the chewing gum he served you tastes awfully beery. He advises you it's not chewing gum, it's shrimp. Your putt will take you from Guar--beery to GAM-beery. The Serbo-Croatian word for "spoon" is kasika, pronounced KAsH (to rhyme with "gosh")-ee-kah. You want to get a spoon in Belgrade. They send you outside the hotel to a cash-and-carry to get a spoon if you want one. Or if you're familiar with the Eastern grain called kasha (buckwheat groats), you can imagine dipping you spoon into a bowl of kasha in the back seat of your car. True memory will carry you from kasha-car to KAsx-ee-ka. "Spoon," then, equals KAsx-ee-ka. The Italian word for "day" is giorno, pronounced JUR (as in "jury")-no. You're eagerly awaiting the outcome of a legal action, but the jury has been tied up all day with no verdict. Even stronger would be the notion of eagerly awaiting the outcome of the trial and learning that the whole day went by without the jury even showing up! All day and jury no. "Day" equals .rux-no. "Humid" in Farsi is martoob, pronounced mar (as in "marshal")-TooB (as in "tube"). It's so dry in Central Iran that in order to provide comfortable humidity in your room, the maritime authorities arranged to bring water in through a tube. True memory will easily let you lop off all but the first syllable of "maritime" and change the vowel from the a as in "maritime" to a as in "marshal" so that humidity equals mar-TooB. "Banana" in Indonesian is pisang, pronounced PEA-song, the second syllable rhyming with the cong in "conga". You'd long heard of jungle magic in the outer islands of Indonesia, but you never really believed it until you went to the local grocer looking for bananas. You don't see bananas anywhere. You ask if he has any bananas. Sure, he says, plenty. "Excuse me," you say, "I don't see any." Be patient, he begs you, until he finishes with a customer. When it's your turn he asks you how many bananas you want. You reply, half a dozen. He then takes six peas and sings them a mysterious little song. Before your bewildered eyes, they turn into bananas! The peas that were sung to became bananas. Your only putt is to make the final vowel sound like the o in "conga." So "banana" equals PEA-song. The Spanish word for "to iron" is planchar, pronounced plan (to rhyme with "Don")-CHAR (as in "charcoal"). The hotel in Madrid has an excellent reputation, with only a single and rather bizarre lapse. Apparently a maid with too much seniority to be fired has a habit of leaving the iron on the backside of the trousers so long it leaves burn marks the size of the iron itself smack across both buttocks. You have no choice. Your pants need ironing and you've got to take your chances. To improve your odds you gingerly approach the concierge and say, " Excuse me, sir. Could you please find out if the maiid plans to iron these pants correctly or if she plans to char them?" Your putt is to carry the plan sound from one rhyming with "tan" over to one rhyming with "Don." "To iron" equals plan-CHAR. The Indonesian word for "donkey" is keledai, pronounced almost exactly like "call it a day" without the it. That's what donkeys in hot climates are reputed to want to do after carrying their loads, and that's what we'll do now with this particular series of examples.
Un-American Sounds
So far we've shied away from words containing sounds that don't exist in English. The real world won't be so protective. "Un-American" sounds are exaggerated as an obstacle to progress in most languages. I say that not because it's unimportant to master the sounds correctly, but because most of them will enter your repertoire automatically with practice. The trilled r in Spanish, the French r that sounds as though it issues from inside the pituitary gland, the half-sh half-guttural in German, the double consonant in Finnish, the many umlauted u's and a's and o's in the various European languages will all be explained in your grammars, and better than explained on your cassettes: they'll be pronounced. Many languages carry so many markings and so many different kinds of markings over and under certain of their letters you may be intimidated. Almost all of them are empty threats; despite their sinister looking foreignness, they don't convey any sounds we don't have in English. The two dots over certain a's in Swedish simply tell you that particular letter is pronounced as the first a in "accurate." Without the dots, it's the a in "father." There's no need to run from the Norwegian o with a line slicing diagonally down through it: the first e sound in "Gertrude" is close enough. Languages with the double consonant spend far too much time warning us Americans that this is something strange to us. It is not strange. We have double consonants too, maybe not inside the same word, but definitely inside the same phrase. We pronounce the last sound of the first word and the first sound of the last word in "late train." We don't say "lay train." So much for the frightening double consonant. We'll make no attempt here to teach you the "click" sounds of some of the languages in South Africa or the larynx twisting sounds of the Georgian language spoken in Soviet Georgia that actually sounds like paper ripping inside the speaker's throat. Those sounds are unrepeatable for most Americans and the languages in which they appear are mercifully obscure. There is really only one sound that doesn't exist in English that we're obliged to learn well, and that's the guttural common in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Dutch, and several other languages. Most textbooks are notoriously weak in conveying that sound. They know they're committing consumer fraud when, as they frequently do, they merely advise the American student to "approximate the ch sound in the German name `Bach' or the final sound in the Scottish word `Loch. "' However, "Bach" is not pronounced bak. "Loch" is not pronounced lock. "Chanukah" is not pronounced Ha-na-ka. The trick is to learn how to make the real sound. The best method, though perhaps inelegant, is to imagine that you're about to say the plain old h sound, and suddenly you feel a terrible tickle in the middle of your throat. The original h sound then becomes lost in all the other powerful things you now do. Clear your throat violently to eject the irritant causing that tickle. You will then have the "Chanukah" sound, the "Bach " sound, the "Loch " sound, the "chutzpah" sound. That sound has no natural parents in the English language. It's up for adoption. Stop and think what image comes easiily to your mind that can make you hear that sound. Don't be afraid to exaggerate it. Then tone it down. Dry it out. It will soon be as serviceable and comfortable as the sounds you grew up with.
Gender
The Harry Lorayne method of remembering the gender of nouns in foreign languages makes you feel downright foolish for not having thought of it yourself. In some languages you have to remember the gender of nouns in order to adjust the articles or the endings of the adjectives that go with them. All the Romance languages Spanish, French, Italian, Protugese, Romanian, etc. have masculine and feminine gender. Usually, but far from always, you can figure which is which by the word's ending: o for masculine, a for feminine. French, however, conceals gender clues with noun endings as unrevealing as battlefield camouflage. German and Russian have masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. The Scandinavian languages call their two noun genders "common" and "neuter," as does Dutch. Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Hungarian, and Finnish, like English, have no noun genders. How do we remember whether the French noun for "train," also spelled train, is le train (masculine) or la train (feminine)? It happens to be masculine, le train. Imagine not merely a train that has no women passengers, but a train that doesn't allow women passengers! The men prefer it that way. In hot weather, when the air conditioning fails, they sit around in their underwear. Feminists are outraged, but the Supreme court keeps postponing the case. Men's magazines litter the aisles. There are twice as many men's rooms as necessary because there are no ladies' rooms. Once the train screeched to a halt between stations and an alarm sounded. It seems a band of militant women tried to board the train and hijack it. They were eventually beaten back, before the men in the club car even had to put their pants back on. Le train; masculine. The French word for "cafe" is le cafe; masculine. You could either confect another all male scenario for a cafe similar to the one you did for the train. Or imagine a masculine name emblazoned over the entrance something like the Macho Cafe or the Rambo Cafe. Le cafe; masculine. "Hour" in French is 1'heure; feminine. Occasionally you get a gift like this one. Heure is pronounced very much like her without the h. L'heure; feminine. "Nose" in French is le nez; masculine. The members of which sex break their noses playing football and hockey, boxing, wrestling, and fighting with wise guys who insult their dates? Le nez; masculine. "Night" in French is la nuit; feminine. Who ever heard of a "man of the night?" La nuit; feminine. "Ticket" in French is le billet; masculine. Always look for opportunities to incorporate a memory hook for the gender as you capture the word itself. Billet is pronounced bee yay, almost exactly like the letters B.A. as in Bachelor of Arts. If "bachelor" doesn't have a sufficiently strong male connotation to you, imagine a giant male bumble bee buzzing around. Le billet; masculine. "Train station" in French is la gare; feminine. Shall we imagine women waiting for their homebound commuting husbands at the train station? Not a good idea. You may forget whether the waiting women or the expected husbands are the star of the association. How about hundreds of women waiting for one man, pouncing upon him and fighting over him as he unsuspectingly steps off the train? La gare; feminine. "Church" in French is Veglise; feminine. Imagine an angry mob of French women storming a church in France, demanding that women be allowed into the Catholic priesthood. L'eglise; feminine. Let this one be a lesson to you. "Mustache" in French is la moustache; feminine! Imagine the circus lady with a mustache, or a new French wine that causes women to grow mustaches, or a little girl asking her mother if she can ever have a mustache. La moustache; feminine. Some languages have neuter gender too. Try to come up with associations that suggest icy impersonality. "House" in German is das Haus; neuter. Imagine a house so cold and unappealing it couldn't have possibly been graced by man or woman for years. No one lives there or would ever conceivably want to. Das Haus; neuter. "Pen" in Russian is pero, pronounced pee-RA w. What could be more sexless than a pea that's raw? Pero; neuter.
Reinforcement
You now have a brand new "closet," a foreign language vocabulary memory system that lets you hang up new words as if they were new clothes. The system just presented will work even better for you if you keep a few tips in mind. Every example given above is clean in word, deed, and thought. Every one could have been presented from the stage in Yadkinville, North Carolina, YMCA during Foreign Language Week. I refuse to do any dirty writing, so you have to do some dirty thinking (if you will) to get maximum benefit from the system. The more vivid, in fact, the more vulgar, your associations are, the more readily they will probably come to mind. Feel free, in your mental imagery, to take clothes off. Get people naked. Get everybody into bed, in the tub, swinging from vines, or making nominating speeches immersed in bubbling Romanian mud. Get them wherever you need them so that the association you want is readily retrievable. X-rated images come readily to mind, even to the minds of nice people. Make your associative images lurid and unforgettable. We've refrained in our model examples from using names and places to buttress our associations. In a book or a class, we can't. Except for famous figures and places we all know in common, names and places don't mean the same things to everybody. As individuals, however, we can haul off and use any and every proper name we know, whether from our personal lives or from stage, screen, radio, video, song, literature, and legend. Does the foreign word demand the sound or any part of the sound of a Harry, an Edna, a Philip, an Art, a Harold, a Doreen, a Billy, a Lance? If that name belongs to someone you actually know, your associations will come to you more rapidly and last longer. Did you grow up around a Reidsville, a Colfax, a Burlington, a Charlotte, a Haw River, or a Mt. Pisgah? Your associations with the foreign words can be enriched by place names that sounds like or almost like your target words. You don't actually have to have those places in your biography, so long as you know them and can visualise them and use them as lassos to haul in and hog tie similar sounding words. I've never been to Nantucket, but when attacking the Indonesian word for "tired" (NAN tuk), I imagine getting so tired on my initial visit to Nantucket that I collapse into bed exhausted shortly after lunch. Yet another asset to you is the body of words you already know in another foreign language, or even in the language you're learning. Those who know many languages may conquer a four syllable word by bringing in sounds from four different languages. This is a classic case of the rich getting richer. Every new word you learn is one more potential hook for grabbing still newer words. Don't fight to forge a winning association. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then give up! Not all words can be forced into the system, and you're better off not wasting good language learning time trying to mash an ill fitting shoe onto Cinderella's sister's foot. Over ninety percent will fit, automatically, neatly, or after some effort. The others, the holdouts, will have to be learned by old familiar rote learning. Don't forget: make your associations vivid, even if that means making them vulgar. You'll find that so many truly comical cartoons will dance through your head as you craft your associative images, you'll find yourself constantly having to explain "What's so funny?" to native speakers who wonder what's so hilarious about those ordinary words they're teaching you in their language! |