^Introduction - Remembering Foreign Vocabulary\

In the previous section you learned how to remember names and faces by
associating a person's name to his or her face.  In doing this there were
two factors involved - the name and the face.

Most memory tasks can in fact be viewed as associating together |two\
factors - a name to a face, an author to a book, a composer to a piece of
music, a telephone number to a person or organisation, a capital city to a
country, and so on.  Even when forming a long Link, for example when you
memorised the imaginary shopping list, you were still basically working with
just |two\ items at a time.

The same principle can be applied to remembering foreign vocabulary. In
order to memorise any foreign word, you simply associate the |word\ to its
|meaning\ in English. To do this you will first need to form a Substitute
Word or Phrase to help you picture the foreign word.

For example, to remember a simple French word like >poulet\ (chicken), you
could picture a gigantic chicken which is operating a >pulley\. To make the
picture more vivid you could picture some buckets at the other end of the
pulley, each of which contains another chicken.#
For the French word >poisson\ (fish) you might see yourself sitting at a
dining table - someone hands you a huge, monstrous, evil-smelling fish on a
plate which you >pass on\ to the person sitting beside you.  Picture that
fish being continuously handed around the table, each person >pass\ing it
>on\ to their neighbour.  To remember that >escargots\ is French for snails,
you could visualise an enormous snail pulling a trailer down the road.  The
trailer contains a cargo of letter S's - it is an >'S' cargo\.

If you really try to see those absurd pictures, the system just ^must\ work
for you, for the reasons you have already learned.  In trying to form these
images you are concentrating hard on the foreign word, and thus forcing
$Initial Awareness\.  It is impossible to apply the Substitute Word system
to a foreign word without using your imagination and really concentrating on
both the word ^and\ its English meaning.

The beauty of the Substitute Word system for remembering foreign vocabulary
is that it can be applied to absolutely $any\ language.  To remember that
the Esperanto word for 'happy' is >felica\ (pronounced fell-eetch'ah), you
might picture yourself being very happy (laughing) when you begin to >feel
itchy\.  You start to scratch yourself where you are itching, but you are
still very happy, laughing loudly.#
To remember the Welsh word for carrot, %moron\, you could see yourself in a
restaurant, being served carrots.  The waiter serves a plateful of carrots,
but then puts %more on\, and %more on\, until you are absolutely up to your
neck in carrots.

When you have formed your silly mental picture, just thinking of that
picture |must\ remind you of the two things you need to know - the foreign
word and its English meaning.

Of course, it does take a little time to come up with appropriate Substitute
Words and silly associations.  But, if you have ever tried to learn foreign
vocabulary from a text book or phrase book >without\ a system, then you will
appreciate how valuable it can be to have a system, especially one that
really does work ! Also, you will find that after a small amount of practice
at creating Substitute Words and zany associations, you will be able to come
up with them almost instantly.

Tutorial 6 takes you through a detailed example of memorising ten Spanish
words and their English meanings.  Tutorial 7 demonstrates that the system
works not just for foreign %words\, but also for foreign %phrases\.

                 ^Press Page Down to proceed to Tutorial 6\~