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runs after it, puffing frantically, throws his suitcase in one of the back compartments, jumps in after it,
and makes it just in time.
This ridiculous story is one that is much harder to forget. The precise details of it are not so
important, except for the fact that it s definitely Garfield who is performing all the actions, and it s
definitely happening in a train station. This means that later, when you see the word gare in some
random French text, you can go through the thought process: gare sounds like Garfield . . . and
Garfield was in the train station.
Conversely and something much more useful than you ll ever get from rote memorization
when you need to say train station in French, you imagine your favorite train station (Valencia s, in
my case), think of what interesting thing happened there, and you suddenly can t avoid seeing that
silly orange cat running through it. If Garfield is running through a train station, then train station in
French must be gare!
The recall process takes less than a second and barely slows down a nicely flowing conversation.
The memory of the word is easily accessible and comes to you much more quickly than the digging
you d have to do with rote memorization.
Mùbio
Now let s take a look at a Chinese word. One that I needed often was the word that meant target
or goal, because I frequently discussed my fluency goal in Chinese when asked why I was in
Taiwan. Since I wasn t learning the writing system yet, all I needed to do was learn the sound of the
word, which is mùbio (falling tone on mù, and first tone, which doesn t go up or down but remains
steady, on bio).
So how do you learn this while incorporating the tone? Like anything else, it just requires a bit of
imagination. Think about it for a second yourself: What would you come up with from mù
(pronounced moo) and then bio (bee-ow)? I don t know about you, but I thought of a cow, then a bee,
and then simply the ow (as in ouch ) sound from pain.
Next, it s a case of throwing ideas out there. It doesn t matter how silly, nonsensical, politically
incorrect, sexual, or personal your story is, as long as it stands out in your memory. This is the short
story that I came up with for this word:
I m walking through a field with a bow and arrow in the early evening as the sun is setting. I
want to practice my shooting skills, but I don t see something challenging to aim at. Suddenly a
cow falls from the sky: Mmmoooooo (crash).
She stumbles to find her footing, and I see my opportunity. Conveniently, a bull s-eye of
concentric red and white circles has been pre-painted on her rear end, and I position myself by
kneeling a little so my bow is at the same height as the poor cow s ass.
This is no ordinary bow and arrow, though. My arrow is made entirely of bees. I pull it back
and launch it to fly horizontally through the air, and since I positioned myself correctly, it flies
straight into the target and goes up the cow s bum! The poor animal forgets herself and rather
than moo, she can t resist yelling a loud Ow!
(No cows or bees were harmed in the making of this mnemonic.)
While it s true this story takes a few minutes to write out, our brains work much faster when
verbalizing (or writing) isn t necessary. All I need from this story are the essentials: target is moo
(falling tone) and bee-ow (first tone, level as in the story where the arrow is shot straight at the same
height as the target). Also, when you hear mùbio, you know it means target, which is symmetrical,
so I can both recognize it and produce it.
Some details are treated differently; for instance, the falling tone in Chinese doesn t actually
sound like someone falling and is more like a stern No! than a dramatic movie Noooooo! but
when I was learning Chinese I made a visual aspect of my mnemonics that incorporates these
movements so I could also remember the tones.
Even forgetting the tones (which I discuss in more detail in chapter 6), can you see how with a
language as distant from English as Mandarin there is still hope, if you have a good imagination?
Other Examples
I could fill a whole book just with some of the craziest keyword-association stories I ve come up
with. But here are some random ones to give you further inspiration:
Playa in Spanish means beach. For this, I imagined a cheesy pickup artist (a player ) strolling
down a beach I know well, trying to pick up pretty Spanish girls but getting slapped in the face; to
give the story a comedic effect, the slaps made it easier to remember.
The German example I began the chapter with, der Tisch this word to me sounds like the start of
the word tissue. So I imagine trying to sit down to dinner at a table made entirely out of tissues,
which collapses as soon as I put my bowl of soup on it. The soup then spills all over the floor and a
little on me . . . so then I have to mop it up with all the tissues I have!
The Czech word prvni looks and sounds nothing like any English word I can think of, but it s an
important word to learn since it means first. For this, I inserted a few vowels to make it easier and
came up with pro van. I imagined a very complex scene of me winning the professional van
Olympics, driving up into first place on the podium in my strange-looking white van, crying as I
am handed my bouquet of flowers and the medal is placed around my neck, while I remain in the
driver s seat. Pro van is easy to remember from this scene and, with a little repetition, you ll be
able to instantly recall prvni.
These examples are all nouns (things). To expand on them and remember verbs (action words),
adjectives (description words like big, red, closed, etc.), and adverbs ( quickly, happily ),
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