How to Learn Any Language 20
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 way 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-A-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 colère, pronounced cole-AIR.
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 colère, the “col’ air” (cole’-AIR).
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.
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