Mnemonics

For thousands of years, it has been recognised that arbitrary facts are more easily remembered if they are artificially given a more memorable context, via the imagination. This is an extension of the natural contextual embedding that occurs when a word is met as part of a paragraph in a novel.

Here's an example. If you read 'Learning Principles', you might remember that 'die Gießkanne' means 'watering can'. (It wouldn't be at all surprising if that fact had been forgotten, because the optimal time to review it was probably about 60 seconds after you first read it.) The 'kanne' (for 'can') doesn't seem too hard to remember - you could just pick the closest-sounding English word, and you'd be right. The German word for 'to pour' is 'gießen', so the word is quite logical if you already know 'gießen' but it is pretty arbitrary if you are meeting 'Gieß' for the first time. 'Gieß' just doesn't sound anything like its English equivalent. In fact, it sounds like 'geese' (once you know that ß is pronounced as 'ss', that is). On being asked to translate 'Gießkanne', many English speakers will guess that some sort of can is involved... but at that point they are likely to stall.

That's where mnemonics step in. After forgetting 'Gießkanne' for the second time around, my son opened up Microsoft Paint and, in about 60 seconds, drew the following picture:


Geese-can


It won't win any art prizes but it looks enough like a watering can made out of a goose that it links 'watering can', via 'geese-can' to 'Gießkanne'.


He saved it as a GIF file, and added it to the item in the edit window, like this:


Geese-Can in the Edit window


Now, if he ever gets it wrong again, the image will appear. More importantly, the mental effort of making the association has made it very unlikely he will ever forget it again.


If mnemonic images are loaded into the vocab file before a student tries to learn it, the mnemonic image is displayed when the item is first encountered:

Geese-Can Mnemonic in action


The mnemonic images that will eventually be supplied with the Cerebware software might have more artistic merit than this one-minute job, but the real point is, any old linking image will do. With practice, students can get just as much benefit, or more, from imagining their mnemonic images rather than having them pre-prepared. The only advantage in having them pre-prepared is that it allows students to fly through a whole stack of new words and remember them with high recall rates.