How to Remember a Foreign Word Forever

To create a robust memory for a word like mjöður, you’ll need all four levels of processing. The
shallowest level, structure, allows you to recognize patterns of letters and determine whether a word
is long, short, and written in English or in Japanese. Your brain is recognizing structure when you
unscramble odctor into doctor. This level is essential for reading, but it involves too little of your
brain to contribute much to memory. Almost none of the students in the levels of processing study
remembered counting the capital letters in BEAR. Words like mjöður are difficult to remember
because you can’t get any deeper than structure until you know how to deal with odd letters like ö and
ð.
Your first task in language learning is to reach the next level: sound. Sound connects structure to
your ears and your mouth and allows you to speak. You’ll start by learning the sounds of your
language and which letters make those sounds, because if you begin with sound, you’ll have a much
easier time remembering words. Our college students remembered twice as many APPLEs (which do,
in fact, rhyme with Snapple) as they did BEARs (which has four capital letters). Sound is the land of
rote memorization. We take a name, like Edward, or a pair of words, like cat–gato, and we repeat
them, continuously activating the parts of our brain that connect structure to sound. Our mjöður is very
roughly pronounced “MEW-ther,” and the more accurately we learn its pronunciation, the better we’ll
remember it.
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 Eventually, our mjöður will be as memorable as a familiar name like Edward. This is
better than structure, but it still isn’t good enough for our needs. After all, many of us don’t remember
names very well, because our brains are filtering them out as quickly as they arrive.
We need a way to get through this filter, and we’ll find it at the third level of processing: concepts.
Our college students remembered twice as many TOOLs (synonym for instruments) as APPLEs
(Snapples). Concepts can be broken down into two groups: abstract and concrete. We’ll begin with
the abstract. If I tell you that my birthday is in June, you probably won’t immediately see images of
birthday cakes and party hats. You don’t need to, and as we’ve discussed, our brains work at the
shallowest level required. It’s efficient, and it saves us a lot of work and distraction. Still, the date of
my birthday is a meaningful, if abstract, concept. This makes it deeper and more memorable than pure
sounds, which is why you’ll have an easier time remembering that my birthday is in June than you’ll
have remembering that the Basque word for “birthday” is urtebetetze.
Deeper still than abstract concepts are concrete, multisensory concepts. If I tell you that my
upcoming birthday party will take place in a paintball arena, after which we’ll eat a cookies-and-
cream ice-cream cake and then spend the rest of the evening in a swimming pool, you’ll tend to
remember those details much better than you’ll remember the month of the event. We prioritize and
store concrete concepts because they engage more of our brains, not because they’re necessarily any
more important than other information. In this case, it is less important that you know the details about
my birthday than that you know when and where to show up.
Given this phenomenon, how do we make a strange, foreign word like mjöður memorable? The
word itself is not the problem. We are not bad at remembering words when they are tied to concrete,
multisensory experiences. If I tell you that my email password is mjöður, you probably (hopefully?)
won’t remember it, because you’re processing it on a sound and structural level. But if we’re in a bar
together, and I hand you a flaming drink with a dead snake in it, and tell you, “This—mjöður! You—
drink!” you won’t have any trouble remembering that word. We have no problem naming things;
nouns comprise the vast majority of the 450,000 entries in Webster’s Third International
Dictionary.
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 It’s when those names aren’t tied to concrete concepts that we run into trouble with our
memories. Our goal, and one of the core goals of this book, is to make foreign words like mjöður
more concrete and meaningful.

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