Fluent Forever : How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
Breaking Through the Filter: The Power of Images and Personal Connections
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| Breaking Through the Filter: The Power of Images and Personal Connections
Earlier in this chapter, we encountered a translated word pair: cat–gato. As we discussed, standard study practice involves repeating gato and cat until they form a sound connection. This is too shallow to remember easily, but it’s also beside the point; when you read gato, you don’t want to think the word cat; you want to think this: We’ll get better results if we skip the English word and use an image instead. We recall images much better than words, because we automatically think conceptually when we see an image. Image-recall studies have repeatedly demonstrated that our visual memory is phenomenal. Memory researchers in the 1960s subjected college students to one of the most terrifyingly-named memory tests ever invented: the Two-Alternative Forced-Choice Test. In it, college students were shown 612 magazine ads (possibly tied to chairs with their eyes held open) and then asked to identify the old pictures when shown a new mixture of images. The students correctly picked the old images 98.5 percent of the time. Unsatisfied, the researchers repeated their tests with more images, trying to determine what college students will put up with for low pay and free food. There doesn’t seem to be a limit. Students were willing to sit in dark rooms for five consecutive days, watching ten thousand images in a row. After the study, these students accurately identified 83 percent of the images. Our capacity for visual memory is extraordinary; we only need to learn how to take advantage of it. Since we need to learn words, not pictures, we will use combinations of words and pictures. Such combinations work even better than pictures alone. This effect even applies to totally unrelated images: you will remember an abstract drawing with the sentence “Apples are delicious” better than that drawing alone. Faced with an incomprehensible image and an unrelated word, your brain struggles to find meaning, even if there isn’t any. In the process, it automatically moves the word out of the disodium phosphate trash can and into cookie territory. As a result, you’ll remember. We can go one step deeper than pictures by taking advantage of the last level, personal connection. You will remember a concept with a personal connection 50 percent more easily than a concept without one, which is why our college students remembered 50 percent more PIZZAs (Yes, we like them) than TOOLs (Yes, they are synonymous with instruments). This is not to say that concepts alone are ineffective. If you connect gato to a picture of some cute cat, you will have an easy time remembering that word. But if, in addition, you can connect gato with a memory of your own childhood cat, that word will become practically unforgettable. How do we use this in practice? A new foreign word is like a new friend’s name. Our new friend could be a person, a cat, or a drink; the memory burden in each case is the same. Let’s make a new friend’s name memorable using levels of processing. Our new friend is named Edward. Simply by thinking “Edward,” we have already reached the second level of processing—sound. If we want to go deeper, into concept territory, we would search for a concrete image for the name Edward, such as the movie character Edward Scissorhands. If we spent a moment imagining our new friend with a pair of scissors for hands, we would have an easy time remembering his name later. This strategy is used by competitive memorizers (yes, there are competitive memorizers) to quickly memorize people’s names, and we’ll discuss it in depth in Chapters 4 and 5 . But we’re not done yet. We’ll do even better if we can find a personal connection with his name. Perhaps you still remember watching Edward Scissorhands in a theater, perhaps your brother is named Edward, or perhaps you too have hands made of scissors. As you imagine your new friend interacting with Edward-related images and Edward-related personal memories, you are activating broader and broader networks in your brain. The next time you see Edward, this parade of images and memories will come rushing back, and you’ll be hard pressed to forget his name. This gives you valuable social points, which are sometimes redeemable for wine, cheese, and board game nights. This thought process can take creativity, but you can learn to do it quickly and easily. For a concrete word like gato, you can find an appropriate image on Google Images ( images.google.com ) within seconds. If you simply ask yourself, “When’s the last time I saw a gato?” you will add a personal connection and cement your memory of the word. Easy. For an abstract word like economía (economy), our job is still very simple. When we search Google Images, we’ll find thousands of pictures of money, piggy banks, stock market charts, and politicians. By choosing any of these images, we’ll force ourselves to think concretely and conceptually. As a result, the word will become much easier to remember. If we ask ourselves whether the economía has affected our lives, we’ll get the personal connection we need to remember that word forever. In this book, we’re going to learn vocabulary in two main stages: we’ll build a foundation of easy, concrete words, and then we’ll use that foundation to learn abstract words. Throughout, we’ll use levels of processing to make foreign words memorable. tải về 3.86 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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