I’m not taking any language courses right now, but I’ve taken quite a few and I have a system for learning large amounts of vocabulary pretty quickly and effectively (i.e. so you’ll remember it later) that I thought might be useful to share since it’s exam season for at least some of the population.
Step 1: Get some paper, and divide each page into two columns (see pictures above of my old Latin notes). Group your words somehow that makes sense to you: by lexical category (nouns/verb/etc), by inflection type (e.g. verbs that take similar conjugation endings, nouns by gender), by textbook chapter (especially for chapter-specific vocab quizzes), or by related topics (e.g family members, things around the house). EDIT: you could also use flashcards here, although personally I’m not a fan. Make sure to do groupings though, they’ll be important later.
Step 2: Write each word in the language you’re learning in column 1, with its translation(s) in column 2 (or if you’re learning more vocabulary in your native language, put definitions in column 2). You can also put extra information by the word, like its gender or conjugation type, irregular things about it, etc. Whatever you need/want to know about it. You could draw pictures in the translation column, but I find that this ends up taking more time and being less effective in the long run. Don’t worry, you’re going to move past translation by the end anyway.
Step 3: Cover all the words in the translation column with your hand or another piece of paper. Starting at the top of the other column, read each word out loud and try to say its translation out loud. Guess if you can. You’ll probably know at least some of them from class and from making the lists.
![jtotheizzoe:
Participle Accelerator
What If CERN Smashed Words Rather Than Protons?
The high-energy particle beams we find in places like the Large Hadron Collider drive protons and other bits of matter toward fantastic collisions, at speeds up to 0.999999991 the speed of light. The result is a fantastic scattering of debris, the products of which can contain rare, short-lived elementary particles like the recently identified Higgs boson.
What if, instead of smashing protons, we could smash words? That’s what Moritz Heller wondered. By driving two words together, their individual phonetics and letters are driven apart in pre-programmed patterns. The sum of those two words’ ingredients jetting away from each other draws patterns that remind me of the beautiful neutrino bubble chambers of old.
Vowels, plosives, frikatives … they’re all there. What a super-cool idea! Check out this video for more:
(↬ Co.Design)
This is a really cool metaphor, and the video is pretty gorgeous, and about half the linguists I talk to would have considered physics as an alternate career if linguistics didn’t exist. (True anecdata, I swear.)
But. But. Why couldn’t this have been in the International Phonetic Alphabet, please? Initially I thought it was supposed to be English words, because the interface language is English, but the “vowels” list contains ä, ö, ü and the “frikatives [sic]” list includes ß (Eszett). And the “plosives” list includes c. Which seems to place it squarely in German. So, fine. But listing ß as a fricative is kind of weird because fricatives, stops, and so on are only really defined in terms of their phonetic values, and ß is not an IPA or other phonetic symbol, it’s a German orthographic representation of a long /s/ sound. And c in German orthography represents the sound /ts/, which is really an affricate, not a plosive (=stop). IPA /c/ is a stop, but it’s a palatal stop and German has palatal affricates (in German orthography ch before a front vowel, IPA /tç/, not present in this video at all), not palatal stops. And this also misses out on a bunch of German sounds as described in the relevant wikipedia article.
Dear Internet People: It’s great when you try to do linguistics. But it’s even better when you get it right.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m70ccc9jzS1qbh26io1_500.jpg)
