How to Memorize Words Easily 第6页 Some English words often make us confuse. In the process of learning, we should use our imagination to memorize them. Let us look at these two words complement, compliment. If we just remember their meaning mechanically, I believe we will confuse their meaning in a few days. So here imagination is needed. As we can see, their spellings are almost same, the only difference of their spelling is that the one has the letter e; the other has the letter I. The letter I ,its pronunciation is similar to Chinese pinyin Ai（爱）, meaning love. Thus we can imagine that everyone love to be praised .So we can associate this with compliment, meaning ‘praise’. Once we remember the meaning of it, it is not difficult for us to distinguish one from the other. For another example, principle and principal, these two words, the former word ends with le while the latter al. As we all know, A is the first letter of English alphabet, so A is the number one, basic and important. Through comparison, we can distinguish the meaning of principle from that of principal.
By using this way, we could not only learn how to spell these words, but also remember their meaning through comparison.
3.2.8 Tongue Twisters
What is a tongue twister? It’s defined as “word or phrase that is difficult to pronounce correctly or quickly, e.g. She sells sea shells on the sea-shore.” Tongue twisters are often used in pronunciation practice because they are fun and motivating. A tongue twister often contains many words of the same or similar pronunciation that we always feel puzzled at. Using tongue twisters makes contribution to vocabulary learning. It will help us to learn and memorize a lot of words of similar pronunciation. Below is one example.
.“A flea and a fly were in a flue. The flea said to the fly, ‘Let’s flee,’ but the fly said to the flea, ‘Let’s fly.’ So the flea fled and the fly flew.”
After reading the tongue twister, we will have a clearer idea of a pair of homophones-‘flea’ and ‘flee’.
3.2.9 Pictography
The development of language and human’s cognition is closely linked. To describe things and thoughts, people need more precise language to express a concept. The development of language is from visible to intangible, from concrete to abstract, from perceptual to rational process. So that we can say the development of language begins with the pictographic words and they are created by people according to their characteristic, such as shape. As long as we hold this notion, memorizing pictographic words would be no trouble. Take the word peep for example the letter e looks like our eyes, p looks like an half open window .so we can imagine that someone looks through a half open window to pry into something. Another word avarice, the letter a can be seen as a person, so there are two persons. The letter v looks like an open mouth. These two people are fighting for rice with open mouth. Therefore; we can remember this word as greedy.
3.2.10 Designing Intelligent Questions and Answers.
This way of vocabulary learning is something like that joke mentioned earlier in the thesis. Intelligent questions refer to questions full of wits that are hard to make head or tail of them. But when the intelligent answers are revealed, people will be enlightened and delighted. Such games play trick on words or homophones and leave a deep impression on us.
What are the strongest days of the week?
Saturday and Sunday—all the other days are weak (week) days.”
The answer is so funny, contrary to most people’s expectation, because “weak” pronounces the same as “week”. Here, the intelligent answer works based on the pair of homophone. In the USA, their weekdays are only five days, that is, from Monday to Friday. In other words, these five days are “weak days”(虚弱的日子). So, here, in the question and answer, we will distinguish “weak” from “week” with little effort, and also learn the expression of a week .Just as it’s mentioned above, an intelligent question and answer about the week is suggested. Read the following example:
Which word has the most letters in it? The answer is mailbox.
Is the answer wrong? Definitely not, it’s right. Aren’t there a lot of letters in a mailbox? So the answer deliberately misinterprets “letter”(字母)in the question as “信”. What a smart answer!
4. Suggestions
The above methods are proved to be useful. Although it seems that more thoughts and time are needed when you first memorize a new word than mechanical memorization, the new words can leave deeper memory traces on our brain and are not easy to forget. Besides, you will find it enjoyable to learn English. Definitely, different learners have different learning strategies. However, generally speaking, in order to improve the efficiency of memorizing, some principles are suggested to observe.
1. Do not try to memorize a large number of words in a short time. Our brain cannot digest too many new words at a time just as our stomach cannot digest too much food.
2. Consolidate vocabulary regularly
According to the forgetting curve, we need to review the new words before they are forgotten.
“The forgetting curve illustrates the decline of memory retention in time. A related concept is the strength of memory that refers to the durability that memory traces in the brain. The stronger the memory is, the longer period of time that a person is able to recall it. A typical graph of the forgetting curve shows that humans tend to halve their memory of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks unless they consciously review the learned material.”
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