Hi, welcome to SuperTutorTV, my name is Brooke, and today we're going to be talking about
vocabulary, and in particular we're going to talk about mnemonics, which are the best
way to learn vocabulary.
Mnemonics is a weird word that's spelled funny, and what mnemonics are is they're essentially
memory tricks.
So, why do we need mnemonics?
I have so many students and they're very overwhelmed by all of the vocabulary that they have to
learn.
Mnemonics, what they can do, is they can help you learn words more quickly!
That means you can study less, play video games more, or - do whatever it is that you
do when you don't do homework.
Within the world of mnemonics, there's several principles that can help you.
One of them is to try to find pieces of a word that are either based on roots, or that
are related to other words that you know that can trigger your memory to come up with some
sort of bigger story than just a one word definition of the word itself.
Take for example the word "truculent."
The word truculent means violent or aggressive.
You might not know this word so if you don't know this word, what you can do is you can
kind of look at the word and say, okay, I know these first four letters, "truc," that
sounds like truck.
And then maybe you can think of monster truck rallies, if you've ever watched television
and seen those commercials during daytime tv for "monster truck rally!"
And you've got these trucks and they're really big and mean looking and they might be painted
like a t-rex, and they're giant and they attack things like other trucks.
So I encourage you to come up with sort of crazy visual image, take apart the word, use
a little piece of it as a clue for yourself to create a story and a bigger piece of information
that your brain can remember.
One of the reasons that mnemonics work is that they are basically like a keychain.
If you don't have a keychain on your keys, it's even easier to lose your key.
I lose my keys all the time and I even have a keychain, but when I don't have a keychain,
it is near impossible, right.
Say you throw your house key in your backpack with all your books and all your stuff, it
can be really difficult to find that key.
But if you put it on a big fuzzy keychain with a bunch of other keys and it makes a
lot of noise, it's going to be a lot easier to find it.
In that same way, when we insert information into our brains, we want to insert it along
with other information so that it doesn't get lost.
And so when we insert more information around that one piece of information, we're creating
a cluster of information that's going to be a lot easier for our brains to remember.
Now, not all words are that convenient in terms of mnemonics.
Sometimes, a word really isn't going to be anything long enough to even pick very much
out.
So vex, for example, means to annoy.
And this word, it's kind of tough because there's nothing in vex that sounds like annoy,
it's such a short word, it's really hard to even think of something.
So I think of T-Rex, kind of rhymes with vex, and then Jar Jar Binks - I think of when I
think of annoying, Jar Jar Binks is really annoying.
And he looks kind of like a lame, futuristic dinosaur, so if you can get from vex rhymes
with T-Rex and Jar Jar Binks looks kind of like a T-Rex, or maybe you can think of a
T-Rex hanging out with Jar Jar, you can come up with things that are sort of random, or
out there - anything that, whatever that word triggers for you, just use what it triggers
for you and figure something out.
So, it doesn't really matter whether it's a silly story that you made up that's visual,
or whether it's coming from the etymology or the root or the context of where the word
came from, but either way you're depositing more information in your brain so you can
acquire that information more quickly and more readily.
The other reason that mnemonics can work really well is that oftentimes mnemonics are visual.
All of our systems of memory are not created alike.
Our strongest memories are our visual memory and our spatial memory.
Let me give you a little bit of an example of this.
I want you to think of a friend that you hang out with, and if I dropped you off at that
friend's front door, could you find their kitchen?
Most of my students are able to say yes to this question, but if I asked that student,
what was the last sentence, word for word, that you said to that friend when you were
leaving?
And most of my students have no idea what that last sentence was.
That's because we understand spatial environments much more quickly and easily than we do word
information.
So if we can engage our visual memory, or our spatial memory - if we can come up with
some creative, ridiculous image that will be hard for our minds to put aside, it's going
to be a lot easier to learn a word.
There's actually a TED talk on this by a guy named Josh Foer.
Josh actually accidentally won the National Memory Championship in New York City - kind
of an amazing feat.
What Josh talks about is memory palaces.
This is a concept that dates back to the ancient Greeks.
I also encourage you to check out that TED talk, I'll put a link in the comments section
below if you want to check it out.
If you want more help with mnemonics, there are a lot of resources on the web.
There's a mnemonic dictionary, there are people on Twitter who post a mnemonic of the day,
and if you just Google the word that you're trying to memorize, and the word mnemonic
together, you're going to be able to probably find some mnemonics to help you memorize if
you're not very good at coming up with these on your own.
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I hope to see you next time, this is Brooke signing off.
Like us on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, and until then, sayonara!