How to learn a new language, quickly

Simple mnemonic devices to help you learn language quickly and easily

This was a post I wrote here on Thinker’s Playground a few years ago, before I relaunched the site.

The original post was a little too long, so I’ve broken it up into separate posts:

• How To Develop A Super-Power Memory
• Memory, Association, and The Link System Of Mnemonics
• The Peg System Of Mnemonics
• How To Memorise Pi To 30 Decimal Places
• How To Memorise A Deck Of Cards
• How To (Quickly) Learn A New Language

In his book How To Learn Any Language, Barry Farber dedicates a whole chapter to Harry Lorayne’s method of remembering new words. Farber writes:

“I think I actually cried in rage at all the time I’d wasted attempting rote memory of foreign words during the thirty-one years I had studied languages before I met Harry Lorayne”

At the time of writing (1993) Farber could speak twenty-five languages.

Learning new words and making them ‘stick’ doesn’t have to be difficult. As in the examples before, we can use mnemonic associations to remind us of how each word should sound as we learn them.

Here’s an example from personal experience: In Norwegian, the word for bridge is ‘bru’. In Scotland, we have a soft drink called Irn Bru (iron brew). When I first heard the word, I made an association in my mind between Irn Bru and bridges. I wont describe the association I made, just know that it was a weird one.

Using this method I was able to pick up Norwegian quite quickly and, surprisingly, I can still remember where I was and who taught me each Norwegian word I know.

Tony Buzan, educational consultant and general brain-box, claims that around 50% of conversation is made up of around one hundred words. Whilst these numbers are obviously estimates, it’s a good starting place when learning a new language. Learn these hundred words and you’re halfway there. All you have to do then is learn all of the various nouns, adjectives and verbs that go in between them. Here’s the hundred as taught by Buzan:

1. a, an
2. about
3. above
4. across
5. after
6. again
7. against
8. all
9. and
10. any
11. as
12. at
13. before
14. but
15. by
16. can
17. to come (came; come)
18. to do (did; done)
19. each
20. to find (found)
21. first
22. for
23. from
24. to get (got)
25. to go (went; gone)
26. to have (had)
27. he — him — his
28. her — hers
29. here
30. how
31. I
32. if
33. in
34. into
35. it — its
36. to know (knew; known)
37. like
38. me
39. more
40. most
41. much
42. my — mine
43. new
44. no — not
45. now
46. of
47. on
48. one
49. only
50. or
51. other
52. our — ours
53. out
54. over
55. part
56. people
57. place
58. same
59. to see (saw; seen)
60. shall
61. she
62. show (showed; shown)
63. so
64. some
65. state
66. still
67. such
68. to take (took; taken)
69. to tell (told)
70. than
71. that
72. the
73. their — theirs
74. them
75. then
76. there
77. these
78. they
79. thing
80. to think (thought)
81. this
82. through
83. time
84. to
85. under
86. up — upon
87. us
88. use
89. very
90. we
91. what
92. when
93. where
94. which
95. who
96. why
97. will
98. with
99. work
100. you — yours

I’ve seen variations of this list in a couple of places so it’s by no means a strict rule of language. If you learn these though, you’re at least making basic conversation in other languages easier.

Farber offers a few other handy tips for picking up languages, but I feel these two are the most useful.

Originally published at https://thinkersplayground.com on October 23, 2013.