Build Your Vocabulary Skills! A Quick and Easy Method - John LaCarna 2017

The technique of mnemonic vocabulary building

The word "mnemonic" refers to a device that assists in the acquisition and retention of matter to be memorized. In this book, we will use such a device to expand your vocabulary. We will teach you new words by artificially associating each one to its definition, using what we call a "key" and a "link sentence".

Research has established this method to be effective for learning both English and foreign language vocabulary words. To illustrate the method, let's take the word mnemonic itself. How would we associate it with its meaning? Well, mnemonic sounds somewhat like pneumonia, so suppose we use that as the key. So now mnemonic calls up pneumonia in our minds, but how does this remind us of memory systems? What would a good link sentence be? Well, suppose we think of our grandfather having a bout of pneumonia so severe he loses his memory of who we are.

So, the next time we see the word mnemonic we will think of pneumonia. We ask ourselves, "What about pneumonia?", and we answer, "Grandpa had pneumonia so bad he lost his memory. Oh that's it! Mnemonic has to do with memory systems." In the format of Build Your Vocabulary Skills, we have:

MNEMONIC (neh MAHN ik) related to a memory system

KEY: PNEUMONIA

LINK SENTENCE: Grandpa had pneumonia so bad he lost his memory.

Now, answer the following without looking at the above:

MNEMONIC What is the KEY?

What is the LINK SENTENCE?

What does MNEMONIC mean?

So if you didn't know mnemonic before, drill yourself on this a couple of times. You've already learned a new word. Still not convinced? Already knew mnemonic? Well, let's try another word, one we're fairly sure you don't know. How about defenestrate, which means to throw out of a window. If you know that one offhand, you probably don't need this book.

What does defenestrate remind you of? How about defend the street? Well, we could Imagine that the enemy troops invaded a city, and the citizens defended their streets by throwing objects out of the windows at them. So, we have the following:

DEFENESTRATE (duh FEN es trate) to throw out of a window.

KEY: DEFEND THE STREET

LINK SENTENCE: The townsfolk defended their streets against the enemy invaders by throwing things out of the windows at them.

Now, without looking:

DEFENESTRATE What is the KEY?

What is the LINK SENTENCE?

What does DEFENESTRATE mean?

Now, drill yourself another time or two. You've learned another new word, and will retain it to the days of your dotage.

Admittedly, this word is of quite limited use, but we wanted to illustrate the principle by actually teaching you a new word. Over fourteen hundred much more useful words follow, so don't defenestrate this book yet.

The thought might have occurred to you, "Why do I need this book? I can just make up my own keys and links for words I want to learn."

Sure you can, and more power to you if you will. You can write this whole book yourself in your own way. But in reality, most people won’t. Also, despite the common-sense expectation that associations you develop yourself would be superior because of their personal nature, and because of the mental effort made using the words to be learned, this is not attested to by research. When subjects were provided associations by the researchers, they learned and retained material at least as well as, if not better than, when they generated their own associations. So we can be confident that our list of ready-made associations provide an effective means of vocabulary development.