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Vocabulary People |
The traditional 'trained memory' way of memorising vocabulary is to associate meaning with spelling by using an imagined scene.
So, if a foreign word means 'door' but is spelled 'PO...something' (eg. Porte) then you can imagine your person for 'PO' (Polly from a previous lesson) opening the door; or you can imagine a bottle of port next to the door because port sounds and/or spells like 'porte'.
I have used that method to memorise vocabulary. Also, if you meet a Mr Smith then you can imagine him with a blacksmith and that is a memory clue to remind you of his surname.
However, I had a problem with the system. A lot of useful vocabulary is hard to imagine in one summary visual image. Yes, a door is easy to imagine and Mr Smith is easy to imagine because they are physical and obvious; but the word 'imagine' or 'correlate' are more challenging vocabulary words to imagine. AND, if I can not imagine them then I can not imagine a story where the meaning is associated with something which represents the sound or spelling (eg. p.o.r.t.e = door = 'bottle of port' imagined scene).
So I designed a picture library where certain pictures must mean common trickier-to-picture words. It is a shorthand memory system which deserves a chapter of its own. It covered over 300 popular words - many of which I would struggle ordinarily to present in a nice summary image.
However, there are still so many popular words which a language learner would really benefit from having a visual image of.
In order to cover 1000 such words, I designed a Vocabulary People system. I have taken 1000 images of celebrities and sports people and simply stated that each celebrity represents one common word. This is something that just has to be learned rote; but the long term benefit is that I could learn a new language a lot quicker because I could imagine a clue to the sound or spelling of a word in a scene involving the celebrity - and that would be a clue for learning a word like 'Imagine'.
In 2010, I made a system. I found for myself 1000 images of celebrities to commit to memory; I listed over a 1000 celebrities and each of them has a forced surname that is a language word. If I were to do it again, I would use the names and images of people from Wikipedia pages (see the link below.. and please email me your list if you make one! Then people could share the benefit).
In the meantime, I can use those 1000 images as clues to the spelling of words or even as a 3-digit number system.
I decided that each person's name would be unconventional. Instead of giving people common names like 'Simon' or 'Jane', the syllable which they represent would be their first name. So, there could be someone named V.A.N just because I want an image to use if I need to remember a word which begins with 'V.A.N...'. That is a first name. The surname will eventually be a word like 'Imagine' or 'Correlate' so that the celebrity can represent common vocabulary as well as the spelling 'V.A.N'.
Furthermore, I can break 'V.A.N' into 'VA' and 'N' and use the number systems from previous lessons to say that VA is 90 and that N is 5 ; so V.A.N is 90..with..5 or 905 .
I hunted for good quality portrait photographs of people. One source is Wikimedia Commons where, under the Society section, you can browse images of people based on their year of birth.
If you use exclusively Wikimedia Commons images then you could more easily share your images with other people who are memory enthusiasts.
However, you could use a search engine to find images of all kinds of people and use those as the faces of the long syllables which you want to memorise as prompts.
Here is a list of 1000 syllables - they will become names for the 1000 people.
Note how the 100 syllables from the previous article are used to make the starting letters of each long syllable.
The ending of each syllable is always one of 10 possible letter endings [maybe you have seen that sequence of endings in a previous lesson.]
The Wikimedia Commons people date of birth section is one way to access photos of a list of people images who you could rename with names like V.A.N or P.E.N .
My first efforts at finding photos of people to use were directed at celebrities from online lists of celebrities. However, Wikimedia Commons is a better photo source since there are less questions about the permission to collect Wikimedia Commons photos. You can systematically find usable photos starting, say, at the 1940s and moving onwards towards the present decade.
Even 1000 long syllables is insufficient! What if there is a word beginning with 'P.E.L' ? I have no syllables ending in L ! Well, the system can be extended.
You might develop your own way of organising the celebrity images based on face type or you might just randomly assign a celebrity image to a consonant-vowel-consonant name:
Why use celebrity images? Why not use just random people's photos? You can. I thought that, by using famous people, there would be benefits - but you can use any people's photos.
I was happy with the idea of 1000 people but then I realised the huge benefit in having two lists of 1000 people (which I will explain in the next article).
You have seen how one system uses consonant-plus-vowel-plus consonant to make a person forename; but the other 1000 people use two vowels and just one consonant.
I decided that one 1000 system would be made of male people while the other 1000 system would be made of female people.
I also used graphics editing software to separate people from their distracting backgrounds.
For me, a good image of a person is one where I can imagine the person's front profile and side profile. The image does not need fantastic resolution but the resolution may not be so poor that it seriously weakens the ability to imagine a front profile and side profile of the face.
Hopefully, you are interested in why I decided to have 2 systems of 1000 people: 1000 men and 1000 women. The next article expands on that.