274. If words: communication

One day teacher A said to teacher B,

“Words, as you know, are essential for any communication.

No words, no communication.

One student of mine told me, some days ago, about his tricks to learn new words.

He is learning Finnish. Finnish is not an Indo-European language.

He does a variety of things. Writes a list of new words.

Now he writes longer lists of words he picks here and there. He dares to write longer lists: he thought before he shouldn’t write too long lists.

He makes a mental photograph of the word or phrase.

Something that helps him is to unconsciously relate the new word with a cognate of his own language. A cognate or one similar word in some way: “pelliohjet”, which is Finnish word, resembles and sounds similar to Spanish “pelo”, and “jet” reminds of English “jet”, “yet”. That Finnish word means “guide of rules” (of a board game). He learned that word weeks ago.

He uses Wordreference, a nice dictionary-plus-forum on the Web.

He revises the words by making mental training, by doing the effort of recalling the word. He says his memory is like chewing-gum.

He uses the words into compositions his teacher sets them as homework.

He rereads lists written long ago.

He has kind of a hunger to learn new word, or like the necessity – and like – of learning new words.

He writes sentences with the new words.

He plays with the dictionary, looking at entries at random.

He says he has invented and improved some tricks that help him to analyze new words and compare his former ways of learning with more recent ones.

He is somehow bold in using words: he takes risks.

He makes up puns with sense of humor.

He has created a mentality more prone to capture new words.

His vocabulary has increased awesome. – Any learner, any authentic learner has his personal ways.”

Picture from postalhearitage org uk