In my post yesterday, I talked about a method of repetition which helps to improve your memory. Today I want to briefly discuss another method that will help you to remember things. That method is forming a mental picture. This is a very efficient way to remember something or in fact, a lot of things. Very often we need associations that would help us to remember the stuff that is really hard naturally to remember. If we are able to associate a word which we want to learn in a foreign language we can do that by making some association of the word with some object that we know really well.
It could be a purely visual association, but you can also add some audio in your mind. The word can be associated by means of similar pronunciation that you have in your own language. Or you can associate a word that you want to learn with a person whose name sounds similar to a word you want to learn, at the same time making a visual connection between the word and that person. Let’s say you want to learn a word bean. You can do that by associating a word with an actor Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson). You can imagine him eating beans or gathering them from the floor or simply throwing them at somebody. The point is that the more extraordinary the image is the better you will remember. That is true with other techniques I will discuss in my future posts. So, try to make a mental picture, associate it with somebody or something and remember the thing, the word, the object or whatever you want.
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