Appendix: Tips on creating mnemonics

Mnemonics to aid memory are personal; they vary from person to person. For example, if you have a friend whose name happens to sound like a new word you’re studying, you can associate the word with the person. If you know a language in which there’s a word or phrase that spells or sounds like the new word, even if it has no etymological connection, you may use it as a mnemonic.^note Nevertheless, English-speaking learners may have a lot of experience in common, and a suggested mnemonic for a word may have fairly widespread applicability.

A good mnemonic for a word should not only create a scene or image to establish an association, but also make a phrase or find another word that sounds or spells like the word being studied. Since we assume the reader of this book only knows English, we only search English dictionaries. There are two types of search or two directions to follow. The first is: given the meaning of the Spanish word, find English synonyms with this meaning, and see which one has a sound similar to that of the Spanish word. This relies on a thesaurus, or simply a Google search for synonym theword, or go to http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/theword. That’s how I find inspissate (“to thicken”), a word I had not personally learned, as a cognate with espeso (“thick”), to name one example. But the first step in this method does not need to be limited to synonyms. You can find words that are often used together. For example, hoe can be a good mnemonic for hoz (“sickle”), not because a hoe and a sickle have the same or similar meanings, but because they’re both traditional farming tools.

The second type of search, which may be more useful and fruitful, starts with the sound instead of meaning of the Spanish word. We can use the websites that provide sound-like words. After testing a handful of them, I have settled down on RhymeZone’s http://itools.com/tool/rhymezone-words-that-sound-like. When using such websites, you can input either real words or word-like spellings that sound like either the correct Spanish pronunciation or the (incorrect) English pronunciation of the word being studied; after all, you’re just looking for a mnemonic, not for logic. Take jabón (“soap”) as an example. English Japan sounds like it (J is pronounced differently but spelling is close) and you can think of “soap made in Japan”. If you’re tech-savvy, you can also do your own sound-like searches. See the later section “Simulation of sound-like searches”.

Not all parts of a word have equal weight in serving as memory clues. Generally, the first part is more important. This makes a simple dictionary lookup sensible. For example, in looking for a word to help you remember acera (“sidewalk”), unless you already thought of it, check a Spanish dictionary for the words adjacent to it, and you’ll see acero (“steel”). (The latter has a higher frequency so you may have learned it before acera.) So imagine a sidewalk with handrails made of steel. Instead of matching from the very beginning of a word, you can of course focus on the part after dropping the initial prefix or prefix-like letters. If you don’t know acero, use Sarah as a mnemonic; just remember to strip a- of acera and think. Similarly, many words of Arabic origin can be stripped of al- and you conjure up mnemonics from the remaining part of the word.

A mnemonic is not limited to matching a whole word with another whole word in sound or spelling. For instance, dinero (“money”) can use “dinner roll”, viejo (“old) “We’re old”. Since many Spanish words are of Arabic origin, they tend to begin with al- (“the” in Arabic). You can break that off and form the beginning of a sentence, e.g. “Al found a bra on the carpet” as a mnemonic for alfombra (“carpet”). The words in the mnemonic phrase or sentence can even be separated as long as they’re not so far apart to impede mental association. “Broom ninja” can be a perfect mnemonic for bruja (“witch”), if you think of it as a shorthand and you pronounce j like in English. A mnemonic can even mix two languages if it works for you. For example, to remember cachorro (“puppy”), use “catch un perro”.

Simulation of sound-like searches:

Instead of using an existing sound-like search website, you may do it yourself, with various degrees of quality. Common English words and many word-like spellings are on each UNIX/Linux computer in the file /usr/share/dict/words and can be downloaded for local pattern matching. I provide this file on this Web page
http://yong321.freeshell.org/lsw/
which I already converted to Windows format suitable for search with Windows findstr command. The following are some examples of using this native Windows command with so-called regular expressions, i.e., strings that signify a search pattern.

For example, find all words that begin with curt case-insensitively:

C:\temp>findstr /i /r "^curt" words.txt
Curt
curt
curtail
...

Find all words that contain mas in the middle (or at the beginning) and end with tion (.* means zero or more characters; it doesn’t matter what characters they are):

C:\temp>findstr /r "mas.*tion$" words.txt
commassation
demasculinisation
demasculinization
...

Case-insensitively find all words that begin with either e or i, followed by m, by either b or p, by any vowel letter, by r, by any vowel, and by l (square brackets contain characters one and only one of which matches):

C:\temp>findstr /r /i “^[ei]m[bp][aeiou]r[aeiou]l” words.txt
emperil
imparalleled
imperil
...

The above search is an attempt to find a mnemonic for empeño (“determination”), whose etymology offers no help. First I tried ^[ei]m[bp][aeiou]ny[aeiou] and ^[ei]m[bp][aeiou]ni[aeiou], to no avail. Then I realized imperil is a good one. To see if there’s anything similar to imperil that could also sound like it, a findstr search is run.

A common string search variation in creating a mnemonic is to change a consonant to a different one within the same place of articulation; e.g., change b to p, d to t, g to k or c, s to z, vice versa, and v to w. Due to b-v merger in Spanish, try that exchange, too. Alternatively, change a vowel to another vowel or even a diphthong. For example, there’s no help from etymology when you try to remember the word barro (“mud”, “clay”). It may easily come to your mind that the word sounds like burrow and you quickly make up a mnemonic with it such as “The little creature made a burrow with mud”. But if the latter word doesn’t come to your mind so naturally, you can systematically search for it: Change b of barro to p, change a to u (which sounds like a in a closed-syllable word), change o to el or ow, change r to l, and make multiple of these changes at the same time. One of the words thus obtained may sound closer to a word you can construct a mnemonic sentence or phrase with.

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[note1] For example, if you know Chinese, kūle (“(he/she) is crying”, pronounced /ku:lə/, where /ə/ is the sound of a of canoe) is a perfect mnemonic for cuna (“cradle”), evoking an image of a crying baby in the cradle. Note that this is different from knowing a language that offers cognates, which have etymological connections. If you know a language sharing a large number of cognates with Spanish, such as a Romance language particularly Portuguese, you are at a tremendously great advantage in vocabulary study. You don’t even need mnemonics in the first place.