Photo by vobios

A very popular method of memorizing things is mnemonics. For example, HOMES to remember The Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). I still remember the episode of The Facts of Life where Tootie learns Au is the periodic table abbreviation for gold by remembering the phrase “Hey you, come back here with my gold!”

These can also be used to learn foreign language vocabulary. There are several examples on the wikipedia entry linked to above, but if you can come up with ones yourself, then even better.

While learning German, I came up with “Howard Stern is a star” to remember that der Stern means “star”. As you can see on the langalot entry, langalot allows you to add notes to words where you can record these memorization phrases.

The interesting thing is that after a few times of going through the mnemonic in your head when you encounter “der Stern” or try to translate “star” from English to German, the mnemonic step disappears and you just know that “der Stern” is a star without needing the mnemonic.

It takes a lot of time to come up with these phrases, but it’s definitely worth it.