Learning by association
I have a method/strategy that I use to remember things. It is called associative learning which is when one stimulus can trigger another one. Like the experiment Ivan Pavlov performed where the dog was conditioned to associate food with sound.
My method is not necessarily conditioning oneself to remember things, but more about remembering things together. This method can be useful in long-term activities such as learning a new language. It can also be useful in everyday scenarios. Let’s cover the latter first. Say you have an appointment tomorrow and you are expected to bring a set of specific documents. While it’s possible to pick up these documents tomorrow and before heading out, what I would do would be to gather all of them and put them right next to things I will definitely take such as my wallet and car keys. It is unlikely to forget all these items at the same time. What happens here is that we physically associate the documents with other important artifacts to increase the chance of recall.
Another way to use associative learning is in language learning. It becomes easier if you already know more than one language, but say you only know English and want to learn French. French and English share a lot of words, though they might have different meanings. Usually these meanings are not too far off. Anyway, say you see the word mur which means wall. You can memorize it, for sure, but a better way could be to remember it with the word mural in English which is an artwork painted directly on a wall. A couple more examples:
- you might know arboreal has something to do with trees; well, arbre is a tree in French
- infirmary is a place where the sick receive treatment; infirmier/infirmière is a nurse.
- you may know that jaundice is associated with the color yellow; well jaune is the word for yellow in French.
- Starbucks has the sizes Venti and Trenta which correspond to 20 and 30oz respectively. Well, those are the exact words to say 20 and 30 in Italian.