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Bootcamp: Day Four – Double your recall rate for vocabulary

Hey,

There are some things you just have to see to believe.

When I first heard about Benny Lewis, I thought for sure he was a
fake. Not only did he claim to speak 8 languages fluently, but he
said it was possible to reach that point in only three months.

I was six months into learning French and still felt total fluency
was a far away. Three months bordered on incredulity.

It wasn’t until I saw Benny in action that removed all doubts in me.

Mingling at a boat party, Benny’s German was impressive after just
over a month. One person even lamented that Benny’s fluency outpaced
his after *four years* studying in Berlin.

How is this possible?

—

Now Benny’s method certainly can’t be reduced to a single tactic.
His unorthodox methods eschew studying for socializing and he
dogmatically avoids English from his first step into a new country.

But even with his friendly Irish attitude and intensity of practice,
one things still couldn’t escape me–how do you remember all those
words?

To speak fluently in a language involves knowing thousands of words,
and knowing them fast enough to speak without stumbling.

I know students that complain about being tested on 100-200 pieces
of terminology before a test. How did he remember thousands without
fail?

—

The method Benny taught me was simple, yet a definite improvement
over rote memorization.

With conceptual understanding, moving to metaphors and diagrams
isn’t too unusual. However remembering words, definitions and
terminology seemed destined to be a painful exercise of flashcard
drills and repetition.

After learning about this method, I decided to test it against rote
memorization. To conduct my admittedly unscientific experiment, I
took hundreds of unfamiliar French words to me (50 per day) and
split them into two batches–one memorized with rote for a set
amount of time, the other remembered using Benny’s method.

I even created a simple computer program to randomize tests for me
I could run at the end of each week.

What was the result?

My recall rate using a strict memorization approach was 35%. Hardly
ideal, but I was doing 50 new words per day with only 30 minutes of
invested time (most of which was spent finding words to translate).

But with Benny’s method, my recall rate jumped above 70%. More than
double the results with the same amount of effort.

What’s more, this new method was more interesting. While drills are
boring, this made the task less painful, which in itself made it
superior to drills.

—

How to Double Your Vocabulary Recall with One Method

The method is fairly simple, although it takes a little practice
before it is quick. Basically you want to create a visual image
which links the terminology to a definition word (or translation in
the case of languages).

Some possible pairs of words:

gare -> station
para siempre -> forever
chien -> dog
ad hominem -> personal attack
ratio decedendi -> legal rationale
calcaneus -> heel bone

Once you have your terminology word and definition word, you need
to create an image for each word.

The best way to do that is to use the “sounds like” method, and to
think of the first image that sounds like the word in question.

Benny’s example for me was in remembering the French word “gare” for
train station, the first “sounds like” image was the cartoon cat,
Garfield.

The next step is to link the images for both words in an incredibly
vivid, bizarre scene in your head. Try to pick scenes which are
unrealistic and fantastic, since those will form better links in
your mind.

With Garfield in mind, he then imagined a scene where Garfield was
racing to get to the *station* in order to get to a lasagna eating
contest.

Sometimes the definition word itself is hard to visualize. Using
this tactic to remember the Spanish word for, “forever” is harder
since “forever” is an abstract concept.

Here you can try to come up with a symbol that will represent that
concept immediately in your mind. For me it’s a giant hourglass with
sand that never runs out.

Using this method, then, I imagine a parasite praying (sounds like
para siempre) next to a gigantic hourglass which never runs out of
sand.

The steps are fairly simple:

1. Pick a TERMINOLOGY word and DEFINITION word
2. Create images for both words using “sounds like” or symbols
3. Link the two together in a bizarre scene

—

Mastering This Technique for Terminology

This tactic is just one of several that I teach in Learning on
Steroids for remembering vocabulary and other details. It can take
a bit of practice to master, but once you get in the habit (as I
did, during my month long, 50-words-per-day experiment) you can go
through each one in 15-20 seconds.

Creating the mental link doesn’t mean that zero review is required,
but once you form the links, you immediately save yourself a lot
of flashcard-style review, and get higher accuracy.

—

Contest Winner for Metaphors

It was great reading through the hundreds of responses for the
contest on metaphors.

There were lots of good first starts, but the majority were still
fairly rough. With practice and coaching, however, I’d expect that
most people could begin accelerating their learning in just a few
weeks of training.

Choosing the best was hard, since many were excellent, but my
favorite was from Yael, a biology student:

“A gene in the DNA is a code for a program. When the ‘transcription
factors’ press play the program starts running. The running program
(on your RAM) is the RNA, and it tells a robot called ribosome how
to put together different colored beads called ‘amino acids’.

A Short string is called a Peptide, and a long one is called a
Protein.”

Not only was the metaphor simple (DNA as a robot) but it’s easy to
visualize and focuses on the underlying concept, rather than as a
memory aid.

Congrats to Yael for winning a free copy of Learn More, Study Less!

Of course, the BEST metaphor is what works for you, so keep at it!

—

Get Free Coaching Before the Week is Over

One of the reason space is restricted in the program, is that I make
myself available to offer email coaching to any student in the
program.

Since I want to help as many students as possible during this 1-week
bootcamp, I’m making the same offer to you.

If you have any questions about applying tactics for your studies,
using any of the techniques we’ve mentioned so far, or advice, hit
REPLY and I’ll do my best to get to everyone.

As always, if you have questions about the full program, Learning
on Steroids, for when it reopens, I’m more than happy to help.

Even if you don’t have any questions at the moment, I’d appreciate
a quick REPLY to tell me what you think so far for the bootcamp.

—

This is the last day of LEARNING tactics in the bootcamp. Tomorrow,
I’ll be posting the second video module, this time on how you can
become ruthlessly productive, get more work done and escape the
grind.