Optional Bonus Video- Nelson Dellis Memory Tips

What’s up everyone? Here is another episode of Random Memory Tips. And in this episode, I’m going to teach you how to remember language vocabulary. How is everyone doing? So last weekend I got the privilege of speaking at Silicon Valley Comic Con. This one had a focus on tech. So there was the comic side of things which was fun and entertaining to watch everybody dressing up. And then the other part of it was tech related which pulled in different companies a lot in the space and science realm. So I go to meet a lot of these people. I got to meet Buzz Aldrin, Adam Savage from Mythbusters. But probably the best discussion I had was this woman that I spoke to who was the inspiration for Amy Adams’ character in the movie Arrival. If you haven’t seen it, go check it out. Very cool movie about aliens arriving. Amy Adams plays a linguist, someone who studies languages. This scientist was at the Comic Con, and I got the opportunity to speak with her. And we got to talking about languages and it reminded me of one of the common questions I get is, can you speak multiple languages? The answer is yes, I speak French fluently and English, and a little bit of Spanish, enough to get by. But I wouldn’t say that I’m a polyglot or anyone who just absorbs languages. And in fact, to learn a language is a hard thing, it’s not just memory. People ask me, can you memorize a language? And yes, I could memorize a lot of vocabulary very quickly, which you need to have in order to speak a language. But I’d still need to practice to learn the vocab. It’s not so simple as just memorizing. The nice thing about memorizing foreign language words is you don’t need a memory palace. It’s all about linking. So what do I mean by linking? There’s the memory palace technique which I’ve talked about in past videos, go check them out if you haven’t, then there’s this kind of like technique that’s not as powerful as the memory palace method. It has certain strength set only the linking method has and I’ll go over linking method for long lists in another video. The basics of this linking method is taking one image and linking it another image. A foreign word and its English translation. Foreign word, English word, boom. Basically imagine the one thing, whatever it sounds like, whatever it reminds you of, some picture for it. Come up with a picture for the second thing and imagine them interacting together. That’s linking, taking these two images and smashing them together. So when I was talking to this, Amy Adams character, I brought up something that I’ve always thought was kind of interesting. And that is that, to the best of my knowledge, the word butterfly is unique in every language. At least almost all of them. I’m going to teach you ten different ways to say the word butterfly. The point is to take ten different examples, see how I would go about turning it into a picture and linking them together so that you can take those examples and apply them to whatever language that you want. Okay, nice. All right so you know the first one that’s butterfly in English. Number two we’re going to talk about French and the word for that is papillon. The sound is papillon. I think of a puppy on something, puppy on something, so our left hand image, the English image for butterfly is going to be the actual butterfly, okay. And then the foreign language is going to be the thing we ad lib, in this case we have a puppy on. Then we’re going to mash them together right? So I’m going to picture a puppy on top of a butterfly, okay. To remember that this was the French language. Papillon, puppy on. What we should do is add some element of French. What’s something French that you think of? So puppy on a butterfly, maybe give this puppy a little mustache, a little beret and a striped shirt. Puppy on a butterfly. But let’s move on to the next word. We’re going to have a say butterfly in Spanish. The word for that is mariposa. So the image for that is going to be marry pose, so you’re getting married and this is the pose you take, whatever ridiculous pose you want to imagine. You’re there at the end of the aisle, about to get married, and you strike a pose with a beautiful butterfly on your finger. So it’s your married pose. To help you remember that in Spanish, just imagine this wedding decoration, this bull fighter outfits, and there’s these Spanish flags draped everywhere. Tapas is being served at this wedding and you’re doing your married pose with that butterfly, okay? That’s our third one. All right, next one’s a good one. It’s Italian.

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The way to say butterfly in Italian is farfalla. Which, if you’re familiar with pastas, farfalla is the one that looks like a butterfly. If you’ve never had that pasta before then let’s come up with image the way it kind reads it looks like far fall someone is falling very far. Italy is known for its beautiful coastlines is often of a cliff they build these beautiful villages of course we going to tie it back to a butterflies some how so maybe you think your butterfly. And you jump off this cliff, this beautiful Italian coastline cliff and it’s a far fall and you plummet into the ocean. Okay Dutch. Here’s how to say butterfly in Dutch. It’s vlinder. It kind of sounds like blender so I’m going to picture putting a butterfly in a blender. Maybe a ton of butterflies in a blender and it just makes this smoothie of butterflies. Let’s tie it back to dutch windmills, right? They’re famous windmills. So maybe the blender is just a big windmill, right, with a cup on top of it. And that’s where you’re putting in the butterflies, it just spins like it normally does, and you have this blender, blender, vlender, vwender, blender of butterflies. This is my favorite one just because all the other one’s sound very beautiful or short and kind of cute. German of course is pretty harsh, but it’s a good one. It’s fun to say. And the word for butterfly in German is, schmetterling. I don’t know if I’m saying that correct, but schmetterling. Here’s where sometimes you have to take liberties with the image for the word. It doesn’t always have to be exactly close to it. So I’m going to go with, an hear me out, butter. I’m going to imagine schmearing butter, right? That helps me get that kind of schma sound. So I have this schmeared butter, schmutter. Maybe let’s imagine there are sausage links. Specifically bratwurst or some really serious German sausage right? So, this butterfly is shmearing butter all over these links and they’re German sausages. Portuguese, borboleta. I could imagine there’s a barb wire fence, and someone is letting me through it. So barb o let. Barb wire let. Who’s letting me in? Of course, it’s a nice big butterfly who’s standing guard. And we have to tie that back to Portuguese somehow, I think of Brazil. It’s just sambaing, when he lets you through the barbed wire. Next is Danish. The word for butterfly in Danish is sommerfugl. And what it makes me think of is a summer, summertime. I think of the Bugle chips that you put on your fingers, the little cone-shaped things, and you eat them off, right? You’re in the grass, sun is out, it’s a beautiful summer day. And maybe a butterfly comes and eats each one off your finger. Maybe the butterfly lands on your hand and then asks you, hey I don’t eat bugles, do you have any danishes?

Nom.

That way you can tie it back to it being from Denmark, Danish. Okay, so, Finnish, perhonen. The picture I think of a pear, the fruit, it’s honing in on something. This pear is honing in on a butterfly, we have to tie this to Finland or Finnish somehow, so, maybe, this pear is honing in on that butterfly to finish him. Maybe you can hear that mortal combat sound. Finish him.

Finish him.

Finally it is Russian and the way to say that is babochka. Babe, says ouch, he’s being pricked or something. He’s at the doctor and then he goes, I’m okay. Babe ouch kay, is not quite right. But if you keep those syllables in your mind, you can probably get the word babochka, close enough. A butterfly comes and maybe that’s who administers the prick. A little pinch, maybe they’re drawing blood or giving a vaccine, this butterfly does it. And the babe goes ouch, and then he’s like kay, not a big deal. For the word Russia think of rushing, something rushed, right. So maybe this is a really rushed visual, right. So this babe suddenly get pricked by a butterfly, ouch, kay really rushed. All right, that’s all ten languages. How to say butterfly. I’m going to take 30 seconds to distract your brain. And then we’ll come back and see if you can remember them. I’m going to show you some highlights of my trip to Silicon Valley Comic Con. It’s pretty interesting. Here we go. We’ll come back and I’ll test you. All right so here we go. English butterfly obviously. French papillon. Spanish mariposa. Italian farfalla. Dutch, vlinder. German, schmetterling. Portuguese, borboleta. Danish, sommerfugal. Finnish perhonen and Russian babochka. Anyways, I hope this helps a little bit. I’m sure in future videos we’ll talk more about learning vocab for languages, but this one was just to give you a little taste of how to do it with a simple word in different languages. And to teach you the basics of the linking method. Take one item, link it to the next. Like this video, subscribe, leave comments if you have any questions or suggestions for future videos. I’ll be back with another random memory tip video in no time. I’m out!