Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0451: Hacking French with a memory palace

Episode Date: November 30, 2015

Mike wants to create a system for hacking the French language like we have done with Spanish at Accelerated Spanish. How should he structure his palace so that it’s easy to remember important grammar aspects such as verb conjugations? I describe some exclusivity and mnemonic tactics, mentioning the importance of prioritizing the most frequently used conjugations of […]

Master of Memory 451. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Today's question is from Mike. So I'd like to phrase my question like this. If you were building a French version of your Spanish class from scratch. What are the strategies and tactics you would use to do something similar to that Spanish class for basically a behind-the-scenes framework of the town and the decisions you made?

And to clarify my question a bit further, I understand the ideas of using the most common words, populating them in relevant areas of the town and using gender zones as well as all the strong visualizations to capture the definitions and the pronunciations. What confuses me is more to do with the grammar and language design itself. For example, verb forms and verb tenses that don't seem like you could immediately, they wouldn't be immediately obvious from frequency lists. And by verb forms, I mean the I, they, we, you, and other type of forms similar to Spanish. And by verb tenses, I mean present, past, subjunctive, and other things. How do you actually select those things and incorporate them into the village?

I would use my local town, for example, and do that proactively without knowing all that grammar rule, all those grammar rules ahead of time. Thank you in advance for any help and love the show. Talk to you soon. Thanks a lot for the question, Mike. And this is a good question and one that I really like to take because I obviously love languages and I love approaching any learning project from the very beginning and describing the process of breaking a project like this down. Now, in short, what I would do with French is exactly what I would do with the Spanish course, and that is go to the Wiktionary frequency list and see which conjugations of which verbs are actually the most frequent. Now, the nice thing is that with French, it actually does give you, in the Wiktionary list, the conjugated forms of the verbs, not just the infinitives, but actually which conjugations themselves are most used. And this is extremely handy and maybe quite a bit different from what people might expect, but it's the way it is. For example, subjunctives are much more common than

some of the other conjugations that you might think are very common. That's just the case. You can't really communicate like a native speaker without using the subjunctive a lot. But anyway, so the method for laying out the town, it sounds like you have a pretty good idea of how you do that, even if you don't know how all the grammar works. Just go ahead and start laying it out the way that the grammar lists are laid out in conjugation charts and the way that they're listed in different pronouns and things like that, even if you don't know exactly why you're doing that. The reason is you don't need to understand the grammar to start learning the grammar.

You just learn the things in the places that they are and put them in organized locations without having to study all the rules for why. Now, this is not tedious. It's actually pretty fun and easy to store words this way. And it's going to come in handy later when you start coming across subjunctives and indirect objects and the differences between the different types of past tenses, which you'll encounter in context. So just, that's my basic method, is just sort them out based on the way that you see them in grammar books. They're that way for a reason, but don't study the grammar books.

Instead, see real contexts and how these words are used, and then you'll know that you can use equivalent words basically interchangeably. Now, as an example, just to apply this, for the French verb être, if that's how you pronounce it, the verb for to be, if you look at the list of the top 150 words conjugated and put into all their plural forms and stuff like that, if you look at the list of the top 150 words, the fact is that you only need the present tenses of this verb, one subjunctive form, one imperfect form, the participle, and one of the future conjugation forms. The past tenses don't appear in the top 150, even though that's one of the first things that people typically teach you. Although the participle and a subjunctive form do,

and those are some of the last things that you're taught. So that's just an interesting thing to observe. If you look at the frequency list, learning the subjunctive and how that's used is one of the best things that you can do first, just from the standpoint of learning how to use it in one or two contexts, maybe, just to get that word into your vocabulary and start thinking like a native speaker, even with the very limited vocabulary. So I'm going to have, I don't want to try to pronounce these because I haven't studied French yet, but I'll include a list of the étres forms in the show notes for this episode at masterofmemory.com. But yeah, so I'm going to

give you that list. There are only, again, less than 10 forms of it in the top 150, and they're not necessarily the forms that most people would teach first off. But if you do focus on those top 150 words and getting those perfect by studying different contexts and trying to use them exactly the same way that a native speaker does. Basically, you now know the language. You basically now know French. It's not just some pieced together version of the language that you've created based on your knowledge of English and basic forms. You're actually speaking the language like a native speaker, but with an extremely limited vocabulary. From that point, everything beyond that will fit nicely into those

structures that you've created in your mind. And you can just ask any of our Spanish students, and they'll tell you the same thing. They've learned more about the language just from focusing on the top 150 words than they would have learned from studying long lists and trying to understand everything. We start with the most essentials and then go down from there. Now, speaking of language learning, I'd recommend that everyone go to masterofmemory.com slash Mandarin and see what we have going on there. Obviously, there are other languages to learn besides Mandarin, including we'd like to get to French and to German and to Russian and Hindi and Arabic, but Mandarin is our next stop. And if you want to accelerate the course creation

process, go to masterofmemory.com slash Mandarin and see what we have going on over there. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.