Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0492: Learn French: A new language memory palace

Episode Date: January 26, 2016

Sarah asks about learning French using the same memory palace techniques that we presented in the Accelerated Spanish course. I give some of the beginning steps to creating a memory palace that will work for learning French just like our “Yol” palace has worked for learning Spanish. What do you want to learn? Leave your question […]

Master of Memory 492. 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. Sarah submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Sarah says, I've been learning French, part-time distance learning, but a lot of it doesn't stick. Your accelerated Spanish course seems to make language learning much easier.

Is there any chance of a French version in the near future? So the answer, Sarah, is, well, I'm not sure about a version of the full course for learning French, as we have for accelerated Spanish at Spanishin1month.com, J-F-Y-I. That's not necessarily in the near future because we have a lot of other languages that we're prioritizing. And while French is the number two second language in the world, it's very far down the list of number of people who actually speak it natively. But in response to this question, I'm going to use this episode to do something that I've never done before like this. I'll be using this episode to present an entire memory palace structure. Well, not the entire structure, but the basic structure of a memory palace for learning French, including the 20 most common words in the French language by, you know, just counting people's speech in subtitles. So this is the way

that people really speak. These are the most common words, and I'm going to organize them as I would in a memory palace. This took quite a bit of time to put together, and even though it's just words that anyone who is studying French would be familiar with, the fact is that sorting them into a memory palace the way that we're doing in this episode gives you real confidence in being able to switch out, let's say, a subject pronoun with another subject pronoun in a sentence. If you know how to say a sentence using any of these words in a particular scene in the memory palace, you can just switch out that word with another word in the same scene, and it'll make sense grammatically. So what we're doing here is this will work pretty well for putting the basics together for anyone who's starting to learn French or who's even pretty far

into it. And after you've mastered these 20 words and learned this memory palace and the use of these words, the rest of the language can be learned from there. So in this episode, I'm going to emphasize the structure of the palace that we're putting together, and that means where each word is located in the palace. And so I'm actually not going to be presenting any mnemonics in this episode. I'm just going to be presenting the structure of the palace, and it's structured very much like, as Sarah mentioned, the memory palace at Spanishin1month.com. You can see all that info for free. You can find the Spanish memory palace that we use. And we're going to organize this palace much the same way with different parts of speech separated from each other. So we'll go through conjunctions

and then prepositions and then articles and pronouns. And then we'll do a couple of adverbs and one of the verbs. Now, since I've never studied French myself before, I'm going to give you the spellings of these words. And if I, you know, end up actually saying any of these words, my pronunciation will probably be wrong because I just don't know French at all. But I do know that the way that I've placed this in the palace, I'm pretty reasonably sure are correct. So let's just go ahead and dive into it. In the conjunctions palace, which you're going to put in one separate place in a world that you're using for your French, you're going to put these words as conjunctions by themselves. One of them is going to be Q, or Q-U-E. I shouldn't try to

pronounce these. But what it means is that, or it's the equivalent of the Spanish word que, and in fact, it's spelled the same way, so it means that. So you're saying, for example, I hope that this is the case. And so that's considered a conjunction. You're using it to join two different clauses together. It also means than in a comparative sense, and that's again the same thing as in Spanish. The Spanish word que is used the same way. Another word you're going to store in this palace is the et word which is equivalent to the Spanish word for and which is e. So it's just basically and. So we have that and and q u e and et and you'll create images for these and place these in a place in your memory palace where you store conjunctions. These two words are exchangeable with each other generally in a grammatical sense.

So for example, I could say, I'm thinking and he's walking down the street. Or I could say, I'm thinking that he's walking down the street. So they can be used between two clauses. Now we'll go to the prepositions palace, and we have three prepositions in here. The DE preposition, the marked A, and the EN preposition. So the DE one is basically equivalent to the Spanish word de or desde, and that's basically de. If you know a romance language, then it's pretty equivalent to most of those, although there are some nuances. And then the letter A with the mark above it is pretty much equivalent to the Spanish word a, including it means to something. But it also means at a certain time.

But sometimes it actually crosses over with the Spanish word en. And sometimes it also means something like de as possession. And so it's very nuanced. Prepositions are the most difficult words because they're just very context-specific, so you want to learn a lot of uses of these words. And then we have the en, which is pretty much equivalent to the Spanish word en, but with a lot of nuances. Okay, so you learn those three words, and you learn them in a lot of contexts, noting that they're used pretty much the same way with they're pretty much always followed by a noun or something equivalent to a noun, and they're exchangeable, although it changes the meaning. Okay, so that's your prepositions palace. You create images for those three things and store those somewhere. Next, we come to the articles.

And these are pretty interesting, much simpler than in Spanish, actually. We have LE, which is the masculine article for the. Then we have LA, which is equivalent to la in Spanish. We have LES, which is equivalent to los and las. So basically, you're going to store these articles, these definite articles, and you're going to put the feminine ones on the left side, create some image for the L-A and the L-E-S. And then on the right side, you'll have L-E and L-E-S. And you'll make sure that those represent the for you, but you have feminine on the left, masculine on the right with both the singular and the plurals. And then we have

U-N for the masculine and U-N-E for the feminine. So the U-N-E will be on the left side and the U-N will be on the right side. And so we have, you know, un and una, if this was Spanish. And yeah, basically that's it. Those are the articles. And next we come to the pronouns. And first we'll start with the subject pronouns. We have je or yo. It's equivalent to yo, but it's je in French.

And then the next one, actually, I think in frequency is V-O-U-S, which is pretty much equivalent to the Spanish word for usted or for ustedes, although it has some grammatical differences. But one way or another, you know that it's a subject pronoun and it's here in this particular place. You've created an image for this V-O-U-S word that shows that it's, you know, exchangeable in a phrase with other subject pronouns. Next, we have t-u, which is equivalent to the Spanish word tú, and then i-l, which is interestingly not just equivalent to el as a subject pronoun, but also to it as a subject, which Spanish doesn't really have. So in this sense, French is actually more similar to English than to Spanish, because you say, you know, it is strange that something is the case. You're actually going to use this IL word. In Spanish, you would never use EL for that.

But anyway, you store these four words, the J-E, V-O-U-S, T-U, and I-L, all together in a scene for the subject pronouns, and know what each of those means and that they're exchangeable with each other because they're stored together like that. Next we come to the direct objects, which are very much like Spanish but simpler as we saw with the articles, and they're really similar to the articles too. In fact, they basically are the same as the articles. We're going to store the LE word in here for the masculine direct object, the LA word in here for the feminine direct object,

the LES in here for the plural direct object, both masculine and feminine, and then V-O-U-S as a direct object for, well, what we had as a subject there, V-O-U-S. Now you might be asking, why did we store all of these words in this new scene for the direct objects if we already have these words stored somewhere else? Well, it's because they mean something entirely different here. In the article scene, the words that started with L meant the, but now they mean him or her or them. It means something entirely different. And then the V word, V-O-U-S, now means that it is the object of something instead of being the subject. So it's like the difference between he and him or it and it. In this case, the two are identical, but it's still exchangeable with those other words that are in the same scene.

And that's the value of using a memory palace that's sorted by function like this. You know that you can switch out this V-O-U-S word with the L-E word or the L-A word when those are direct objects. So you know how you're using your words and you can use them confidently because you know that they're exchangeable since they're in the same scene. In another scene, or perhaps several other scenes, it depends on how you proceed from here, but we're going to store other pronouns that are basically third-person pronouns but used in different ways, not personal pronouns. For example, we have Q-U-E, that means the Spanish word que with an accent. It's used to ask what something is. Then we have CE and the special CA, which are used to mean this or that, or eso and esto in certain situations in French. Then we also have UN, which basically means uno or one when you're referring to one person. For example, one must pick up the trash. That's UN. And then we have ON, which is something that we don't have in Spanish or English, but it's just a general and indefinite pronoun to talk about

what people are doing or what somebody did indefinitely. Now we'll move on to adverbs. There'll be a different scene where you'll store adverbs. The word P-A-S means not, but it's used after a verb rather than before, and it's the most frequent adverb for not. Then we also have ne, which also means not, but it's used before a verb. So that's more equivalent to the Spanish word no, which means not. So we have pas and ne. Those are both adverbs, but they'll be stored in an adverb palace maybe in two different places for maybe you'll in one of those places you'll keep storing adverbs that happen after verbs and in the other place you'll keep storing adverbs that have that generally happen before

adverbs finally we come to the most complicated part of speech and that is verbs and so you're gonna like we did in the Spanish course, you'll have a different memory palace for each verb, and you'll store the different conjugations in different rooms based on which mood and which tense it is. But fortunately, we only have one to cover today, and it's from etre, specifically the conjugation est. This is basically equivalent to the Spanish word es and also está, so it's by far the most used conjugation of any verb in French and the only verb that's in the top 20 of conjugated and used forms in speech. Now once you've built out this palace and created, you know, looked up the pronunciation and created images to help you remember where each word is stored

in the palace, I would suggest that you enhance your pronunciation, first of all, by perhaps even creating stock mnemonic objects to differentiate particular types of sounds. For example, nasal sounds could always have a particular creature along with them, like an elephant is always used with verbs that have a nasal sound or something similar to that. And then next, you want to study text and maybe the simplest texts that you can, but they'll still use a lot of these words and see exactly how these words are being used in phrases. You want to make the most use of this palace as you can by seeing why it is that these words are in the different scenes that they're in, and how it is that these words fall in a phrase, so that you can use them in phrases correctly instead of trying to take a French word and

use it as an English speaker would, which is obviously what you don't want to do. You want to study native French texts for this. Afterwards, you'll start filling in the palace and including more regions. You're going to use, for example, organized palaces for the adverbs that are more complex than what I described. We only did two adverbs, but you want to organize it and put those adverbs in place based on use, maybe time adverbs in one place and geographic or placement adverbs in another place. You want an organized palace for the verb être, but you want, you know, it filled out with all the conjugations. And then, of course, you're going to create more palaces for more verbs

and then a palace for adjectives and a palace for nouns. Next, I would suggest that you learn the most common phrases that you can find for the top 200 words. And, of course, start getting some conversation coaching. I know that you're starting to do something with distance learning, Sarah, but for anyone listening, you know, you need to get some conversation coaching and feedback from native speakers in order to be confident that what you're practicing is correct and that you're both being understood by and understanding native speakers when you speak with them. Thanks for the question, Sarah. I spent a lot of time on this episode, but I really enjoyed doing it. And even if, again, you're really comfortable with these words already,

I would suggest proceeding and building out this palace from here afterwards. If anyone listening is interested in learning French or interested in using memory palaces and exclusivity tactics to hack and learn any language, I cover this stuff every week on Tuesdays, so I'd love to get your request. 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.