Page 224 - Use Your Memory

MEMORY SYSTEMS FOR VOCABULARY AND LANGUAGE
for book is livre. This can be remembered more readily if you think
of the first four letters of the word library, which is a place where
books are classified and studied. The French word for pen is
plume, which in English refers to a bird's feather, especially a large
one used for ornament. This immediately brings to mind the quill
pen used widely before the invention of the steel nib, fountain pen
and ball-point pen. The link-chain plume-feather-quill-pen will
make remembering the French word a simple task.
Apart from Latin, Greek and French, the rest of English is
largely Anglo-Saxon, going back to German, giving rise to count-
less words that are the same in German and English - will, hand,
arm, bank, halt, wolf, etc., whereas others are closely related: light
(Licht), night (Nacht), book (Buch), stick (Stock), ship (Schiff) and
house (Haus).
Learning languages, both our own and those of other people,
need not be the frustrating and depressing experience it so often
is. It is simply a matter of organising the information you want to
learn in such a way as to enable your memory to 'hook on' to every
available scrap of information.
One way to get a head start in learning a language is to realise
that in most languages, 50 per cent of all conversation is made up
of only 100 words. If you apply the Major System to the memori-
sation of these 100 basic words, you are already 50 per cent of the
way toward being able to understand the basic conversation of any
native speaker.
For your convenience, the 100 basic words in the English
language are listed overleaf. You will find that if you compare
them with their counterparts in, say, French, German, Swedish,
etc., nearly 50 per cent of these are almost the same as in English,
with only minor variations in the accent and accentuation of the
words.

129