Hello,

I was just reading an article in my town's paper about learning other languages and one of the tips caught my eye, so I thought I would share the idea with learners here who might like to try this.

Since learning vocabulary is never an easy task, they said to try to assign multiple levels of association to a new word. In this article, they talked about how colors can be very helpful when learning new words.

For example, don't just make vocab cards. Use colored cards. If you are learning a language that has only masculine and feminine genders, you can use blue cards for masculine nouns and pink cards for feminine nouns. (blue for boys and pink for girls)

This way, you might forget that "comhtholgadh" is a masucline noun, but you might remember it was on a blue card so therefore it is a masculine noun. That sort of thing.

Now Irish is unique in that there are five groups of nouns that have their own ways of behaving. I decided to take it one step further and give each group one color.

1st- blue
2nd- pink
3rd- yellow
4th- green
5th- purple

These colors can often be found in packs of 3 x 5 index cards so it works out nicely.

This way I can remember the word's group, and the behavior that comes with that group. this can be done with verbs and the like, but I personally have been struggling more with remebering the group that a noun belongs to.

Just that I would share this idea with people here. Let me know if anyone does something similar to this?

Or can suggest another strategy?

Sounds good to me , Every little helps , go raibh maith agat , let us know how it works out , and if you had to adapt it ádh mór

Great idea

Sounds good! Just a suggestion - since you're using color for the types of nouns what if you used a basic difference in the card shape to indicate gender? For example, making a diagonal cut on one (or more)of the corners to indicate masculine nouns?

That's a great idea Gavin.

And if coloured cards were not easily available people could use different colour fonts.

I did a lot of rote learning when I was a student and when working in Japan and had half hour or more trips on buses and trains, especially when it was standing-room only. (I learnt 2000 Kanji on a train one year and wore a hole in the leg of my jeans.) I also used to learn one word while I brushed my teeth, another while I ate breakfast, etc., etc.

It is interesting how your mind and body can retain unrelated and redundant information from the environment. Now, when I see or hear a word I learnt back then, I sometimes have flashbacks to a place or an event that occurred while I was learning that word. The mind seems to tie all of the information together in intricate patterns some of which are useful, some not.

Using colors? Could be good...but I wonder if you might not also end up learning words from cards in your favorite color better than those in a color you don't like as much!

Jokes aside, here are some tips for making and learning from cards (from my experience only, others may have had different experiences):

1. Half of the learning from cards occurs in the writing that you do when you make them and the fact that you see the word as you write (and if you make a mistake it has a tendency also to stick tight if you learn by rote.) So, it is better to make your cards by hand writing them yourself rather than printing them from a printer.

My card making always outpaced the rote learning and I still have boxes and boxes of unused cards somewhere (all on recycled bits of paper, of course ;-) ).

2. When you learn a word try to picture the concept, if possible. Think of "coldness" when you learn fuar or picture a boat as you learn bád, etc.

3. When I started learning, I just learned the dictionary form of each noun with its gender but as I got more advanced I eventually got to writing out a set of declensions with the article for each noun to help with gender and plural:

bád (m1)
an bád
an bháid
na báid
na mbád

bean (f)
an bhean
na mná
na mná
na mban

That is a lot of work, but like I said, the process of writing up the cards was more important in the end than actually using them for rote.

For regular verbs, aim for imperative (imperative plural), verbal noun, past tense, present tense and past participle (Other tenses can easily be derived from these.):

bris (brisigí)
ag briseadh
bhris sé
briseann sí
briste

oscail (osclaígí)
ag oscailt
d'oscail sé
osclaíonn sí
oscailte

Adjectives, nominative and comparative:

bán
níos báine

suimiúil
níos suimiúla

Of course, if you could do all that, you wouldn't need the cards in the first place. Start off simple and work towards the above.

As I have said, it is the process of looking up dictionaries, etc., to find the different elements in the declensions and conjugations that really helps you learn, not the cards themselves.


(Message edited by breandán on June 19, 2009)

Hello again to everyone,

Brandán a chara, I would love to be able to write all the forms that way and remember them. But I am not certain my memory is ready for that just yet.

That's why I was hoping to concentrate on the group the noun belongs to. This way, I might not get the spelling down, but at least I will have a general idea on what I should be doing with it.

Although, I really like the verb break down...never thought of that.

And student, I suppose you could use colored fonts instead. I just hope one has a the ability to color code their fonts. I have an older color printer that eats the colored ink horribly. I get more usage from the black ink myself. As for putting a diagonal cut or something like that, well I assume it is all the same idea. Just add an extra element to help engrave the word into your memory.

The article I was reading was actually helping students of French who were having trouble with words like "l'ami," or another situation when the distinction between the two genders may not be easily seen by a new learner.

I don't know if this will work. I am just now getting down to using it myself. I haven't really had a chance to make a lot of cards that are new to me. The stacks of them that I have are all standard white and black.

But it was a neat idea and I hope it will help out.

Don't use the "noun group" system. I learned the "noun group" system about 7 years ago in school, but since then I devised my own system based on endings.

Learn how to deal with specific endings, endings such as:
-ach, -air, -acht, -aíocht, -óir

After that, there's only two groups left:
1) Ending with a broad consonant
2) Ending with a slender consonant

If anyone's interested I can fish out my old Irish notebook and give a finite list of how to deal with every kind of noun in Irish.

But really, I never found the 5 groups helpful, it was much better just to deal with endings.

Traveller, if you look at the Preface to Foclóir Póca, you will see that the "noun groups" ARE based on the endings. So you have gone by a round about way to arrive at the same place. ;-)

My advice to beginners is to use as many different ways to remember these things as you can - it is all reinforcement. Later, you will narrow it down to the one's that suit your own learning style and eventually you will reach a critical mass of reference patterns and just be able to remember them anyway.