Hello, everyone. I’m asking for a bit of help for a project…
I quite often use striking images in my head to help words “stick”. For example, when I was trying to learn the Welsh for “hedgehog” I had a mental image of a hedgehog running out of a drainpipe: drain-og … draenog. Someone else I know pictured Sean Connery as Father Christmas to help remember Siôn Corn[ery]
And I used to use the Memrise website to learn vocab, which had lots more similar pictures of silly associations to help words stick. (But they’ve gone in a different direction now…)
Do any of you do similar things? Would you be willing to share here? I’d like to try to collect a load more silly picture-word associations together.
I’ll always look for something when I’m a bit stuck with a word, but they tend to be pretty short term - don’t think I remember many of them. Catrin found a course that did a lot of stuff like that for Spanish, years and years ago - she still remembers that cajon (car-horn) is ‘drawer’ and armorio (armoury!) is wardrobe…
I’m currently remembering poceti (to start) in Croatian as being a kind of weird relative of potsian - to start to potsian around…
That’s exactly it - I’ve got a few for Irish going on at the moment, but now all the Welsh words are firmly attached to what they actually are rather than the silly picture I made up for them!
But I have just remembered about looking out for the rabbit if it’s not a straight answer (“mind duh bunny” - mae’n dibynnu).
When I was starting out I had a book called “Link Word Welsh” which used pictures to help words stick. Unfortunately I no longer have my copy, but they’re still about and cheap enough.
Can never remember the difference between llosgi and llogi but I use the ‘s’ in llosgi to signify smoke rising out of a chimney in a kind of ‘s’ shape.
Another two are diwylliant and diwydiant where the ‘L’ in the word culture is represented by the ‘ll’ in diwylliant (also the ‘d’ in the middle of diwydiant represents the ‘d’ in industry).
Not that it is any way the same as what you have asked for but I think it was @siaronjames who mentioned how to recognise the singular of some plurals by indicating that the plural came first and the singular became the plural with the word ‘one’ at the end eg dailen (dail un), plentyn (plant un), coeden (coed un) etc etc.
A joke quoted by one of the Oxford Welsh lot: How many people are needed to look after a rabbit? It depends… Faint o bobl sydd angen i ofalu am gwningen? Mae’n dibynnu!
(We were at a talk once where someone explained a Chinese joke that only worked if you understood both Chinese and English. My partner went up to him at the end with a slightly smutty Brazilian joke that required the hearer to understand both English and Portuguese to get the joke - so the mae’n dibynnu one makes a third!)
I had trouble distinguishing between weles i and wedes i back in the early days! I used to relate the L in weles i to ‘(eye)Lashes’ and the D in wedes i to ‘Dant’ (tooth).
Before I found SSIW I listened to a bit of The Learn Welsh Podcast, and Jason Shepherd conjured some crackingly surreal mental images which have still stuck with me such as;
