Eselsbrücke
Eselsbrücke: a memory aid, a mnemonic. The literal meaning is 'donkey bridge', a plank placed over a stream to give a little helping hand to persuade the reluctant animal to cross the water! Mnemonics give our little brains a helping hand too!
When learning a new language, we often find it hard to make a connection between new vocabulary in the target language and the equivalent words in our own. So we need a bridge, an Eselsbrücke.
This is relatively simple for languages that have some historical relationship with English. It doesn’t take too much effort, for example, to connect the Italian word cuore with medical terms such as ‘cardiac’, ‘cardiology’, ‘cardiogram’, etc. It will come as no surprise therefore to learn that cuore means ‘heart’ in the language of Dante.
But mnemonics really come into their own when we are learning a language with few, if any, connections to English. Take the Lingala word bomá. There is a chance that you may have heard it if you have ever seen footage of the Rumble in the Jungle world heavyweight fight between George Foreman and Mohammed Ali, which took place in Kinshasa. “Bomá ye, Ali, bomá ye!” shouted the crowd. “Kill him, Ali, kill him!”
So bomá means ‘kill’, but how do we remember it? The trick is to think of some English word that the Lingala word reminds you of. Any thoughts? ‘Bomb’, perhaps? At last we have our little Eselsbrücke, our mnemonic. A bomb is used to kill, so we can construct a mental picture of a cartoon bomb going “Boom!” and thus remember our first word in Lingala. The more bizarre the picture you construct in your mind, the more likely it is to stick. We’ve helped the donkey across the bridge.
Learn more about mnemonics in chapter 4 (PARANOID ANDROID) of our must-read book about language learning, THE LANGUAGE SECRET.
