Korean Job Discussion Forums

[vox]

Hello board,

Back in the 80s in the West there was a product that you could order by phone that would help you with your memory, to remember anything (so they said.) Once I remembered I had it in my closet, I decided to pull it out and use it. It's based on a word association with numbers, and then making a crazy image in your mind of the associated picture with the thing you're trying to remember (like a list of things to do, for example.)

I've been applying the technique to Korean words since I got here. One of the first ones I did was

1) "Sarang" - love (I used to think of a sarong on a beautiful woman)
and
2) "Moonhwa" - culture - which I used to think of a crescent moon and an audience going 'ha' at something onstage.

Well you get it, hopefully. But this week I've done two:

1) "Saggechodthda" - crooked/dishonest - I think of a soggy wet businessman coming apart like wet cardboard, unreliable, when I try his soggy dishonest handshake.

2) "oo-joo" - outer space - I think of one of those pictures of Jesus looking over the whole planet and somebody looking up to the sky and pointing, 'ooh! A (great big) Jew!'

Anyway, I do this with a lot of words and it works. The funnier or crazier the better. I usually find I don't need the crazy image after a month or so with the new word.

Anyone have any similar vocabulary associations or other methods for vocabulary? I was particulary amused at oojoo and hoping for a parallel but I'm also interested in how others learn vocabulary

[BuHaoChi]

....

[the_beaver]

That's a basic mnemonic technique. Great for lists and other discrete point knowledge but pretty useless after the beginner stage for language. If you bought it in the 1980s it was probably Kevin Trudeau's Mega Memory kit, which was the repackaging of the technique at that time.

[hojucandy]

best way i found was to learn hanja. chinese characters are fun to draw and help you to remember korean vocab a treat

[vox]

tatooda - to fight - angry red-faced little Tattoo from Fantasy Island cussing and swearing.

That was the other one I was trying to remember.

Hanja, eh? I'll have to dig into that a bit, the mnemonic enhancement isn't immediately clear (seems like an extra step or two) but thanks for the tip, will look into it.

Yeah about the beginner stage, I'm finding that the tool is useful when I splash into new subject areas and have a lot of vocabulary to memorize with a new sentence form. So it seems to be useful in such cases thus far (but I'm still a beginner, although a high beginner now, starting to launch into low intermediate I think.)

[Ginormousaurus]

[chasmmi]

Best one I had was: (Please forgive awful romanised spelling of Korean)

sagwa hada = apologise

As I knew sagwa was apple, I found it amusing that the Korean for apologise contains the word apple and the English for apologise also sot of contains apple. SO:

sagwa hada = apple ogise

[HighTreason]

There is language software for sale out there called Unforgettable Languages that works on the same principle. I have learned several languages so far and find this technique works great. Before I even knew about this as a technique, I remember having learned new English words by associating them this way.

I don't agree that it is purely a beginner's technique. Like I said, I have learned words in my own language this way, and I certainly wasn't a beginner. The trick is to transfer smoothly from associating the new words to words or a phrase in English to associating them with other words or a phrase in the language you are learning as you go along. This helps not to attach your target language to you native language which is bad.

[Qinella]

The only word I have a memory trick to help me remember is 수건. 수 means water, and 건 sounds like the 'gone', so water gone. 수건 means towel.

[Troll_Bait]

[kiwiduncan]

I've been increasingly picking up Chinese characters and it can make remembering Korean very easy. For example su-pyeong-son (water-flat-line) is horizon and jeo-su-ji (save-water-place) is reservoir.

On the other hand some of my other word associations are really screwed up and based on a mixture of Korean and English. Yong-Am is lava. I think of the dragon Yong and the cancer Am, and then dragon cancer makes me think of lava. Yong-Job is welding. I don't know the base Chinese meaning of Job but I think welding is a suitable job for a dragon.

yu-bae-hada means to exile someone. I think of the villagers shouting at someone 'you ba(d), you ba(d).' in angry oriental accents as he is chased out of the village.

Today I learned seom-myeol-hada, which means to annihilate. Another meaning of seom is island, and i imagine it's easier to wipe-out people on an island than the mainland. As for myeol. well this is getting really dodgy here, but I think of moles, which I would like to annihilate from my vege patch.

Finally nu-gu is who. We might ask who is the new guy

[postfundie]

수학


a picture of a woman named sue hacking some frozen meat with a cleaver. It means math. a co-worker told me this and I thought it was stupid but it stuck in my head, and I don't know why.

[HighTreason]

[kiwiduncan]

seobseobhada = sad. Sob sob

go-a = orphan. Cats go 'meow', dogs go 'woof', orphans go 'wah'

[Bugmenot]