Mnemonics

When I first started teaching English in Germany, I was a little bit rubbish at explaining grammar. My students would often help me out with Eselsbrücken they had learned at school. "He, she, it: das ‘s' muss mit," they would declare. Or "If and will makes me ill" and "If und would macht Satz kaputt." An Eselsbrücke is what we call a mnemonic (the first "m" is silent, by the way) in English.

I've always been a little bit envious that German has the word Eselsbrücke. Mnemonic is too fancy. It sounds so medical, like a cross between anemic and pneumonia: "Margaret's gone to lie down. She's a mnemonic, you know!" Mnemonic is from the ancient Greek. Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory. See? Fancy.

Over the years, my students have come up with all sorts of mnemonics to help them remember vocabulary, idioms, grammar and so on. The one that sticks in my mind, though, is from a young man called Andreas. He was having great difficulty pronouncing the word "comfortable". I tried hard to help him. I said it slowly, I broke it down into syllables, showing him on the blackboard which syllable to stress. Eventually, we gave up and moved on with the lesson.

When I came into the classroom the following week, Andreas was grinning from ear to ear. "I can do it," he said. "Do what?" I asked. "I can say 'comfortable'." And he could. "Excellent, Andreas! How did you manage that?" I asked. "It was easy," he said. "All I have to do is think of Kampfdackel!

Here's Demetri Martin from Comedy Central's Important Things on mnemonics and how to remember the names of those planets:

For a more serious take on mnemonics and advice on how you can boost your memory, see Tony Buzan's book Use Your Head.