Part of mastering a foreign language involves coming up with strategies that help you trick your brain into learning. In my own case, I figured out early on that I learned better if I made word associations, allowing me to tie a word like kurai (dark) to the similar-sounding English word “cry” using the sentence “cry in the dark,” or combining shinu (to die) with the English words “she knew,” creating “she knew he was going to die.” These word associations can get quite silly, but when you make a connection this way you’ll probably have it forever, so they can be useful tools. My kids are preparing for the Eiken test this weekend, which is the primary test of English in Japan, and to help out we’ve tried to come up with innovative ways for them to learn. My daughter has trouble sitting still for a long time, so we do short lessons with lots of breaks in between. Also, when reading through word problems, she’s allowed to change the subject of any sentence so that it talks about one of her family members, making it more fun for her to get through, like Mad Libs. In the case of my son, I help him memorize vocabulary words by coming up with lines from the Star Wars films, when I can. For example, one word he wasn’t getting was “contamination,” so I turned on my C-3P0 voice and spat out the Episode IV line, “I’ve got such a bad case of dust contamination I can barely move.” It was just the mental hook he needed.
