Yong Huang's Blog: Learning Spanish, French, and Italian Words Through Etymology and Mnemonics, page 3

Two types of word association

Anna Gudmundson in his article The mental lexicon of multilingual adult learners of Italian L3: A study of word association behavior and cross-lingual semantic priming summarizes word association categories of other researchers (Fitzpatrick & Izura). The first two categories are

1. Equivalent meaning relation
 * synonymy (rug-carpet);
 * co-ordination (bus-car);
 * superordination (bird-robin);
 * subordination (bird-animal);
 * partonymy (bird-feather)
2. Non-equivalent meaning relation
 * scream-afraid; steak-argentina; bubble-child

and he said "Equivalent meaning relations represent a close semantic relation and could be
said to operate on a paradigmatic level: both words belong to the same word class,
appear in the same semantic and grammatical contexts and have similar referents, while the non-equivalent meaning relations and the collocational meaning relations represent a looser semantic connection and a more syntagmatic-based relation" (see pp.78-9), and "there was an increase with age as regards the proportion of paradigmatic associations, and a decrease of the proportion of syntagmatic and form associations" (p.76).

I hope the examples he gave are clear in distinguishing the two types of association. Basically, if you see the word scream and immediately think of cry, shout, you're using equivalent meaning relation, because these words are near synonyms or have some semantic relations with scream. If instead you think of afraid, danger, panic, that's non-equivalent meaning relation.

My books ( Learning Spanish Words and Learning French Words ) mostly use equivalent meaning relation (or paradigmatic association), rarely non-equivalent meaning relation (or syntagmatic association). And so according to his summary of the research, the preferred readers of my book are adults and not young children, which is what I stated repeatedly in the introductions of the books. Now I come to think of it. Maybe I should occasionally add some non-equivalent meaning relation as mnemonics, especially when a good mnemonic is hard to come by (and etymology does not help). Actually, there are some in the books, but just too few.

Incidentally, older language learners not only change their word association type (from non-equivalent meaning relation to equivalent meaning relation), but also tend to rely more on cognates. According to Cognate recognition by young multilingual language learners: the role of age and exposure , "age was the strongest determinant of cognate word recognition". This is again consistent with my claim that my books are more suitable for older learners.

Initial letters catch more attention for a mnemonic

In the Appendix of either Learning Spanish Words or Learning French Words , I describe some tips on creating mnemonics. Over the years I have found another fact I should add to the article, i.e. initial letters of a word or word root catch more attention for a mnemonic. For example, when you learn the Italian word rupestre ("rocky" or "rock" used as adj.; also a French and Spanish word, e.g. peinture rupestre, pintura rupestre "rock painting" or "cave painting"), your first impression is probably some word like ruby because you naturally focus on the first part of the word and ignore the latter part, which often is a suffix or something like that anyway. So ruby ("a kind of precious stone") is taken to be a mnemonic, and it's actually a good one (imagine reddish rock paintings). We can think of many other examples:

* French branché ("trendy"): Think of brand (focus on bran- and more or less ignore -ché).
* French cravate: crave for a necktie (ignore -te)
* French entamer ("to start"): You can strip the prefix and use tame as a mnemonic (to get along with and eventually use a wild horse, you have to tame him first), but the initial letters of entamer look like enter , whose meaning more or less matches "start". So why not use that?
* French matelas ("mattress"): You can use mat as a memonic even though mat is etymologically unrelated. Interestingly, matelas and mattress are cognates because they both come from one single Old French word (which comes from Arabic), but it may not be easy to think of changing l of matelas to r to associate it with mattress.
* French sabot ("hoof"; "wooden shoe", "clog"): Cognate with Spanish zapato (“shoe”), after which the online shoe retailer Zappos was named. But if you don't know Spanish, as a mnemonic, just think of the saddle on a horse when you see sa- of this word (but you still need to move your thought from saddle down to hoof).

* Spanish acantilado ("cliff"; "steep"): Imagine cantaloupes grown on a cliff (focus on the root, i.e. without prefix a-).
* Spanish aseverar ("to assert"): The first three letters or two syllables ase - may be a hint for assert.
* Spanish azotar ("to whip"): Imagine an Aztec man whipping another man, perhaps a captured enemy tribesman.
* Spanish cacique ("chieftain"): Imagine the chieftain of a Native American tribe cuts the ribbon at the opening ceremony of a new casino in this Indian reserve.
* Spanish fosa ("pit"): Think of a fox in a pit.
* Spanish legado ("legacy"): English legacy is from Old French legacie, from Medieval Latin legatia, from legatus (“legate”, “envoy”), from which Spanish legado is directly derived. It's easier to just focus on the first two syllables of legado and legacy.
* Spanish zanahoria ("carrot"): carrot as salad (focus on zana- although you sure can use another word to accomodate -horia, e.g. carrot as salad plus Oriel cookies)

guinea pig

A guinea pig is a species of rodent, commonly used for laboratory experiment. In Spanish, the word is cobaya (or conejillo de Indias). In French, it is cobaye. And in Italian, it's cavia. The word is from Old Tupi, a language spoken by the aboriginal Tupi people of Brazil. The original form in Old Tupi was sabuia, alternatively written as çabuia. Later the cedilla in ç somehow got lost (probably due to unclear handwriting) and this letter became c, hence *cabuia. I suspect there was a metathesis (syllable or letter swap), along with a small vowel sound change, in *cabuia > Spanish cobaya and so French cobaye. But in Italian, the form cavia is closer to the original, with just b > v, which is a common development.

Since the word is of native American origin, and the English word guinea pig is not, we can't rely on etymology to remember it. As a mnemonic, if you know the song Kumbaya (literally meaning "Come by Here"), you can imagine seeing this small animal on an African safari. Or if you don't mind, imagine the disturbing scene of a cobra snake eating such a cute little yet fatally unlucky creature.

How much can a mnemonic help?

When the etymology or origin of a word doesn't help us remember the word, we can create a mnemonic. How much does a mnemonic really help? It depends on two factors.

(1) First and foremost, it depends on the learner's position on, for lack of a good term let me temporarily call it, the scale of word analyzing habit (WAH). Some people strongly prefer rote memory while some prefer to do some word analysis in vocabulary study. Generally, the younger the learner, the lower WAH score he/she has. With increasing age, people diverge on the score. I personally have a high WAH score and enjoy and heavily rely on word analysis, but I know very well many people (adults) have a low score and speak foreign languages fluently. Word analysis in this context consists of two parts: etymology and mnemonics. In this blog posting, I'm only referring to the latter.

(2) Some words can have remarkable mnemonics created while others defy such effort. If a great mnemonic is found, such as “I like the smell of Olay (a name brand skin care product)” that helps you remember Spanish oler ("to smell") or olor ("smell", n.), even a person with a low WAH score may like it. On the other hand, a mnemonic such as “Harry cooked beans” that is meant to help remember French haricot ("bean") probably only appeals to an adult learner with a high WAH score.

So we see that the two factors, (1) and (2), should be combined to judge how helpful a mnemonic is. If you say I don't like mnemonics, you probably still use this trick occasionally when the good mnemonic is too good to ignore. If you say I use mnemonics a lot, there're still times you can't think of one even remotely helpful and you more or less resort to rote memory.

One side note: A mnemonic can help you remember the word but can also negatively affect your fluency. If you strive for speaking the language fluently, word analysis should be out of the picture; after all, your brain can't run as fast as a modern computer. That's why I said in the past that once a word is firmly stuck in your brain, you should forgo the mnemonic you used to remember it, and optionally the etymology (although the latter can be retained for other purposes, as knowledge of the culture for instance). In short, to answer the question how much a mnemonic can help, we should limit the scope of what is being helped to first-stage word study, i.e. when the word is still relatively new to the learner.

"menos de" and "moins de"

Spanish menos de and French moins de seem to mean "less / fewer of". In fact, French moins de does mean that, or sort of, as in e.g. moins de gens ("fewer people", literally "less of people"), although you say menos gente, not menos de gente, in Spanish.

What's interesting is that when the phrases are followed by an amount or quantity, the meaning is "less than", in both Spanish and French. E.g. menos de un año, moins d'un an ("less than a year"), menos de 12 personas, moins de 12 personnes ("less than 12 people"). If we had to literally interpret them, we might say "less from", not "less of". If the amount looks lower from the point of the amount said after that, this amount is less. Here de (of both Spanish and French) is not interpreted as "of", but as "from" (as in un tren de Londres, un train de Londres, "a train from London").

At least one other Romance language, Italian, has the same phrase, e.g. meno di 12 persone ("less than 12 people").

How to remember 'melatonin'

One user wonders if there's a better way to remember the English word melatonin ("A hormone, related to serotonin, that is secreted by the pineal gland, and stimulates colour change in the skin of reptiles, and is involved in the sleep/wake and reproductive cycles" according to Wiktionary). And I said,

If you know melancholy ("depression"; "sorrow"), you will remember half of it. The first half, melan- is the same as mela- of melatonin in origin, meaning "black" in Ancient Greek. For -tonin, think of tonic (so literally melatonin is "black tonic" and melancholy is "black bile"). If you don't know melancholy, you can use a pure mnemonic. For instance, imagine that Carmela and Tony both have a dark or black face. Etymology plus mnemonics can help you memorize almost all words of a language. Some adults memorize words purely by rote memory, while others rely on some analysis of the words to remember them. I'm among the latter group. Children and young people are mostly in the first group.

The above example is of an English word. But the idea is the same for words in any language. If you wonder how I think of melancholy, I used the Windows console command

C:\temp> findstr mela words.txt | more
acromelalgia
Amelanchier
amelanchier
...
melancholomaniac
melancholy
melancholyish
...

where words.txt is from a Linux server under /usr/share/dict. You can also download it from my web page. If you don't use this method, you can of course try to think of various combinations and may eventually get it. But with this Windows command, you're doing a systematic search and it saves time in those cases where a match is not obvious.

Spanish phrase: menos mal que

Spanish: menos mal que la lluvia cesó ("luckily the rain stopped")

If you're the type of persons that enjoy analyzing words, phrases and sentences instead of relying on rote memory alone to learn them, the Spanish phrase menos mal que, commonly translated as "luckily" or "thank goodness", is an interesting case. If you thought it literally meant "less bad than", you would be wrong on two grounds: mal if used as an adjective is only used before a noun (and it must be a masculine singular, otherwise it would be malo or its variant); que in the phrase menos mal que is followed by a clause (sentence), not a noun-phrase (a noun, pronoun, or phrase that grammatically behaves like a noun) and so cannot mean "than". Not only that. The meaning would even be the opposite; "less bad than something" means that "something" is worse.

So, how do we literally translate this phrase and somewhat match the correct sense of "luckily" or "thank goodness"? We can think of it as meaning "(it's) less evil that ..." or "(it's) a less bad thing that ...". Here mal is a noun, as in el bien y el mal ("good and evil") or de mal en peor ("from bad to worse"), and que is the conjunction that introduces the clause, as in digo que Pablo puede hacerlo ("I say that Pablo can do it"). You can treat the whole que clause as the subject as if saying que la lluvia cesó es menos mal (literally "that the rain stopped is a less bad thing"). A less bad thing implies that there is a possibility of a worse outcome. Since the lesser among the bad things turns out to be the case, you feel relieved and sigh "thank goodness!"

Google Ngram

Google Ngram View shows usage frequency of words or phrases along with a timeline. This is far better than simply checking the estimated search count of a word or phrase (as I used to rely on to sort words by frequency, for English words or Chinese characters). But there are a few things you need to know when using Google Ngram.

* Words are case-sensitive by default. So when comparing frequencies of different words (or phrases), make sure to use all lower-case, or just click the Case-Insensitive button. (The button shows on screen but is NOT highlighted by default.)
* You can only enter a string of 120 characters in the text input box.
* You can only enter a phrase or sentence of at most 5 words.

With those conditions kept in mind, if you want to check the frequencies of, say, all the 18 phrases that contain couteau ("knife" in French) on the Wiktionary page (click "show more" on the page to see all 18), you have to break them up into a few chunks. What I do is copy all the phrases and paste them into a gvim window (vim is a freeware editor), add commas to the end of each line (command: %s/$/,/), join them into one line (%j!), and manually break the long string up into chunks, each less than or equal to 120 characters. (The last phrase remuer le couteau dans la plaie has more than 5 words and can be omitted since Ngram won't accept it anyway.) Copy each chunk into Google Ngram, choose French as the language and search. Thus, I find couteau de cuisine ("kitchen knife"), couteau de chasse ("hunting knife"), and à couper au couteau ("(fog) very dense") in modern-day French have relatively high frequencies. I added the first two to my Learning French Words book as examples for headword couteau, but omitted à couper au couteau because it sounds a little too idiomatic. The actual text in my book is as follows:

couteau knife. Cognate with ... Example, couteau de cuisine / de chasse / à pain (“kitchen / hunting / bread knife”).

I added couteau à pain in spite of its slightly lower Ngram frequency, because this is a phrase common enough and I want to show the usage of à + noun in addition to the de + noun phrases.

Another use of the Ngram is in choosing the most common conjugation examples for headwords, as I talked about before. The example sentences I gave to the headword mentir ("to tell a lie") in my Learning French Words book are "je mens / tu mens / il ment (“I’m / you’re / he’s lying”); j’ai / il as / tu a menti (“I / he / you lied”)". Only two tenses are given because they're the most common, present and present perfect, and within each tense I chose the most common conjugations according to Googel Ngram.

By the way, although my Spanish words book was already published, I'm slowly revising it without a plan for publication. One type of addition to it is example phrases or sentences. For example, I added

Examples, buena estrella (“lucky star”); estrella fugaz (“shooting star”, literally “fleeting star”); estrella de mar (“starfish”, literally “star of sea”); el producto estrella (“the flagship / leading product”; note it’s not ... estrello).

to the headwords

estrellar to smash, to crash. estrella star. Cognate with stellar. ...

The Wiktionary page for estrella has 23 example phrases. I chose 3 because of their relatively high Ngram frequencies, in addition to el producto estrella, which I think is a common phrase and can illustrate the figurative usage of this word.

Frequencies of days of week in French and Spanish

It's interesting to find that Google Ngram Viewer (GN) lists French words for the days of week in almost the same order as the Lexique Corpus (LC) [note1]:

GN: dimanche > samedi > lundi > vendredi > mardi > jeudi > mercredi
LC: dimanche > samedi > lundi > jeudi > vendredi > mardi > mercredi

I'm pleasantly surprised that the two orders match quite well; the only outlier is jeudi ("Thursday"), for reason I don't know. Note that dimanche ("Sunday") and samedi ("Saturday") are high and mercredi ("Wednesday") is low in frequency.

Now let's look at Spanish, where GN again is the data of Google Ngram Viewer, and RAE is the word frequency provided by Diccionario de la lengua española of Real Academia Española [note2]:

GN : domingo > sábado > viernes > lunes >> jueves > miércoles = martes
RAE: domingo > lunes > viernes > sábado > martes > jueves > miércoles

We see that while domingo ("Sunday") remains the most frequent and the mid-week miércoles ("Wednesday") is the least, there's not much agreement for the other days of week between these two statistical data sets.

In both French and Spanish, Sunday and to a less extent Saturday are the most talked about while the mid-week Wednesday is the least. This probably reflects a human tendency to be more verbose and garrulous when it's time to relax and less so when you have tons of work to do.
___________
[note1] The actual Lexique data I use is the lemma frequency of usage in books (column freqlemlivres in the Lexique spreadsheet), extracted and shown here.
[note2] The actual data is available here.

Adding examples to my books

When I wrote Learning Spanish Words Through Etymology and Mnemonics , I intentionally omitted examples for the headwords, so that the book remains compact and each headword entry looks short and clean. A few years have passed and I come to realize that if the book is used as a dictionary for language learners, examples are essential, even if they can be easily found in other dictionaries. They not only show the usage of the words, but also help the learners memorize them.

Currently, I'm more actively working on the French words book. So I chose to augment that book with examples first; its early version suffered from the same fault, too. As always, I'd like to make my book slightly different from any other out there. In giving examples, I decide to explain some example sentences or phrases in their literal senses so as to help the learners better remember the meanings. For example,

tête head. ... This word has many extended meanings e.g. “mind” (où avais-tu la tête?, “what were you thinking?”, literally “where did you have the head?”)

arriver to arrive; to happen; (followed by à + verb) to manage (to do something). ... je n’y arrive pas (“I can’t do it”, literally “I don’t manage to do it” or more literally “I don’t arrive at it / arrive there”).

Another decision is to merge several short example phrases, separating the replaceable components with a slash. For example,

attendre to wait (for); (reflexive) to expect, to foresee. ... j’attends le bus (“I’m waiting / I wait for the bus”); on s’attend au pire / à mieux (“we’re expecting the worse / better”)

exciter to excite. ... In general, say je suis ému / surexcité / ravi instead of excité for “I’m excited”.

Obviously, giving examples for the easier or more frequent words offers greater benefit in vocabulary learning. I think I'll continue to review my book and add examples along the way to about the middle of the book, which orders the headwords in frequency of occurrence. Once the French book is done, I'll start to work on the revised edition of the Spanish word book, even though there's no plan to formally publish it.