Explore The PAO System For Language Learning
When I’ve struggled to come up with associations when learning a language, I always stop. I ask myself what the numbers would be for the word I’m struggling with.
For example, there’s a word in German: faseln. It means to “spout off.”
When I looked at the F and S, I thought of 80. That is an image of… you guessed it:
William Shatner as James T. Kirk with his phaser set to stun. “Eln” would be 52, which is a lion in my PAO system.
But not just any lion. It’s the MGM lion so that the image is vibrant and familiar, not generic.
And imagining Captain Kirk using a phaser on the MGM lion because the lion was “spouting off” a bunch of drivel made it fast, fun and easy to memorize the sound and meaning of that word.