{"id":3039,"date":"2015-01-26T09:19:07","date_gmt":"2015-01-26T14:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/?p=3039"},"modified":"2020-10-02T13:00:11","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T17:00:11","slug":"remember-better-with-toons-and-tunes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/2015\/01\/26\/remember-better-with-toons-and-tunes\/","title":{"rendered":"Remember Better with Toons and Tunes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Itchy<\/a><\/p>\n

The comic above was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. When I drew it, I thought I\u2019d just get a laugh out of imagining what different Asian scripts might look like. Since then, though, it\u2019s actually helped me out quite a bit identifying which written language I\u2019m looking at. For instance, thanks to this comic, I can now look at a photo of any random Asian city street and have a good chance of guessing which country it\u2019s in just from the writing on the storefronts and street ads. What started as a silly joke actually became a useful reference tool.<\/p>\n

In college I took a German class to fulfill my language credit. I\u2019d no idea I was going to move to Germany, nor had I any desire to learn it fluently. That was almost seven years ago, and I remember nothing that the professor taught me except for two incredibly annoying songs to help us remember prepositions and cases. Aus, au\u00dfer, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu<\/em> are the dative ones, and durch, f\u00fcr, gegen, ohne, um<\/em> are the accusative ones. Believe it or not, I didn\u2019t even have to look that up, because she made us sing the former to the melody of \u201cthe Blue Danube<\/a>\u201d by Johann Strauss, and the latter to that military \u201cI don\u2019t know but I\u2019ve been told\u2026\u201d cadence call<\/a> (\u201cdurch f\u00fcr gegen ohne um, Deutsch zu lernen ist nicht dumm!<\/em>\u201d, or in English, \u201cthrough for against without around, learning German isn\u2019t stupid!\u201d . . .\u00a0it rhymes in German).<\/p>\n

I remember these things because annoying, funny, or stupid tricks actually embed themselves deeper into your brain than just rote memorization. You may have noticed that some airline safety videos are getting funnier<\/a> these days \u2013 it\u2019s been proven<\/a> that humor helps you remember information better, and songs as well. The Germans took this idea to its wicked,\u00a0German extreme in this absolutely insane forklift safety video<\/a> (not for the faint of heart. You’ve been\u00a0warned!).<\/p>\n

What about you? What silly songs or rhymes or games have you learned to remember otherwise boring grammar tables or vocabulary?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"

The comic above was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. When I drew it, I thought I\u2019d just get a laugh out of imagining what different Asian scripts might look like. Since then, though, it\u2019s actually helped me out quite a bit identifying which written language I\u2019m looking at. For instance, thanks to this comic, I…<\/p>\n

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