Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The Fastest Way to Learn Numbers in a Foreign Language

For those who have been doing physical exercises on a regular basis and studying a foreign language there is a way to memorize numbers fairly quickly.
All you have to do is, instead of counting your repetitions in English, start counting them in the foreign language you are trying to learn. I, for example, have been studying Spanish for the past three months, and when I got to the chapter about numbers in my textbook I tried to memorize them. I thought I did. However a little later when I tried to recall certain numbers I couldn’t. When somebody told me a sentence with a number in Spanish I couldn’t instantly figure out what that number was. One day, when I did my usual workout, it hit me that instead of counting pushups in English I could count in Spanish. I would get a lot of repetitions that way too! So instead of inwardly counting “one, two, three, … , fourteen, fifteen” , for example, while lifting weights,  I count “uno, dos, tres, …, catorce, quince”.  Or when I am doing yoga, I count till hundred while doing each pose. And if I want to make it more challenging I can count to over a hundred. Furthermore, in my reading, if I encounter numbers in millions it is easy for me to read these numbers because they are constructed by adding “mil” for thousands and “millones” for a hundred thousand.
When I started this practice, I would sometimes forget about counting in Spanish and "slip" into counting in English. I had to catch myself and revert to counting in Spanish. Now I automatically count in Spanish when doing my exercises. What I notice now is that when I exchange a few words with somebody in Spanish and I have to come up with a number in Spanish, I can recall the Spanish number instantly. Try it and see if it will make a difference in your effort to memorize numbers in a foreign language.

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