Emma: The Secret to Remembering

Hello. My name is Emma, and in today’s video, I will teach you a trick on how to remember vocabulary. So English has the largest vocabulary out of any language. I think it’s close to 600,000 words in English. So how are you going to remember so much vocabulary? Well, when I was in China, I created a little trick — and other people use this trick, too — that really helped me to remember all the new words I was learning. So in this video, I will teach you this trick.
So what you do — I have a bunch of interesting pictures on the board — is any time you come up across a new word and you’re learning a new word, you need to make a picture in your head of this word. A good idea is to try to think of other words that sound like this word and imagine funny situations in your mind. So what do I mean by that? Well, let me show you.

The first word I’m going to teach you today is “bald”, “bald”, b-a-l-d. What does it mean to be “bald”? It means to have no hair, okay? So if you have no hair, you are “bald”. How do you remember this word? Well, if you use my trick, you can imagine a word that sounds like “bald” — maybe “ball”, basketball, soccer ball. So in your mind, I want you to imagine a ball. It can be a basketball, a soccer ball — any type of ball. Now, imagine the ball with a face. Imagine the ball with no hair on top, maybe a little hair on the side, a little hair here, but no hair on the top. Because “ball” and “bald” sound alike, if you imagine this picture for maybe ten seconds, it will help you to remember it in the future, okay? Think “ball with no hair”. Okay.

Let’s try our second word: “beard”. What’s a beard? It’s the hair that comes off a man’s chin — usually, women don’t have beards. So it’s the hair that comes down like this. How are we going to remember this word? Well, imagine a man with a beard, and inside the beard is a bird, a little bird, tweet tweet! And what’s it doing in the beard? Why, it’s drinking beer. Okay? So this little picture is — don’t know if you can see that, but that is beer. So imagine a bird drinking beer. Those two words together — beer. This isn’t beer; this one is. Imagine “bird” and “beer”. Together, if you put the words together, they make “beard”. A bird drinking beer in a beard. Can you say that fast? “Bird drinking beer in a beard.” So maybe, if you picture this for ten seconds, you will remember this word. Okay.

Next word I want to teach you today: “creamed”. So what does it mean to be “creamed”? “We creamed you guys.” “You guys got creamed.” It means someone lost a game very badly. If our team creamed your basketball team, your basketball team lost; our team won. So you don’t want to be “creamed”. If you get “creamed”, it’s bad. It means you lost, you lose. So how can you remember this? Well, imagine someone — maybe somebody you don’t like, somebody you play basketball against or some sport. Imagine throwing a bunch of ice cream and it hits their face — because the keyword “cream”, “ice cream”. So if you can imagine ice cream on someone’s face, it will help you to remember the word “creamed”. So imagine that for ten seconds. So think “ice cream on face”, “creamed”.