So I realise I haven't written anything for a very long time indeed, and there's probably no-one reading at this point, but there's something that I feel like writing about, so I'm going to write about it, even if no-one ever reads it. Sounds fair, right? Well as I don't hear any disagreement, I'll continue. ;-)
OK, so someone in a Facebook group recently asked for pointers on creating mnemonics to help learn vocabulary in Scottish Gaelic, and I commented that it wasn't really worth doing. For one thing, mnemonics based on other languages risk encouraging bad pronunciation habits -- I've seen this in a lot of learners, who struggle to move away from their L1 pronunciation of a mnemonic to the natural L2 pronunciation. I've even met people who struggle with close cognates, and even having achieved relatively good general pronunciation in the L2 still can't manage to say (for example) adopción in Spanish or adoption in French without the SH sound of adoption in English.
But the use of mnemonics is still actively recommended by a lot of learners and teachers to new beginners. Why so?
My belief is that this is a misperception driven by the salience (noticeability, the property of "sticking out") of words learned this way. If you've ever learned any L2 vocabulary via a mnemonic, you're sure to remember at least one of them. I can tell you now that a French swimming pool is the place where you'll find (adopt French accent now) "all ze baby peess een." These words therefore stick out in your mind, and you give them much more importance than they really deserve.
This doesn't only happen with mnemonics. The same salience is given to items you learn by making a mistake, like the old classic of trying to tell someone you're tired in Spanish (cansado) and accidentally saying you're married (casado). This is one of a series of classic mistakes that you make once and then never again, such as trying to say your embarrassed in French, Spanish or Italian and accidentally saying you're pregnant; or French, Spanish or Italian people trying to say they've got a bunged up nose and instead saying they're constipated.
This sort of mistake is instantly memorable -- a great many people can tell you when and where they made that exact mistake. We learned effectively from the situation. This can lead us to assume that it's a good way to learn -- make mistakes, get corrected.
I can also tell you about why I know the Spanish for oats (avena) and for hazelnuts (avellanas). I tend to eat quite a lot of oats, and I can still picture to this day one small section of the small supermarket down the road from the school I taught in in Donostia where the oats was on one shelf and the nuts were either 2 up or 2 down. It took me several weeks, if not months, to remember which was which. This is the sort of anecdote that superficially supports the idea that learning is most effective when it is immediately personal and relevant, but in reality it doesn't. I remember the process, but it was neither particularly efficient or useful.
I've heard all these claims numerous times, both from teachers and from experienced learners, and they're always backed up with little anecdotes about the time they got given condoms when they asked for jam or similar. However, the reason that most people can list the words they learnt by mnemonic, embarrassing mistake, or specific personal experience is that these are rare occurrences. -- the way we learned the words gains saliency precisely because these were one-off memorable occurrences.
This way, we manage to convince ourselves that a handful of words, possibly as many as a dozen, provide us with a model for how to learn language, when in reality they are vanishingly insignificant compared to the hundreds or thousands of words that we have picked up through more mundane processes during the course of our learning journey. As a result, we end up advising others to pursue inefficient learning techniques.
But it's worse than that, because you can't replicate the accidental embarrassing error experience artificially and you can't artificially engineer the sort of situation that leads to truly personalised memorable experienced. As for word mnemonics, the reason that a lot of advice on mnemonics starts with common cliched examples shows that there really is a very limited set of circumstances where good mnemonics exist. This means that the advice is not simply inefficient, it's actually pretty difficult to put into practice, and there is nothing more guaranteed to mess up learners' heads than to give them advice that they literally can't follow.
