How to Memorize Words & Sentences in the Cook Islands Reo with These 7 Insanely Super-Easy Techniques

Have you ever had the following thought?

How am I going to memorize all these new Kuki words?

What about this experience?

Ever tried to memorize a word over and over again, but it just won’t stick?

If you answered yes on both counts, you are not the only one.It’s happened to me heaps of times.

And let me tell you, its frustrating, big time.

You put lots of effort into getting one short sequence of letters into your brain (a word), and for some reason, it just goes in one ear and out the other.

And that’s just one word of many.

Aue tatou e!

Even languages with “small” vocabularies, like our reo Kuki, usually have thousands of words to learn. Initially, that’s a bit of a mish (mission), but not unachievable. There are clever ways to remember words.

Pity the fellas who go to learn English, Russian, or Chinese. umm..no thankyou.

Pain tikae!

When you stop to consider that learning words is one of the most essential parts of learning a language, it pays to leverage cutting-edge memory practices and techniques if you want to speak the language.

It pays to

Work smart, not hard.

There's a saying in the building-construction world: “Measure twice, cut once.”

So as the same here, learning Kuki words.

”Leverage brain, fast gains.”.

Always remember this saying:

"The Limits of Your Words... are the Limits of Your World."

So make it your goal to increase your vocabulary.

Build your vocabulary basket word by word.

In this article, we will share with you 7 effective techniques for memorizing words so that you can use these tools to build a huge vocabulary basket.

Let’s do this, shall we?

Sometimes, a single word can have many meanings.

Consider the word “game,” for example:

If I ask you “Are you game for the party tomorrow night?” I’m asking you if you are up

for it to come to that party.

If I say “Ernest Hemingway often liked to hunt big game in Africa,” I’m talking about how the famous writer liked to hunt large animals, like elephants and rhinos.

That’s one word (game) with two wildly different meanings. And that’s ignoring all of

the other meanings game has, like the phrases video game, game show, fair game, and others.

What can learners of Cook Islands maori do to keep all of these meanings separate?

How is it possible to make sure that when you see or hear the word game, you know exactly which definition is intended?

The answer is context.

If a word has multiple meanings, context—or the words that surround a specific word—can often help us narrow down our options, and identify the correct one.

For example, even though “Are you game?” and “Hemingway hunted big game” both

use “game” as the keyword, it is easy to see that their surrounding contexts are completely different.

In “Are you game?” someone is asking you a question, specifically, if you have the quality of “being game”. Sort of like a dare, “i dare you to come”.

In “Hemingway hunted big game,” the game is the thing that is “hunted” by “Hemingway.” Even if you never heard of a game used in this context before, if you know the verb “to hunt,” you can easily work out that “game” has something to do with animals.

So how can context help you learn vocabulary more efficiently?

Simple!

When you write down a word, never write it down by itself.

Instead, write down a full sentence or phrase in which it appears, along with a definition or translation.

When you learn a new word along with other similar words that often appear alongside it, you create a sort of “word network” in your mind.

Every time you recall one word in the network, it will automatically bring to mind the other words you will need to express the correct meaning.

Heres an example in the reo.

Papaku (shallow)

She waded into the shallow end of the pool.

Kua aere marie atu aia ki te tua papaku i te ngai pai vai.

He is a shallow fella!

E tangata papaku aia.

Learn words in context; network your words to identify meaning.

Many people like to divide language into four separate skills;

1.speaking, 2.listening, 3.reading and 4.writing

.

Very often, two or more of these skills can be practiced at the same time.

Here's an example.

Just imagine your in a conversation. Speaking with a friend.You’re most likely doing

a lot of listening and a lot of speaking. In this way, speaking and listening are skills

that support one another.

Listening is a skill that heavily supports reading, in a way that can be extremely beneficial for language learning.

Take, for example, reo Kuki.

Beginner learners of our language have two major challenges to overcome:

- Learn words and symbols, like macrons (reading)

- Learn to identify all of the new sounds in the spoken language (listening)

It is possible to do both of these things separately, by devoting parts of your learning time to each individual task.

It is much more efficient, however, to do both at once; to listen while you read, and

read while you listen.

If you’re reading a text that comes with audio, for example, play the audio while you

read. See audio books in our App.

If your text doesn’t have audio, try to read the text aloud yourself, or ask a native

speaker to do it for you.

Get as much practise as you can listening and reading together. It is a great way to strengthen the connection between the spoken sounds and the written symbols of the language, so that you can learn from both quickly.

It also adds a layer of context, which, as we saw in the last section, can greatly

increase your understanding of any text or spoken audio.

This method is especially useful for beginners, since most language courses nowadays come with mp3 (audio) or mp4 (video) recordings of the written course material.

Earlier, we mentioned how context can help you identify the correct meaning of a

word, out of several options.

Context is useful for committing new words to memory as well.

Think of all the words you know like flies in a massive spider’s web.

A word like “sun”, for example, is stuck in the web next to other words, like “moon”,

“stars”, “sunshine” and “sunlight.”

When you hear the word “sun”, all of these other words will also come to mind

quickly, because they are all strongly associated with “sun” and the contexts in which it appears.

If you already have a web of strongly associated words in your mind, then it is easier to add more related words to that web, and easily remember them.

When you learn new words, try to look for associations and relationships with ideas and concepts you already know. You may be surprised to find clues and other small details that will help activate your mental “spider’s web” of words, and so result in easier memorization and learning.

(insert image….thematic bk page 2 of the waiter , kitchen, etc) talk me wen do

So far, we’ve mostly discussed tools and concepts that will help you memorize whole words.

Sometimes, however, words can be easiest to remember when you deconstruct them, or break them apart, and look at the meaning of the resulting pieces.

This is especially common with English that allow for words to be combined together into so-called “compound words”.

English compound words are relatively short, with examples including “newspaper” (i.e. “news” + “paper”), “doorbell” (“door” + “bell”) and “spaceship” (“space” + “ship”).

These smaller pieces can be ever further broken down, too. In “akaetaetauaua” the part “etaeta” refers to the word “to stretch” into and “ua ua”, means “stringy, elastic,tendons”. So broken down, the word means “stretch-tendons”. In reo maori, it means “to exercise”.

So, if you’re ever confronted with a word that seems too long or complicated to handle all at once, try breaking it down, and see if the smaller word-pieces aren’t easier to remember.

When you were in school when you were younger, what was your preferred strategy for studying for exams?

Most people, if they studied at all, would try to reread or review the material over and over and over again until they were convinced they had memorized every detail.

This kind of review, called rote memorization is extremely common, and most of us were taught to believe that it was effective.

But if you’re like me, and you actually tried it from time to time, you know that rote memorization doesn’t really work. You’d see the same information over and over, but since you never got anything new from it, you wouldn’t actually process anything.

Repetition does help, but you need to do it in a way that keeps the material fresh and engaging, every time you review. Sort of like a brain-jolter.

One way to do this is referred to as “Brain-Jolt Repetition”. Again, it’s a technique that can greatly help improve your vocabulary learning.

It goes like this:

I recommend trying the brain-jolt even with older materials that you’ve already gone through. With a little creativity, you’d be surprised how easy it is to breathe new life and usefulness into an old resource.

I’ve spent nearly this entire article sharing methods and techniques for organically memorizing new vocabulary words.

However, I’ve failed to mention one of the biggest drawbacks of memorization—even with the best techniques, it’s not always guaranteed to work!

You know how memory is. One day, you can recite whole scenes from your favorite movie at a moment’s notice, the next, you can’t even remember where you left your car keys.

Simply put, your memory is not always there for you when you need it.

Not to worry, though! There’s an easy way to keep all of your important vocabulary safe, even during times you can’t remember. All you need to do is take notes!

It may sound like a big-let down, but it works.

To use note-taking as an effective vocabulary memorization tool, you want to buy a notebook that is small enough to carry with you at all times. If you’re the tech-savvy type, you can alternatively use your phone. But the act of writing is best.

Keep your note-taking tool handy, and whenever you discover a new, unknown word in your language, write it down, along with the date and context, when and where the word was found.

When you’re home, and in front of your language resources, you can then look up the words you didn’t know, and maybe even look online for sentences or phrases to give you deeper meaning and context.

Take lots of vocabulary notes, and go over them regularly, and you will have an indispensable tool for learning words, and never forgetting them.

When you’re just starting to learn a new language, the vast amount of unknown words before you can seem incredibly daunting. It doesn't have to be.

Even when you have a decent amount of words under your belt, you still have to figure out how to connect them, and make them work together to say the things that you want to say.

The seven tools that I’ve shared with you in this article will help simplify and speed up the memorization process.

One by one, these tools will help you take the huge mass of words in reo kuki and divide it up into smaller and smaller pieces, which will be much easier for you to digest.

As you go, you will also learn the value of context, and how connecting words to each other will make your memory for vocabulary stronger and more reliable.

But these techniques will not work for you if you just use them once and forget them. You need to use them every day, and make their use a habit.

So today, pick one of these seven tools. Use it the next time you try to learn new words. And then stick to using it for at least the next week.

Once that tool is a habit, pick up another, and another, and do the same thing.

If you think you’re up to the challenge, try to implement all seven tools in seven weeks. If you can do that, let me know in the comments how you got on.

And lastly, if you’re looking to kill it with vocabulary memorization, you should check out Brainscape.com.

Brainscape is a spaced-repetiton-system (srs) that assists you with recalling words. It helps you pull-up words in your memory bank and drills in on those you dont catch-on well enough, and drops those which you have sorted fairly well.

Its the digital equivalent of flashcards…but on steroids.

I will go over how spaced-repetition software helps your vocab building in another post.

But more specifically, how you can ramp up the Kuki words you can recall…by spending 5 minutes a day, here and there, tops.

Tukia

Tairi