Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

How Can You Come Up with These Associations?

---

When I suggest coming up with such keyword associations, a retort I
immediately hear from people is that they take far too much time and are
much too complicated. It slows you down to go through the whole story
every time you need to recall a word, but eventually you don’t have to go
through the whole story.
When I first tried this approach, I found myself creating an association
for a new word more slowly than I would have liked. After a week or so of
doing this consistently, my mind and imagination expanded to come up with
good images quickly.
At first, my examples were boring and far from memorable. Or, if they
were good, it took me an entire minute or more to come up with it, which is
a lot of time when you are dealing with a long list of words to memorize. In
a very short time, though, my childlike imagination started to reawaken and
I came up with more interesting images and examples, played with the
process more, and expanded on the characters, colors, situations, and
ridiculousness of my images. As such, they became more memorable and
formed more quickly.
It’s true that, at first, it takes a minute or two to come up with a story for
a new word, and when you multiply this by the many thousands of new
words you may want to learn, it can seem terribly inefficient. But after
doing this for a few days or a week, you get much better at it and can come
up with a fantastic association in just a couple of seconds.
What about thinking through this silly story every time you want to
recall a word? I’ve actually found that this approach acts more like glue,
attaching the word to my memory, and it just becomes a natural part of my
memory without me having to reapply the glue. Because of this, I generally
only need to recall a story three or four times before I just know the word.
Now when I hear gare in French, I no longer need to go through the
Garfield story. I just know this word means “train station.” It’s as much a