By the way, I didn't write it in the last post, but we rode 67 km the previous day. Not a lot, but you have to factor in our extreme dirt jumping. By the way, dirt in Turkish means “four”, spelled like this: “dört”. This, by the way, reminded me of how I learned Turkish. I'll write more about the app in a separate post about the iPhone, and here I'll just tell you about mnemonics.
For those who happen to not know, mnemonics is an effective way to memorize arbitrary information, based on associative thinking. On Wikipedia there are many informative examples, and I'll explain using the Turkish language as an example. I was using mnemonic techniques for the first time, without a scientific approach or knowledge in this area. But it turned out effective — my comrades were surprised at how I memorized so many words and complained that their brains weren't wired linguistically. I truly think that mnemonic techniques work for everyone, just to different degrees. And about the idea that it's very hard for some people to learn a foreign language, I also have my doubts. I mean, it is true of course, but the difficulties are greatly exaggerated.
So anyway, to memorize a word, you have to associate it with something already known. For me it doesn't really matter whether the association is logical or not — you can still remember it, if only because of the absurdity. What does matter is knowing a lot of different things and loving associations — so you have something to link things to.
Below are the mnemonics I came up with.
- Hello - MERHABA (m'er(h)aba)
Mer — sea in French, haba — there's like this funny phrase “uga-uga haba-haba”, I don't know where it's from
- Good morning! - GÜN AYDIN! (günayd'ın)
Memorized without a mnemonic, but aydın sounds like a Georgian saying “adyn”, and gün — this can be linked to the English gun
- My name is – ADIM (adım)
a — is a particle of negation or a preposition, and dym is just smoke
- Please – LÜTFEN (lütfen)
Sounds like Luftwaffe, the name of the Air Force in German.
- no – AYIR (h'ayır)
With hair (Eng.), as we know, metalheads shake at concerts.
- excuse me – AFFEDERSİNİZ (affed'ersiniz)
This was a tough nut to crack — I thought and tried to memorize it for a long time. As a result, I came up with nothing better than the phrase “A Fyodor vniz”. The same thing happened with the following word.
- Thank you - teşekkür-ler (teshekkurler)
The best I came up with was — drag the chicken. You could also do “kurler for the mother-in-law”, where kurler is clearly something unpleasant.
I'll take a break from the linguistic exercises for now, and write more about our journey. In the morning, Sergey and I went to the shower, which we skipped the evening before — him because of the cold, and me out of laziness and not wanting to wait in line. And Shchukin and I think Maris (I'm not sure) went swimming in the Aegean Sea, like truly rugged bicycle tourists, close to nature. When one of the campsite owners saw this, he came running with exclamations: right near the walkways it's full of sea urchins, it's dangerous to swim. Shchukin is a very experienced man, by that time he had already figured it out himself and warned the others. I would have definitely blundered into them if I had gone first. But, fortunately, the water seemed a bit too cold. In general, I'm not really afraid of cold, hunger, and other hardships and torments, but I am afraid of the consequences: once I took a swim drunk in ice-cold water, and afterwards I was sick for a very long and unpleasant time. True, this didn't stop me from once swimming in a fjord in Norway at a really low temperature, but since then I've become less of a risk-taker.
Here I will digress a bit into linguistics again. How to remember numbers? It's simple.
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zero - SIFIR (syf'yr) – sounds like “tsyfir”
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one – BİR (bir) – here, I hope, no explanation is even needed.
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two – İKİ (iki) – we have a store called that
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three – ÜÇ (yuch) – sounds like “neuch”, just with a “yu”. I apparently was saying it wrong — with a “u”. That's just how I remembered it — mnemonics have their flaws too.
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four – DÖRT (dyort) – already discussed, dirt in English
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five - BEŞ (besh) – very easy, sounds like “veshch”
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six - ALTI (alt'y) – like “alternativa”
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seven – YEDİ (yed'i) – like “yeda”
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eight – SEKİZ (sek'iz) – a strange word, like “sekira”
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nine – DOKUZ (dok'uz) – an even stranger word
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ten – ON (on) – a preposition in English
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twenty – YİRMİ (y'irmi) – like “yarmo”. But I only memorized it when I was already in Turkey
If anyone made it through the indigestible chunks about mnemonics, they've probably figured out by now that learning a hundred or two words for a trip is totally realistic. How much they will help you – depends only on you yourself. I'm generally partly an introvert myself and partly don't really like communicating with people – I get shy, afraid, and all that. But in the end – nobody is going to eat you. On the contrary – it's a blast when you try to babble in their native language.
By the way, from this perspective it's interesting about France, if I haven't written about it yet. On the one hand, the French are terrible linguistic nationalists, if you can call it that. They love their native language very much and promote it in every way, and they also don't welcome it at all when English is spoken in their country. But on the other hand, will they like it if you speak broken French?
I'm still betting that you should try – at least they will appreciate your effort and desire. I learned French in school, I like it, and I wouldn't mind brushing up on it. But I don't know how to do something difficult just for the sake of it, so I have to pack up and go to some French-speaking country – Morocco, for example. They say it's great there and relatively safe. We could go to France itself too, but that takes more money, and time too.
