Remembering Nonsense Syllables

The Psychology of Forgetting

Hermann Ebbinghaus is a famous 20th century psychologist best known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect in learning.  Modern day flashcard systems known as SRS (spaced-repetition systems) can thank Ebbinghaus for these discoveries.  The underlying spacing algorithms are based on his research findings.  Without SRS flashcard systems I fear I wouldn't have developed such a fondness of the Japanese writing system.

Ebbinghaus conducted a number of experiments where he memorized lists of nonsense syllables.  Nonsense syllables are syllables that have little association with English.  For example the syllable PED would not be considered nonsense because of its association with real words like pedantic and pedal.  Syllables such as DAX are be considered to be nonsense because they have little to no association with real English words.

This research would help Ebbinghaus establish his theory of the forgetting curve.  Those familiar with SRS flashcard systems are already well acquainted with the theory.  Time is relative to forgetting.  The longer we remember something, the longer it takes to forget.  No memory is permanent.  Given a long enough period of time anything is forgettable including your mother tongue.

Organic Association Value

I suggest you read the Wikipedia article on association value instead of reading my poorly regurgitated synopsis.

Association value is a theory in cognitive psychology that supposedly allows us to remember things more easily if we can associate them with something else that we already know.  This is what causes us to learn and acquire foreign language vocabularies at different rates.  The less association value a word has the more abstract it becomes making it more difficult to learn.

Examples of this in language are numerous.  I once read that there are more than 6,000 nouns that are nearly identical in English and Spanish.  In other words the association value is high.  These word-pairs are much more easily acquired when one of the words is already known.  As language families become more distant so do association values.  Japanese for instance borrowed the majority of it's modern lexicon from Chinese along with a good portion of the writing system.  Although the languages are quite different phonetically and morphologically, the distance in writing and vocabulary is much less than in other language families.  The association value is higher across language.

Creating Association Value

It's my belief that if we want to learn a foreign language that is very different from our mother tongue like Japanese that we can speed up the process by creating association value.  Abstractions can be bridged and association value created if we use our creative thinking ability.  Ideas, concepts, and words that are abstract to us can be made less abstract.  The speed of learning increased.

I've published several instances over the past few weeks of how I use mnemonics to create association value.  Here I'll break down the process.

Take the word 産婦人科 (サンフジンカ or san-fu-jin-ka) which means maternity and gynecology department.  If I tried to learn this word last year I would have quit studying Japanese.  The truth now is that the word is quite simple to read and learn.

Here are the Kanji definitions.

産 サン products/childbirth

婦 フ lady

人 ジン person

科 カ department

Given the meanings of individual Kanji the word is simple and logical.  If you know the sounds for each Kanji you have no trouble reading the word.  The problem is that learning the meaning, writing, and phonology for these characters requires a lot of elbow-grease and a different strategy altogether.  The characters have no association value so you have to create it.  Only after you create enough association value is this word easily learned (semantics and phonology for each character).  Thanks to Ebbingaus there's no reason to memorize nonsense.  Break down the language into discrete parts and create your own association value.