Learn Spanish with Images, Part II

First up is mentira. This is the word for a lie, as in an untruth, although here in South America it is also used to admit to a little joke, sort of like ‘only kidding’. Anyway, I could never remember this word and alternated between ‘mintero’, ‘mentora’ and several other variations. One day on a long bus journey I had a sudden and unexpected thought; it sounds like ‘mint era’ in English. So now I could picture the Mint Age, which in my addled mind involves people living in igloos made out of Fox’s glacier mints. To complete the image I had a well known politician (can you guess who?) pop his or her head out of one of the igloos spouting untruths. It sounds utterly ludicrous but since that day I have never once got the word wrong.

Buoyed by my success I leapt on another troublesome word – tenedor. This means fork and so I imagined ten people at the door of the castle of Frankenstein, all carrying pitchforks. Amazingly it worked and thanks to my new, enhanced vocabulary I no longer had to eat every meal using a spoon.
These examples probably won’t work for you, as I think the secret is to come up with something that sticks in your own mind for some reason. There is obviously also a limit to the number of these things you can store in your head at any one time. If you decide to learn Spanish it is worth trying for those difficult words though.