Sung Hoon LINK

As an international student who spent majority of lifetime in non-English speaking country, I have been having more difficulty remembering academic terms than those who grew up in the U.S. After trying many different ways to learn new words, I still have not found the perfect method that fits me. This week’s topic is memory and I learned LINK as a strategy for memorizing. I used LINK for JPS 102 and CFS 388. I chose Japanese because we have vocab quiz and kanji quiz every day and it is a very difficult work for me to memorize all of them without a clue.

On the first column, I put the words I need to memorize. On the second column, I wrote what the words sound like. On the third column, I gave the definitions of the words.

For the Japanese words, since they are originally closer to Korean, I put things in Korean on the second column. For example, I thought of 주인(ju-in) which means ‘owner’ for しゅじん which means ‘husband’ and as well as ‘owner’ just like the Korean word. For おとこ(male), I wrote (o-tto-ba-i) which means motorcycle because most people who ride motorcycle are men. Some people could think that things have to be closely related when you are trying to think of something sounds similar to a word you are attempting to memorize. I do not really think so. Even if you come up with something that means totally different thing, it still can help you remember.

While I was applying this method for those classes and making a sample for this blog, I could actually memorize many words I did not know. I felt that I would have done much better on verbal SAT if I used this method to study vocabs.