Language lessons from my fridge
Remember the fad for fridge poetry? Quite a while ago now. I think you can still get packs of words here and there but you have to hunt for them these days. Well, I picked up 3 or 4 packs around ten years ago in Finland, not so much to create masterpieces in verse, as to help with learning the language.
At first I got a board suitable for moving the words around on, but I quickly found trying to make sentences was a non starter. Although I had a lot of words, they were designed for use in verse which was too restrictive; and the packs I had were limited in theme - I think one was for children, another for romance, and so on. Furthermore, Finnish as a language doesn't easily lend itself to this activity. It's not just the 17 cases, affecting the word endings, but consonant gradation, which can massively change the internal spelling of words.
Here's my fridge today (it may help to click on the image, if it's unclear). As you can see, the front is entirely devoted to things Finnish. Here are a variety of fridge magnets relating to cities I've visited in Finland. Kuopio, Joensuu, Oulu, Helsinki, Turku and Tampere. There are other cities, but perhaps they were lacking that sense of civic vanity which would have demanded fridge magnets be produced to buff up their image amongst tourists. Of whom I am one.
I stuck up a whole load of words from the poetry sets a few years ago. Obviously, one looks at ones fridge several times a day, and I decided this might work, in helping to reinforce and expand my vocabulary. You see, learning Finnish vocabulary is a big challenge if you aren't Finnish (or Estonian, which is a related language). Finnish isn't related to Indo-European languages, which means most European languages, because the only 'major' languages which aren't, are Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Basque. If you're, say, Italian, learning French or Spanish and various others is, well, not easy as such, but you'll pick up a lot of words very quickly. They're all essentially dialects of Latin. But when it comes to Finnish, nothing is familiar except for the loan words. Though you have to be fairly astute because the spelling is usually changed to conform to Finnish's admirably phonetic alphabet. So, pizza becomes pitsa; slightly less obviously, bank becomes pankki; and so on and so forth.
Anyway, my rule is that I can't take a word from the fridge until I know what it is without looking it up, at a glance. I've just taken the picture above to record the new set I've just put up, after taking a long while to slowly clear the previous lot. Honestly, one does almost anything to try and learn vocab, especially when the barrier is that bit higher as in Finnish. It's not just that Finnish is unrelated to English, but that the slimmer nature of the Finnish alphabet results in an awful lot of words beginning with k. And indeed, I found that as the previous pool shrunk to the last thirty words or so, most of them began with k; and also, a fair number with h. As for the rest, it's so haphazard, what sticks and what seems to vanish a microsecond after you look away. But as I suggest, my principal enemies were those ks.
Will it be effective? I think it will be, more than some other tricks I've tried. However, I know very well that when I eventually clear this fridge door's worth of words, I'll be putting back up some words from the previous lot. The next step is reinforcement, and for me that will be encountering these words in reading and listening. If nothing else, it's been nice looking at pictures and emblems of places I've enjoyed visiting...
At first I got a board suitable for moving the words around on, but I quickly found trying to make sentences was a non starter. Although I had a lot of words, they were designed for use in verse which was too restrictive; and the packs I had were limited in theme - I think one was for children, another for romance, and so on. Furthermore, Finnish as a language doesn't easily lend itself to this activity. It's not just the 17 cases, affecting the word endings, but consonant gradation, which can massively change the internal spelling of words.
I stuck up a whole load of words from the poetry sets a few years ago. Obviously, one looks at ones fridge several times a day, and I decided this might work, in helping to reinforce and expand my vocabulary. You see, learning Finnish vocabulary is a big challenge if you aren't Finnish (or Estonian, which is a related language). Finnish isn't related to Indo-European languages, which means most European languages, because the only 'major' languages which aren't, are Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Basque. If you're, say, Italian, learning French or Spanish and various others is, well, not easy as such, but you'll pick up a lot of words very quickly. They're all essentially dialects of Latin. But when it comes to Finnish, nothing is familiar except for the loan words. Though you have to be fairly astute because the spelling is usually changed to conform to Finnish's admirably phonetic alphabet. So, pizza becomes pitsa; slightly less obviously, bank becomes pankki; and so on and so forth.
Anyway, my rule is that I can't take a word from the fridge until I know what it is without looking it up, at a glance. I've just taken the picture above to record the new set I've just put up, after taking a long while to slowly clear the previous lot. Honestly, one does almost anything to try and learn vocab, especially when the barrier is that bit higher as in Finnish. It's not just that Finnish is unrelated to English, but that the slimmer nature of the Finnish alphabet results in an awful lot of words beginning with k. And indeed, I found that as the previous pool shrunk to the last thirty words or so, most of them began with k; and also, a fair number with h. As for the rest, it's so haphazard, what sticks and what seems to vanish a microsecond after you look away. But as I suggest, my principal enemies were those ks.
Will it be effective? I think it will be, more than some other tricks I've tried. However, I know very well that when I eventually clear this fridge door's worth of words, I'll be putting back up some words from the previous lot. The next step is reinforcement, and for me that will be encountering these words in reading and listening. If nothing else, it's been nice looking at pictures and emblems of places I've enjoyed visiting...
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