I had an educational experience yesterday. I was reading a novel set in Turkey, and I observed how difficult the complete unfamiliarity of the names made it for me. Names of people, names of places. It took a long time before I could confidently recognize the names of even the principal characters. It brought home to me the qualifications one needs to append to the general rule: distinctiveness is memorable. We must always remember that distinctiveness is contextual. One Turkish name among a host of Anglo-Saxon names is highly distinctive to me, and easily remembered. A Turkish name in a host of Turkish names is not distinctive to me. And with familiarity, comes a greater ability to be aware of distinctions that were once too subtle for you to notice.

Of course, a conscious and deliberate searching for points of difference helps speed up this process no end!

I came across an interesting link the other day. The page offers mnemonic suggestions for memorising a number of famous passages from Shakespeare.

For those who like flashcards, I also found a site that has a large number of reviews on memorization software (I can't get over how much of this is around - obviously of variable quality, as well as variable price). Although actually, being a simple soul, I think I prefer another variant on this theme - very simple, and free. You know the drill is set up simply to provide you with sufficient practice with your set of words. Adding lists of words is very simple.

I wouldn't of course suggest that you solely rely on this as a means of learning vocabulary, but then I don't advocate sole reliance on flashcards either. But when you get down to it, whatever clever mnemonics you use, at the end of the day, the only thing that cements new words into your head, is repetition. So, a lot of learning strategies are ways of providing that repetition in as interesting a manner as possible. The cost of that is time - interesting strategies invariably are more time-consuming than simple repetition. They can also be "stronger", in that they allow greater depth of processing (which means fewer repetitions wil be needed). Nevertheless, sometimes ... you just want to keep it simple.