Memorising of words..? 18 12 5 (16) 25 2 1

Unlike my wife A-E, my sons S and P, I was the only odd man out who was unable like them to remember things like words: you could say I am wired differently which also makes for me being something of an oddball, but there you go, we can’t all be clever in that department, now can we? But whilst conversant in a multitude of different languages, including English, Finnish, Swedish, German, French, Russian and Japanese, none of them write blogs though two of them have been, or are, engaged in teaching languages, leaving P out of it to follow, exceptionally, his father into the sciences. As a group however they are not the most communicative of people despite their knowledge of such things…

But recently with advancing years and against the background of a lifetime promptly forgetting someone’s name the moment I first heard it, I have been making an effort recently to remember new names and new words in general and for a time at least I seem to be effective: by using the well-known trick of tying the memory of something into something else…

Take for example Avocado. Now avocados were not something I was ever introduced to as a child growing up in war-torn Britain, and I think it must have been our son S who, upon graduation from his University honours degree course in English with Russian, proceeded to continue learning new languages when he went to Japan for a year, which ended by his residing there 5 years and becoming fluent in its language and gaining a teacher’s certificate which entitled him to teach Japanese to foreigners. In the process of all these activities I believe he introduced the family, or at least his Da, as he calls me, to the delicacies of eating avocado. Only for many years I have spoken of the memory test I subject myself from time to time of whether I can still pass my “avocado test,” and remember the word some time, as in maybe it will come to me again after a few hours..?

Another word I have difficulties with is “Rukiinen” the Finnish word for “of rye” as in “rye bread” my favourite brand of black bread but just recently I have been working on my ability of catching this word whenever the mood takes me, and so far successfully. Then there is this guy “Veikko” who recently joined our Walking Club, and I have had great difficulties remembering his name, though once again increasingly I have begun to be able to recall it, but only very recently.

When our S and his wife Sa together with their eldest son Ak visited us a couple of weekends ago, and when during a dinner party we put on in their honour, I misbehaved in a minor way by using some English words not deemed to be the politest in the dictionary, in order to graphically pepper what it was I was saying at the time, in a manner I would have avoided at all costs in deference to my son's very ladylike lady his wife, when he first introduced her to our family, which had the effect of prompting my daughter-in-law to treat me to a short discourse on the use of the same word translated into Japanese. When later I had to text Ak to make sure I was not hearing things, which I will leave the reader to guess at, for the word “manko” (for a male student of Finnish, which is what I have been since I was 20, with the knowledge that adding “ko” to a verb for example, makes the whole construction an interrogative, in this example a translation into English would therefore be “Do you mean a man?”, not so difficult a construction to remember easily then!   

Laying down new memories then is not something that I have found so easy during my adult life, and all the fruits of my childhood like apples, oranges, pears, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries and the like come to mind without any difficulties. Even bananas which didn’t enter my life until probably by early teenage years, and I think this has to be one of the more important reasons for remembering something: the sooner in one’s life the better, so that new words with no connection to my childhood I can expect to have problems with. 

How lucky is the person who has problems with such trivia, do I hear you ask? And the answer: Quite so! Quite so! Hahaha.