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I speak two languages at a conversational level: French and Spanish. I have a minor in French; and Spanish I learned on my own. As I was learning French, I noticed that I was having trouble remembering which word went with what, which is how I developed my little system.
Today’s blog post will be a little different than most because it’s not a tutorial on how to create art, but rather how to use art for personal growth. Many of you who read this blog are very visual people — like me — who respond to images better than words or oral learning. So, I wanted to take a moment to share how I used illustration to learn a language, and hope that you will benefit from my little trick.
I speak two languages at a conversational level: French and Spanish. I have a minor in French; and Spanish I learned on my own using Duolingo {which I highly recommend if you want to learn a language!}. As I was learning French, I noticed that I was having trouble remembering what words meant, which is how I developed my little system.
Basically, I tried to make language learning interesting, fun, and memorable by utilizing illustrations. I would create a page of quick sketches to tie words to visuals. For example, “mourir” means “to die” in French. I could associate Jack the Pumpkin King from The Nightmare Before Christmas with death, so I drew a little sketch of him.
“Tomber” means “to fall”, so I drew this little skydiver to help me remember:
For the page below, I used a lot of color and little graphics to the side of my words to remember their meanings.
It was easy to learn a language by creating these pages; honestly, 85% of my memorization/learning happened in the creation stage, as I illustrated the sketches and colored them in. I would stare at a page for a couple of minutes a day and found that I had wonderful results when the time came that I needed to recall what I knew {exams, conversations}. The last French class I had was three years ago, and to this day I still remember my illustrations and, I was shocked to find that the subtitles for a recent viewing of La Vie en Rose weren’t necessary for me.
So, for those of you who are currently learning a language or who want to learn a language — there’s no better time than now! Use this illustration trick to do well in a course; or use it as a supplement to a program like Duolingo or Rosetta Stone. Chances are if you are a subscriber to this blog {you artist, you!}, this technique will do the trick!
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