Mnemonic Memories

Living in Hutul without many English speakers around puts extra pressure on learning Mongolian and learning it quickly. I have a few friends here in town who I spend some time with, the way this plays out is usually them stuffing food down my throat while we teach other a few phrases in our respective languages with the help of a pile of dictionaries and language training books between us. Usually this amusing scene is successful in helping me interact and practicing the few phrases I know but my challenge lately has been in trying to remember the new vocabulary.

I’ve reviewed my notes from these meetings, I’ve tried rewriting words over and over again like some sort of punishment, I’ve even tried Sesame Street style “words of the day” which I would write on my hand and try to use in the day to drill them in my mind but nothing’s been sticking! Finally I decided to go back to what I know.

In my second year of university I enrolled into an elective “The History of Classic Greek Art and Archeology”. As a budding anthropology student I thought it would be interesting to see the physical archeological side of my discipline. I don’t remember why I didn’t drop out of that class but it tore at my soul. We would spend 3 hours looking at slides with 15 centuries worth of pottery, paintings, sculptures and architecture. We had tests every couple of weeks worth just a few percentage points but no matter how hard I would study those pictures the classical Greek names, dates, artists, materials and locations that matched them never connected and I kept bombing one exam after another.

As the semester went on I started freaking out, I’d never done so bad in a class and it only got worse after my final exam schedule came out, I had 5 finals consecutively squashed into 4 days and couldn’t spare the time to figure out the difference between Daedalic and Severe sculpture styles anymore. The night before I had to sit for that impending exam I finally pulled out my text book and stared at one clay pot after another trying to drill all the details into my exhausted mind, I was studying an archeological plan which had a long path going up to a main temple, I began picturing the beautiful goddess Hera walking up that path and imagined that there was water on either side of it, as she walked up that path salmon were jumping out of the water over the path to the other side, 6 on the left jumping over 5 on the right, Hera being a bit freaked out by these weird fishes runs into the temple for sanctuary – and that’s how I remembered that The Sanctuary of Hera dating back to 650BC was excavated in Samos.

I spent the entire night fantasizing ridiculous, often perverted, intricate stories and images. At the end of the three hour exam I looked up and found that I was one of the only people still there – not because I was struggling to remember but because I remembered so many details that I couldn’t stop writing!

Now when I have to remember the word for “question” an image of a menacing cartoon interrogation mark pops into my mind since the word for question асуулт sounds like “assault” and if I can’t remember I can say “мартах” because it rhymes with partaay and if you party too much it’s only natural to forget.