The significance of the picture to the right is the saying, "An elephant never forgets." And, indeed, remembering is a big part of language learning . To master a language, a working vocabulary of 2000 words is required. Besides vocabulary, there are also phrases, grammatical endings and constructions to remember. This does take time and effort, both to learn and to be able to retrieve what you have learnt. I want to talk about how to make that effort in a way which is effective, not wasting energy on what will not deliver the result you need. So how do you do it? Let me suggest some ways I have used to remember language . 1. One artificial way of remembering words is to come up with some association . My Hebrew teacher taught us to associate the Hebrew derekh (road) with the name of my current church minister, Derek. The word for yellow in Russian, jolty , sounds like the word for a dayglow jacket ( jilet ). I remember the German for elephant trunk, because it ...