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With so many memory techniques available, there is no good reason to struggle to retain new vocabulary words when dabbling in a foreign language.  Let’s discuss possible strategies to remember the basic German verb wissen (to know).  For those of you who thrive on simplicity (and if your train of think becomes disrupted anytime you see a slice of pizza….inside joke…..), you might only need a sounds-alike.  Wissen rhymes with these words from the Queen’s English: kissin’, missin’, dissin’, and others.  I don’t know how this will help you retain the definition, but some linguistic scholars only need the most basic of relational material.

For those who need a few more connections than the above paragraph, my I suggest some visual cues to remember the definition.  The English wise can be seen in wissen.  A bit more distant is the word wit.  Both can help secure the definition in one’s mind.

For those who enjoy thinking harder than they should, how about this one?  Wissen sounds like the English visceral.  Visceral refers to trusting one’s intuition as opposed to thinking through something with a detached rationality.  So if you truly know something, and it is rationally supported, you would probably say that you “know” this piece of information…hence, wissen being the opposite of visceral in some strange geeky way.

If you forget the definition of wissen after reading through all of this, you have some issues to deal with.

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