Food and Restaurant Vocabulary

Food and Restaurant 

This audio vocabulary lesson teaches one food and restaurant terminology.  Level one is a foundation level vocabulary list that combines general meat, vegetable, herb & spice, restaurant, cooking and baking terminology.  This will provide a strong foundation vocabulary for most, if not all, standard day-to-day food situations. 

Quick Vocab™ Food and Restaurant will build the foundation for any foreign language situation involving food.  It is a great way for students or professionals to broaden their vocabulary depth and impress those they communicate with.  Creating a resource to help those who study language but are also professionals in a different area is our primary goal.  This category teaches the basic level of food related vocabulary. However, we plan to increase the depth of this category to include more specific and difficult terminology. We will create categories to help with terminology for chefs, bakers, butchers, restaurant owners or managers, and food enthusiasts.  We will be your resource for in depth, focused language study beyond the normal scholastic limitations.

Check out: Food and Restaurant I - Spanish

Animal Vocabulary

Animals 

This vocabulary training category was created for animal enthusiasts and language lovers.  Often enough, when abroad in a foreign country or speaking a foreign language with another, the use of animal vocabulary becomes necessary.  There is not much focus on animals from a scholastic point of view even though animals are a part of daily life.  More often than not, when one wakes up in the morning they greet their household pets, step outside and see squirrels, rabbits, birds and many other animals and insects.  We believe that in order to become fluent in another language you have to have this general vocabulary knowledge.  Although not used often, this knowledge will help you impress other students, your professors or even your foreign language pals.

Quick Vocab™: Animals was also created for those individuals that study or have studied a foreign language but their main profession is focused on animals.  A zoologist or veterinarian who has also studied a foreign language.  This is the first of many installments, we will ever increase the depth of these single categories in each language and give the language professional a way to continually increase their ability to combine their language skills with their career.

Check Out: Animals I - Spanish

Business Vocabulary

Business

This audio vocabulary training exercise is focused on combining language with business professionalism.  In order to expand ones’ ability to communicate with a foreign language in a business setting, one needs to have the proper vocabulary.  This set combines a large variety of business terms together.  The focus would be on office vocabulary (i.e. office administrator, clerk, security system, PTO, etc.), management vocabulary (i.e. to hire, to fire, to review, new hire documentation, to discipline, to coach, to manage, etc.), economics vocabulary (i.e. GDP, economics, stocks, etc.), and much more.  The ‘audio’ part of this vocabulary will help train one to hear the words during a discussion with a foreign client, as well as teach one to pronounce these words properly.  This all happens while you are learning vocabulary words along with gender articles. 

Quick Vocab™ Business I will allow all individuals to intertwine their business lives with their language knowledge.  Especially for those who deal primarily with foreign individuals or those who work in a foreign country.  It will be invaluable to have this office and over-arching business terminology.  You will be able to understand, communicate and function within the workplace.

Check Out: Business I - Spanish

Analysis of Memorization Techniques

Memorization Techniques

First, a bit of a preamble.  Our current knowledge of how the brain actually functions is very limited.  Humans do not know exactly how information is stored in the brain and how it is recalled.  Otherwise, an all-encompassing method of memorization would already exist.  Neuroscience is going to continue to crack this code but for now it is still one of the great mysteries of life.  For this reason many methods work for one person but are impossible for another.  All systems claim to have the best method to memory retention but they are just one of many methods.  They are not the best, they are just the most popular.  Rosetta Stones Patented Method and the Pimsleur Method are some of the most popular and successful.  For this reason we believe in combining many methods of memory retention in order to attempt to target and help a larger majority of language learning individuals.

This will continue describing the various memory tricks or techniques in detail and then discuss how they tie into our vocabulary lessons.

Chunking: This is the belief that ‘chunking’ words into groups because of their relationship to one another helps increase memory retention.  Through multiple studies over the years this has been proven very effective for a large portion of the population.

Example:

Unorganized List:

• Carrots
• Apples
• Peas
• Zucchini
• Bread
• Oranges
• Roll
• Pears

List Using Chunking Technique:

• Carrots
• Peas
• Zucchini

• Apples
• Pears
• Oranges

• Bread
• Roll

Grouping these terms into categories (i.e. vegetables, fruit or baked goods) helps one retain and record the information into long term memory.  Creating a relationship between these individual terms is important because it forces you to create a common context. 

This technique helps with overall memory retention and for this reason we have broken our vocabulary lessons down into categories.  As you follow along with the vocabulary lesson you will be able to continually connect each of the words together and relate them to the over-arching theme of the lesson.  This is our version of chunking the words together. 

Imagery:

The belief that combining mental visualizations of vocabulary words into an over-arching scene in your mind helps with memorization.  Versions of this concept are the memory palace or the pyramid technique.

Example Vocabulary:

• Desk
• Lamp
• Laptop
• Phone
• Office
• Manager

Example Imagery:

*Remember, you do not try to create an inner dialogue.  You create a mental picture that combines, groups and associates these words with one another AND a memorable situation.*

My manager was in his office talking on the phone when he tripped over his desk.  He knocked his laptop onto the floor and head-butted his lamp.

The scene that is created in your mind will help you remember all key words.  The fact that the situation is relatively comical will add to its effectiveness.  It is best to think of unique even obnoxious scenes because it will be all the more memorable.

Our audio vocabulary format is perfect for using this technique.  As the vocabulary lesson progresses and each word is added you can build upon the previous words.  Most of our vocabulary lessons contain 500 words and we know that trying this technique with all 500 at once would be an IMMENSE headache.  Therefore you can always stop at a certain point, rewind and repeat the set of words at your own comfort level.  We also believe that repeating this process and trying to recreate a scene entirely DIFFERENT from the original scene you created in your mind is both challenging and effective.  It increases memory retention because your mind has to work harder to avoid using the same situation twice.  This is keeping your mind active.

Repetition:

This is the age old method of memorization and is still one of the most important tools to memory retention.  In order to commit something to memory you need to see, hear and say the material over and over again.

Speech Example:

You are trying to memorize a speech you wrote for work or class.  You have a printed, written copy in your hand and you first read it a couple of times using internal dialogue.  This is triggering visual memory, you will remember how the words looked actually written on the page.  Then you read it out loud a couple more times while still looking at your hard copy.  This continues to use visual memory but is now stimulating your auditory memory as well.  You hear yourself speaking the words.  You are also including all of the muscles in your body involved with speech, as well as this part of your brain.  You stumble a bit over difficult to pronounce words but work through it and continue.  The last step to memorizing the speech is to remove the hardcopy and practice without a visual guide.  You repeatedly read the speech with your eyes, repeatedly spoke the speech out loud and repeatedly listened to yourself say the speech.

For our lessons, we believe in this process of repetition.  This is why our audio lessons promote follow along practice.  You will hear the words being spoken by native speakers, practice speaking the words out loud and be able to follow along with a visual aid.  We are also firm believers in the fact that simply hearing the word for apple in your native tongue paired with the same word in your target language, pronouncing them side by side and visually pairing them in your mind will increase memory retention.  This attaches the translations together in your mind.

This is our understanding of these memorization techniques and how we utilized them for our lessons.  Please give us your comments and feedback.  Are we missing certain memorization techniques?  What works best for you?

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The Starting Bell

Schwarzwald, Germany

Tearing down the communication barrier and learning to speak.  

What many scholastic approaches to language learning fail to teach us, is how to properly communicate with native speakers.  Too much focus is made on the ability to read and write the language and not enough is made on the ability to actually speak the language.  With our experiences the main lack of communication lies in the inability to understand what is being said and also the inability to recall the proper vocabulary for the situation.  For example; one of our staff (myself) studied abroad in Germany for a year while attending the University of Madison Wisconsin.  For those of you who do not know about the German language there are dialects spoken in various regions of Germany.  These dialects are similar to the US accents but much more complex.  Needless to say all of the Hochdeutsch, 'High German' , I was used to listening to during class lessons was rarely spoken and when it was, it was spoken so fast it was almost impossible to pick out individual words and recall their meaning.  Outside of simply not understand what was being said by the native speaker, I could not formulate an adequate response to add to the conversation even when I did understand what was being said.  I lacked the vocabulary, the gender articles and had trouble simply pronouncing the words.  So when someone asked me what I felt like eating or what I felt like doing, I was often unable to adequately express myself.  

I attempted to solve this problem while abroad and learn additional vocabulary from the dictionary and grammar book.  The problem with this is simply the time it takes to look up the individual words, as well as the end result still can't teach you how to 'listen' for that word or how to 'speak' that word.  The majority of the time is spent looking up the words, writing them down and creating note cards or vocabulary sheets.  You memorize how the word sounds within your mind and you memorize how the word looks but you can't memorize how the word sounds or how the word is pronounced.

After my completion of a German degree at the University of Madison Wisconsin, myself and other language graduates decided that a product needed to be created to help language learners with these skills.