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the first few times I see it in a word list. A word that was meaningless and looked like gibberish suddenly takes on personality and character. That's what remembering a word is all about. You can throw away the word association crutch once the word has become real to you and begun to sink into your memory. So go ahead and dream up your own “connections” to help you remember. What works is right for you.
    Of course, the more languages you learn the easier this process becomes. First of all, you just get more experienced at making up your own memory devices day after day. Second, the more languages you know, the more words you know that remind you of something else. You get much faster at “spotting handles.”
    Non-Indo-European languages:
    Many of you will be studying languages that are not part of the Indo-European family. These languages will present even greater difficulty since there is no reason whatsoever for words in these languages to have any connection with English. Still, even here you'll find many words borrowed in more recent times from English.
    All is not hopeless however, especially if you are going to be learning more than one language from a given area. In the Middle East, for example, there are also a number of language families. Should you ever become serious about studying more than one language of this region, your job will be relatively easy if your second language belongs to the same family as your first.
    -For example, Hebrew and Arabic are very closely related. If you know one language it's fairly easy to spot word relationships in the other, and the grammar is fairly similar.
    -Moreover, Arab/Islamic culture spread all over the Middle East, North Africa, and much of south and south-east Asia in the Middle Ages. So even though most of the languages in the area are not in the same family at all as Arabic, the regional languages absorbed great quantities of Arabic words.
    Most of these Arabic loan words were adopted to express new Islamic terms relating to cultural, literary, scientific or philosophical concepts in the fields of history, law, literature, religion, and economics. These Arabic terms are generally identical in languages unrelated to Arabic—languages like Turkish, Persian, Urdu (Pakistan), Hindustani, Malaysian, Indonesian, and Swahili (in much of Africa)—wherever Islam spread. So here again, just as Latin is the basis of muchof the educated concepts of Western languages, Arabic plays the same role in the Muslim world.
    Turkish is related to a very large family of Turkic languages that are spoken across a huge geographic belt from Turkey east through northern Iran, Soviet Central Asia and Western China. They may be exotic languages you're not too likely to learn—Uzbek, Kazakh, Turkmen, Azerbaijani, Uighur, etc., but once you learn Turkish you've taken a huge step forward towards learning the virtual lingua franca or common language of an area covering several thousand miles, from the borders of Greece to the borders of Mongolia.
    East Asian languages are even more elusive to the English speaker. Japanese and Chinese words seem to lack the separate and distinctive sounds of English or other Western languages. From some points of view they might be considered harder to learn. Chinese (Thai and Vietnamese, too) uses tones to distinguish among different words. So a word in Mandarin Chinese like “ yan ” could mean either tobacco, color, eye, or test, (or more) depending on the tone (high, rising, falling, low) that the particular word has. That complicates learning vocabulary if you don't happen to have a good ear and memory for tones. The only consolation is that Chinese grammar is very easy.
    Now you have some sense of what experts are talking about when they say that this or that language is related. When the language you are learning is related to one you already know, your task is easier. You can also begin to understand why people who have already learned a number of