vjmp books – Page 4

Learn Maori Vocabulary With Mnemonics

Leading up to the Southern Summer Solstice of 2019, VJM Publishing will be co-operating with Jeff Ngatai to put together a book about learning the vocabulary of Te Reo Maori by using mnemonics.

A follow up to our 2012 publication Learn Spanish Vocabulary With Mnemonics, this book will essentially seek to achieve the same goal: to help native speakers of English learn another language as efficiently as possible.

A mnemonic is a way of arranging information so that, when you learn it, it is much easier to remember. An example of a mnemonic is the fictional boy’s name ROY G. BIV – not a real name but if you can remember it you can remember red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet: the colours of the rainbow.

Note! A mnemonic is a tool for learning how to remember words, not a tool for learning how to pronounce words! This book will teach you how to remember the Maori translations for a moderately large number of English words, which will make it much easier and faster for you to learn the necessary vocabulary to speak fluent Te Reo. However, if you want to learn how to pronounce these words you have to listen to a native speaker and imitate them! This book can only be used in conjunction with e.g. YouTube videos that feature native speakers speaking the language. They will teach you how to pronounce the words – this book will tell you how to remember which of the most important thousand or so words translate from English to Maori and vice-versa.

Mnemonics were used by ancient Greek and Roman statesmen to memorise the 20 or 30-minute speeches that they were forced to give in order to prove their mental competence to govern.

Used skillfully, they are capable of rapidly increasing the speed at which a student can learn a set body of information as well as the length of time that the body of information can be remembered before it starts to degrade.

A common way to use a mnemonic to learn a piece of foreign language vocabulary is to imagine a scene, as realistically as possible, replete with sights and smells and sounds.

There must be something about the scene that links the sound of the word that you are trying to learn with the word in English, so that the two of them become associated in your memory (associative learning is the basis of mnemonics).

If you wanted to learn that the Swedish word for ‘table’ is ‘bord’ you can imagine a man sitting at a table with his head in one hand, looking bored. Once you associate the sight of the table with the word ‘bored’ you have also associated table with the similar-sounding ‘bord’.

An example of a mnemonic to learn Maori language vocabulary might be as follows.

Let’s say you want to learn that the word for ‘man’ is ‘tāne’. You might imagine yourself peering into a fog and seeing a fleeting shape. The shape takes the form of a man, and you hear him speak in a man’s voice.

It is definitely a man – and then the fog clears more and you see that the man was Tony Soprano (if you don’t know who Tony Soprano is, imagine that man is anyone else you know named Tony).

If you need to remember the name for ‘man’ at any point, this mnemonic should help your subconscious mind recall the link between the idea of ‘man’ and a sound similar to ‘Tony’ – and so you should remember that the translation is ‘tāne’.

All of the mnemonics in the upcoming book Learn Maori Vocabulary With Mnemonics are of this kind: a simple, powerful visual image that makes a phonetic connection between a word in English and its translation in Te Reo Maori.

Starting tomorrow, this website will start to present short lists of English-Maori mnemonics that are excerpts from the upcoming book.

Previous lists of mnemonics for native speakers of English looking to learn Maori vocabulary:

Home Words
Competition Words
Military Words
Physical Dimensions
Sports Words
Natural Cycles
Entertainment Words
Colour Words
Animal Words
Head Words
Travel Words
Nature Words
Food Words
Kitchen Words
Garden Words
Caring and Sharing Words
Government Words
Rugby Positions
Rugby Words
Truth and Lies Words
Buildings Words
Parts of Language Words
Law and Justice Words
Time Words
Protest and Politics Words
Media Words
Recreational Drugs Words
School and Study Words
Spirituality Words
Voting and Elections Words
Banking and Money Words

Understanding New Zealand

The paperback version of the New Zealand Edition of Understanding New Zealand is available from the VJM Publishing TradeMe store for $29.90

The paperback version of the International Edition of Understanding New Zealand is available from Amazon for USD19.99.

The Kindle version of the International Edition of Understanding New Zealand is available from Amazon for AUD11.99.

Dan McGlashan’s Understanding New Zealand has now (07 DEC 17) been released as a paperback 2nd Edition to take into account the results of the 2017 General Election.

This brilliant and unprecedented demographic analysis of the full breadth of the people of Aotearoa has been updated to tell you what groups of people voted for which parties in the 2017 General Election, exactly which demographics supported those parties and how strongly.

It will also tell you about the direction and size of trends in voting patterns from 2014.

Compiling the data from the Electorate Profiles index on the New Zealand Parliament website into a correlation matrix, Understanding New Zealand discusses the various interrelations between age, income, sex, education, occupation, industry, ethnicity, religion, tenure of dwelling, how the North Island compares to the South and even tobacco smoking habits.

Over 11,000 correlations were examined in the writing of this book, allowing McGlashan to bring enlightenment to any Kiwi with an interest in sociology, psychology, anthropology or politics.

Writing With the DSM-V (Writing With Psychology Book 5)

The print version of the International Edition of Writing With the DSM-V is available from Amazon for USD9.99.

The Kindle version of the International Edition of Writing With the DSM-V is available from Amazon for USD4.99.

This book, fifth in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series and released in the Summer of 2018, details how to write engaging characters who have mental illnesses listed in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders.

Mental illness is a popular subject in creative fiction – and it’s easy to get wrong. To get it right, it’s helpful to turn to the experts, such as the authors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V). This book, the 5th in the Writing With Psychology series, uses the DSM-V to help you write more accurate, believable and engaging creative fiction featuring characters with mental disorders.

There are three major reasons why the subject of mental illness and mental disorder is of particular interest to an author of creative fiction.

The first and most obvious reason is to provide a more dramatic portrayal.

Although the subject is often treated lightly, the truth is that mental illness is one that almost all of your readers will have felt some pain from. Mental illness is common enough that anyone who doesn’t have one themselves will know someone who does. Many of your readers will have seen a life destroyed by a severe mental illness. So it’s a subject that easily engenders a strong emotive response.

Mental illness is stressful, chaotic and often destructive, and all of these qualities can contribute greatly to your creative fiction. Alfred Hitchcock once described drama as “life with all the dull bits cut out”. In this book, all incidences of mental good health are cut out. All of the conditions in the DSM-V have the potential to provide the seed for extremely dramatic fiction.

A person’s life can be stopped cold by a mental illness, as surely as from having one’s legs broken. So if a character in your story develops or has one of the mental illnesses in this book, your reader will know that character is in for a hard time. Also, a story that is weak can be livened up by the introduction of a mentally disordered character, who is apt to shake things up.

The second major reason is to provide a more accurate portrayal.

Creative fiction is dependent on the suspension of disbelief. In order to really feel the magic of a story, the reader has to feel like the story being told is plausible enough that they can ignore the fact that they’re only reading about it and not really seeing it happen in front of their eyes. To this end, it has to be realistic.

The reader will not enjoy your story if the characters in it do not behave like real people, because not only will they not believe it but they won’t be able to identify with those characters, and it’s being able to identify with those other characters that is the key to being swept away by the magic of a story. The more real the characters behave, the more the reader can let go and fall into the story world.

If your story features a mentally ill character, this book will help you write them more accurately, so that the reader is more likely to become engaged in your story and thereby enjoy it. Understanding the chapter of this book relating to any mental disorder will help you portray characters with that disorder in a way that the reader will believe, or that the reader will recognise if they are familiar with the condition themselves.

The third major reason is to provide a more compassionate portrayal.

Key to a more compassionate portrayal of mentally ill people is a realistic portrayal of their lives. The majority of mental disorders are believed to have an origin in early childhood trauma or family dysfunction, and not from personal weakness or moral failure. So showing this is the key to getting the reader to empathise.

Showing not only a mentally ill character, but also the environment and circumstances that can conspired to make them mentally ill, is an excellent way of demystifying that condition and people with that condition. After all, some mental illnesses are actually perfectly sane reactions to insane circumstances.

This compassionate portrayal will help the reader like and commiserate with the characters in your story who have mental disorders. It’s easy enough to cast a mentally ill person as a villain, but casting one sympathetically requires that their background is understood.

Using this book, the writer of creative fiction will be able to write excellent characters based around the conditions in the DSM-V. It’s possible to read this whole book cover to cover for ideas, or to simply choose a chapter to base a character around. Just don’t use this book to diagnose yourself or other people!

Chapters:

Learn Spanish Vocabulary With Mnemonics

This book uses mnemonics to teach Spanish vocabulary as quickly and efficiently as possible. Some of the mnemonics are weird, some sexy, some cheerfully obscene, but all are memorable.

The system offered in this book not only presents 3,000 of the most common words and a mnemonic for each, but also organises them into a heirarchical system for maximum ease of encoding.

Where to buy Learn Spanish Vocabulary With Mnemonics:

New Zealand readers can buy a paperback copy of Learn Spanish Vocabulary With Mnemonics from TradeMe HERE.

International readers can buy a paperback copy of Learn Spanish Vocabulary With Mnemonics from Amazon HERE.

New Zealand and International readers can buy a Kindle copy of Learn Spanish Vocabulary With Mnemonics from Amazon HERE.