Have rhyme words

Smile!

One day a colleague of mine shared with me a paraphrased joke of this expression.

Chi va piano non è di Milano 🙂

O mangiare questa minestra, o saltare dalla finestra - Either eat the soup or jump out the window. In Russian it is “choose the lesser of two evils”

Rosso di sera bel tempo si spera - Evening fiery red sunset heralds good weather for the next day

Invented rhymes

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You can invent such rhymes yourself. Moreover, it's great to use not only Italian words, but also Russian consonant with them. Here are some examples of rhymes that my students have compiled.

Il gatto con gli stivali - at festival . At one time, my student Svetlana memorized the word stivali (boots) in such an interesting way.

Lecce è further . That is far away. My student Julia recently returned from Puglia. She talked about how she went to Matera, Alberobello, Ostuni. But I didn’t get to Lecce. Why? Because it is “far away” 🙂

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You can take for a rhyme not a whole word, but only its fragment. It also sticks very well in memory. Especially if the rhyme is humorous.

Scrivo - I write crookedly. Funny, but memorable.

Denistra a sinistra . Here the man took the name Denis and slightly modified it. And we see the consonance of the syllable "nis" in both words.

By the way, in this case, stable associations often arise , to which the word will be "attached". If a person has forgotten how “left / left / left” will be in Italian, then it is enough for him to remember the name Denis.

Do you use rhymes to memorize words?

© Tatyana Trunova, October 2019

Other articles about how to memorize words

• "Nontiscordardimè" or how to memorize words - the article shows how you can analyze the composition of a word and understand its meaning without using a dictionary
• "In primo luogo": a memory technique from Cicero - an essay describes how the well-known "room technique" can be used to memorize unrelated words

Easy-peasy, super-duper: what are reduplicants and how to spice up your English with them

What do the American horror movie Jeepers Creepers and the Russian comedy Shirley Myrly have in common? The words in both names are repeated twice (though sometimes in a slightly modified form). In linguistics, such words are called reduplicants. Nadezhda Tretyakova, teacher at Skyeng online English school, collected popular rhyming reduplicants - reduplicants, where the second word rhymes with the first.

Of the 368 languages ​​of the world that are listed in the World Atlas of Language Structures, only 55 use reduplication, and English is one of them. We encounter some reduplicants at the very beginning of language learning (for example, bye-bye ), others use onomatopoeia and are intuitive ( tick-tock , ding-dong ). At the same time, others are left without attention, which is a pity: such words make speech much more expressive. Especially rhyming ones.

In this example, the most amusing thing, perhaps, is that in Russian there is an analogue - “super-duper”. The main thing is not to fall for him and not to give out “duper”, speaking in English. At least believe it, at least check it, but it will sound indecent. The correct reduplicant is super-duper : "ABBA's Super Trouper became a super-duper hit in 1980" ("ABBA's Super Trouper became a super-duper hit in 1980").

Unlike the previous reduplicant, okey-dokey we adopted without changes and we say the same: “Okey-dokey!”. This word was loved by the companion of Indiana Jones, nicknamed Shorty: “Okey-Dokey Dr. Jones! Hold on to your potatoes!” ("Yes, Dr. Jones. Hold on tight").

An exclamation of surprise or delight similar to "No kidding!" or "Wow!" (context dependent). In an episode of The Simpsons, Ned Flanders says to his neighbor Homer Simpson: "Jeepers Creepers, pop my peeper!" You can translate it like this: “Damn it, give me a black eye!” ( peepers - Zenki, blinkers). True, the translators decided to be more creative: "Pancakes, pancakes, burst my eyes."

Compiling reduplicants is essentially easy, or easy-peasy . Rhymes suggest themselves somehow and are quickly picked up, and some phrases give rise to others. Thus, the expression easy-peasy has grown to easy peasy lemon squeezy . According to one version, this happened due to the advertising slogan of either dishwashing detergent or washing powder in the 1950s.

In 1960, the song Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini blew up the American hit parade about a shy girl who was very embarrassed by her outfit - a tiny bikini. If you look closely, the word bit (slightly) is noticeable in the first reduplicant, and teeny in the second is a modified tiny (tiny, tiny).

The word "mumbo-jumbo" we mainly use as a collective name for a distant African tribe. English mumbo-jumbo means nonsense, confusion, nonsense. This is often called professional slang, which is difficult for ordinary people to understand: “I’m not a lawyer. So I can't really understand all that legal mumbo-jumbo written in the document" The word is indeed associated with African tribes. According to some sources, this was the name of the masked dancer who participated in ritual dances, according to others - the deity itself.

Another reduplicant and another song from the 60s, which was called that - The Nitty Gritty , that is, "the essence of the matter, important details." "Now let's get right on down to the nitty-gritty"