Reading language books is a sure-fire way to get to grips with the basics of any language. When starting off, no-one is under the impression that they are going to master a foreign language overnight. However what these books do offer are the building blocks that you will keep referring to throughout your holiday or in your early days of beginning to master the language.

Memorising any language is not easy. We all stumble when it comes to remember even the most commonly used words and traditionally, it was only through repetition that we could eventually retain these words in our vocabularies.

However, repetition is not the only way of remembering how to speak a foreign language. The skills and careers website Mindtools offers up three advance language learning techniques, all of which will be explored here.

Using mnemonics

Mnemonics rely on easy-to-remember associations between two words, images, feelings or sounds. For foreign language learners, the most practical application of them may be to link similar sounding words, or create stories using the foreign words, but in English.

By way of example, the English for ‘rug’ or ‘carpet’ is ‘tapis’ in French. So try to picture a ‘tap’ woven into the middle of a household rug, to paint the image in your mind.

Alternatively, consider the English for ‘grumpy’ and compare that to ‘grognon’ (French). Now assume that the ‘grumpy’ man is also ‘groaning’. When loosely combining the two, it is possible to create ‘grognon’.

The pioneer of this linkword technique, Dr. Michael Gruneberg, claims that a basic vocabulary of around 1000 words can be learnt in around 10 hours using this method.

Using visual objects or cues

This method is a visual-based learning technique that can be used by people in familiar surroundings. Towns, parks, roads and buildings are recommended as a starting point.

Pay attention to your surroundings and try to apply the words that you have learnt in your language book with real life examples around your home. So when seeing a hairdressers, say the French, ‘le coiffer’, in your head. Or go as far as to describe the hairdressing shop as ‘small’ in your foreign language (‘petits coiffeurs’).

This kind of repetition is easier to remember because you are associating words with images that you are already familiar with and just slightly re-labelling them.

Seek out the most common words

Author of ‘Using Your Memory’ Tony Buzan, says that there are just 100 words that make up half of all words used in common conversation. Based on this, familiarise yourself with as many of these as possible and you should have the ability to construct connecting sentences loosely, or at least follow what is being said roughly.

According to Buzan, some of the most used words in all conversation are: ‘I, you, please, thank you, when, what, where, which, why,’ and ‘how’.