Donkey Bridges

Now, do you use ‘donkey bridges’ for English words you just cannot remember? Of course, the official translation of ‘Eselsbrücke’ is ‘mnemonic’, a word I’ve just had to look up twice to get the right spelling, so definitely a word you can forget 😊. My inofficial translation is much nicer don’t you think?

What is your favourite? I often talk about the ‘Alice’ tense (I have been doing …) from the Smokie song (… for 24 years I’ve been living next to Alice), a tip I got from a former student Irmina many years ago. It’s great to just be able to say ‘Alice’ and my students know exactly what they should have said!

I like Christoph’s way to remember the difference between angry and afraid – he just thinks about the game ‘Angry Birds’ – good one!

And his partner Ilona remembers the difference between expensive and afraid by thinking that expensive is a longer and more exclusive word … also nice.

Do you have any good ones?

My favourite German one is thinking about dozy (tired) lecturers at college for ‘Dozent’.

There actually is a donkey bridge in England, a peaceful bridge in the woods built in 1709 to carry packhorses, so we can think of the word in a nice way to help us to communicate in a peaceful way in English! I especially like this peaceful photo of a donkey carrying other animals …