Ontem, fomos passear a cadelinha e estávamos a conversar - Yesterday we took our little dog for a walk and were chatting. My son was telling me how they needed to use the basketball to play football because the ‘real’ football was so bouncy it kept bouncing out of the playground. And I thought, ‘I don’t know the word for bouncy…’ So I asked him ‘Como se diz bouncy em português'?’ And he told me: ‘saltltona’.
Since then I’ve remembered it :) What a fantastic word! A combination of saltar - to jump, and -ona, an ending to express the idea of bigness, with ‘it’ in the middle to give it that ‘bounce’ and enable you to say it.
There are two things to think about here:
how come that word ‘stuck’ immediately ?
why didn’t I already know that word?
It stuck because I liked it, it sounded great, I could immediately connect it to other words in a meaningful way. And I didn’t know it because I have learnt Portuguese as an adult, and so haven’t had any need to use the word saltitona before :)
So, there’s a couple of great take-aways:
We remember words that we like, can relate to other words to and can give a context to. So when learning words, try to find meaningful connections and if you like the word, the feel of saying it, even better!
Don’t give yourself a hard time for not knowing words… Even in your native language you are always learning new words. In new and unusual situations, you will come across many words you don’t know. That’s fine, try to pick up a new one or two, be curious, don’t stress :)