Picture yourself spending money in China, Spain or Germany. Focus on the process from entering the supermarket and choosing your items to standing in front of the cashier to pay for your items. The grocery receipt is the main item you want to get to verify that your spending is correctly checked.
I came up with this idea to deal with a new language. I know for a fact that when I look at my grocery receipt, I am looking at the money that I have spent on the items bought. There is no denying that I can immediately notice any discrepancy because numbers do not lie. When I learn the languages this way, it is usually cognitive and intuitive, there is no need to figure out about grammar or structure of my language. Since we need groceries everyday, why not use this method to deal with languages?
Here are some scans of grocery receipts. Notice that one is printed only in English and the other is a mix of Bahasa Indonesia / English. Translate now.
Learn Your Language With Grocery Receipts
You can try this yourself at home. Take a single receipt (any) and tick the ones which you feel most incline to find out what the foreign language maybe and translate them. How the words are stored in the brain vary from person to person, depending on your learning patterns, how often you get to practise to use those terms and your willingness to transform the words from theory into practical life experience. Practise Now
If you have been living overseas, you would know that checking grocery receipts can be a big headache in some countries because of the foreign languages used in the printout. I have to deal with grocery receipts everyday to keep track of our spending. So do you. right? There are a few items on receipts however that you can cognitively relate to your mother tongue, and somehow conclude that whatever you have bought are calculated correctly and that you have paid the correct amount. Let’s name a few:
1. Total
2. Amount
3. Credit Card
4. Brand Names (Int’l ones like Coca Cola, Sprite, Wall’s Magnum, Ultra Milk.)
5. Savings
6. Discounts
7. Sales.
8. Rebates
9. Date
10.Cash
11.Of course the amount attached on the receipt itself
To find out more of how I did learn pick up my 5th language through grocery shopping, read the tips in this post, “Tips on how to learn languages from the enviroment”
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