levels in the language

By grouping the keywords into language levels you become more aware of what type of words you should concentrate on.

We can construct a ˜language staircase , where we start from details in the language and step up to more general and overlapping words. It is also a matter of stepping up from a concrete level of detail to an abstract level. Let s have a look at an example:

At the bottom of this generalized staircase you will find all the details in a text, in this case symbolized by the name of a dog. When it comes to talking about all the Tobys, Fidos, Spots and whatever the dogs are called, it is more practical to speak about them as ˜dogs . The next step puts the dogs into the same category as a group of other animals and the highest step on this staircase includes all animals of the category ˜mammals . On this step the dog is no longer visible, it has become a detail in a much larger context.

When you are making learning maps it is necessary to keep this classification in mind. The foremost task for keywords is to act as ˜keys , just as the word suggests. They should unlock whole contexts, even years after you make your notes. They should give you the right associations directly “ if you have chosen the right keywords!

Imagine a field of flower buds. With your video camera you take pictures of the buds “ one picture every ten minutes until they open up into flowers. When you show the film the process will be much quicker than in reality. The image of these flower buds blooming may symbolize how the keywords work in your brain. A word that ˜turns into a flower is a word that will hold many associations. Some of these words will hold the content of a whole text, while others reveal smaller parts of the text.

Conversely, in the same way as the flower draws all the petals back to a bud again, a word may draw back its associations into its ˜bud and keep them locked up in the brain until you need them again. If it is a good keyword it will show all its ˜petals when it appears. New facts are hooked to the existing associations on various levels in the pattern. If they stay and could be retrieved we call it learning.

When you practise picking out keywords, you will probably find that you tend to take down too many words, ˜just in case . Try hard to reduce the number of keywords. It is a lot better to concentrate on finding keywords that function as flower buds.

This does not mean you should pick words mainly from the upper steps of the staircase where you find the abstract or general words. It might equally be concrete details that give you the best associations; sometimes it is an example or a story. In a learning map you use every level of language and also non-verbal information, such as pictures, colours, symbols, learning, etc.