I will be on a 5-week trip this summer to Italy. I want to speak the language as well, naturally, and fluently as possible. The steps I've taken so far are listening to Pimsleur Italian I audio tapes (which have a section at the end of each which involes pronunciation of written material) and PhotoReading an Italian-English English-Italian dictionary regularly.

However, once I get to Italy, I expect that there will be some new words that I want to know in order to communicate more effectively, so naturally, I'll look them up in a travel dictionary. Ideally, I'd simply look up a word I need and remember it perfectly from then on :-) However, this is not so realistic really because for some words it takes several repititions/reminders to solidify a new vocabulary word into my useable vocabulary.

I read through parts of a book by Harry Lorayne, called The Memory Book, I believe. However, I've really had limited success applying his technique of using ridiculous mental imagery to associate the meaning of a word with the English sound of a word. a) Coming up with an appropriate image sometimes consumes more of my time than simply reading it over and over again to remember by rote. And b) then, if I do come up with a clever image, sometimes it is too clever, and I remember part of the ridiculous image later, but it doesen't help me to tie the associated vocabulary word into quick, easily accessible useage.

Anyone who is familiar with memory techniques which are appropriate for quickly and effectively learning new words of a foreign language: What would you recommend that I try? Should I try Harry Lorayne's again, but with a different approach? Might it be worth my while to buy a different book of his that approaches the subject from a different angle? Am I hoping for too much to memorize vocabulary so quickly? Some guy wrote in a review to Amazon.com for one of Harry Lorayne's book geared for high school students saying that the techniques work very well for him and that he easily learns 300-400 new words per day. I certainly believe this is possible -- I just want to see clearly how :-)

Thanks!

-CameronJ