I don’t speak Spanish, but on a recent trip to Mexico my wife and I tried to learn some basic words and phrases to get around.  When helpful shop owners would approach us I wanted to be able to let them know that we were just browsing.  Google translate provided “solo estamos mirando,” as the translation for “we’re only looking.”  I’ve always disliked (and not been very good at) brute force repetition as a memorizing technique, so I applied a visual association method.  I imagined the actor John Stamos free soloing El Capitan (a la Alex Honnold) when a policeman stops him to read him his Miranda rights.  Solo estamos mirando!  (If you are a basically non-Spanish speaker like me, I recently got a tip from a native Spanish speaker on the pronunciation of mirando, which is to emphasize the “mir” part with a distinctive “ee” sound: MEE-ran-doe.  The way I was pronouncing it before he couldn’t even tell what the word was!)

[Photo credit: Photo credit: iDominick on Visual Hunt]