ඒක වුණේ නැත්නම්

In short

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  ඒක වුණේ නැත්නම්

  ēka vuṇē nætnam

  had that not happened

Why it looks that way

The familiar conditional tail, 'if not'. Sinhala has no subjunctive: 'had it not happened' and 'if it hadn't happened' are one turn

A word with a story stays in memory longer than one learned as a “spelling — translation” pair: memory holds on to meaning, not to a string.

In a live sentence

A single word almost never appears alone in conversation. A sentence shows where it fits and what stands next to it.

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  ඒක වුණේ නැත්නම් අපි තාම එහේ

  ēka vuṇē nætnam api tāma ehē

  Had that not happened, we'd still be there

How not to forget this word

Reading a word and remembering it are different jobs. A day later, little survives of a single reading — and that is not bad memory, that is how memory works.

• This has been tested on foreign words too. The difference shows up most when you test yourself a few days later rather than straight away.checked many times
  Kim & Webb, 2022, Language Learning 72(2) · 48 experiments, 3,411 participants, 98 comparisons.
• Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many times
  Adesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
• An answer you worked out yourself sticks better than one handed to you.checked many times
  Bertsch et al., 2007, Memory & Cognition 35(2) · 86 studies, 445 comparisons, d = 0.40.

Next

• එහෙම වුණා තමයි — that's how it turned outread “ehema vuṇā tamayi”
• කොහෙද කියලා ඇහුවා — she asked me whereread “kohēda kiyalā æhuvā”
• කරන්න කියලා ඉල්ලුවා — he asked me toread “karanna kiyalā illuvā”
• කියලා පැහැදිලි කළා — he explained thatread “kiyalā pæhædili kaḷā”
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