අත ගහනවා

In short

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  අත ගහනවා

  ata gahanavā

  to get to work

Why it looks that way

Literally 'to take the hand', from the familiar hand. It means 'to set about the business', not 'to take in hand'. The same strike verb the course knows loses its sense in the pair

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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  එයා ඕන වැඩකට අත ගහනවා

  eyā ōna væḍakaṭa ata gahanavā

  He gets to work on any job

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

• කල් ඇදෙනවා — to drag onread “kal ædenavā”
• මුල ඉඳන් — from scratchread “mula indan”
• අත් අරිනවා — to let it goread “at arinavā”
• අන්තිම වෙනකොට — toward the endread “antima venakoṭa”
• All Sinhala wordsIndex by topic