You CAN'T Memorize a Language - YouTube

Memorizing versus learning.

Very often people say to me, you know, I can't learn languages

because I have a poor memory.

And many people think that language learning is a matter of memorizing things.

Uh, it's not uncommon to see people studying lists of words.

Um, bookstores have, you know, the thousand words or the 5,000

words, you know, for TOEFL.

Uh, and people study these and they deliberately try to memorize them.

Uh, some people have, um, memorization techniques, uh, some of these

memorization techniques called mnemonics a date back to the ancient Romans.

Um, I don't use any of these.

I don't even use space repetition actually.

Uh, I make no deliberate attempt to memorize anything.

To me, learning is more what the great Brazilian educator Rubem Alves

described as a vagabond experience.

What I've sometimes called grazing, uh, what Robert Bjork

referred to as interleaving.

It's kind of exploring different things, seeing something over here,

which we then forget and see again somewhere else, and slowly we learn.

Uh, it is important to have a positive attitude.

It is important to spend the time, but it's also important to

be aware of how the brain works.

Again, I often quote Manfred Spitzer, he says, the brain

cannot do otherwise than learn.

The brain learns slowly and the brain requires repetition and novelty.

So with the repetition, it's not a matter of trying to repeat something to

yourself over and over again, or reading the same list over and over again, or

testing yourself with flashcards, it's more a matter of noticing things that

cause certain neurons to fire together.

So if I read a text in Persian and then I listen to the same text, the audio of

it, I will remember having read some of those words, especially if I'm all already

somewhat familiar with those words.

And then I hear them and then I notice them and, and then I might read it again.

And all of this is causing these neurons, at least is the way I see it,

to fire together and gradually those connections are getting stronger.

And because the brain requires both repetition and novelty, if you can

do this, you know, repeating in contexts that are of interest to

you, that contain new information...

like I listened to the news in Persian, uh, that's gonna help you remember it.

Uh, or conversely, because the repetition is so important.

Uh, you know, in fact, I see this whole repetition thing as a matter

of, of hooks, of connections.

I think there's a, an expression in this Sufi Islamic, uh, philosophy that

says you can only learn things that you already know, so you have to have seen

it once, and then you discover it again, or you hear it, and then you read it.

And all of this is helping to reinforce these neural connections.

To enable you to learn words, not through memorization, but through this

exploring vagabond type of learning.

The same is true if with grammar.

If you have no experience with the language and you read a grammar

explanation, it makes no impact on you.

If you have had a lot of exposure to the language and then you read an explanation

of a structure, it's possible that that might help you notice that structure.

Once you've noticed that structure in different situations, read it and

heard it, and been aware of it and and so forth, then because you now sort of

kind of know it, you can now learn it.

And that sort of transformation from something that you have

subconsciously sort of acquired to where it becomes something that you

can consciously use, that is a gradual process and not one that, in my

opinion, we can deliberately control.

So I think every effort to deliberately memorize something or deliberately

learn something is not very efficient.

I don't say that it's useless because it is a form of exposure, but uh, there's all

kinds of research that shows that if we read the same material over and over again

with the intention of sort of memorizing it, we are in fact learning less and less,

and we are better off to provide that novelty, that change to the brain so that

the brain can go off and look at something else and then come back and rediscover,

relearn something that's gonna be a more efficient way of acquiring words.

And as I've said many times, language learning is largely

a process of acquiring words.

So the, the language learning um, the model that I like is one where

I'm learning in a vagabond way rather than deliberately memorizing.

And I think part of doing that, and part of, uh, believing in that is, is, is to

accept the fact that that is how we learn.

Don't try to short circuit, speed it up, force yourself, shove it, shove it

down your throat, it isn't gonna work.

Believe that your brain is always learning, and if you give it enough

exposure in different situations, uh, some easy content, some difficult

content, sometimes listening to the words, sometimes reading the words, maybe

doing the odd, you know, matching pairs, which is my favorite form of, of, you

know, flashcard review, but other people have other forms of flashcard review.

It's all part of the exposure to the language and the greater

the variety of the exposure.

The greater the different levels of difficulty, the more we are

learning and the less we are deliberately trying to memorize.

I think in the end we enjoy the process more and we're more successful.

So there's my take on memorization versus learning.

Look forward to your comments.