Repetition and language learning.
Today I wanna talk about a strategy for repetition, which is so
important in learning anything and in particular learning languages.
You may have heard the famous aphorism call it the neurons That
Fire Together, wire Together.
This was first enunciated by Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist in 1949, and the
idea is that if neurons are close enough to each other to trigger a reaction,
in other words, firing together, they will eventually create a synapse, a connection,
which is how learning takes place.
This is neuroplasticity, this is how memories are created.
So that's how learning takes place.
But how do we create these firing together of neurons?
A lot of it has to do with repetition.
It's the repeated exposure to similar concepts or phenomena that enable us to
learn things, but it is not, in my view, simply a matter of frequent exposure to
very specific items, for example, words.
The same word over and over and over again, that has been
shown to be not very effective.
In other words, we need to decide what we wanna repeat, when we wanna
repeat it, and how we repeat it.
So the strategy of repetition deals with those three elements.
Now, underlying all of this as usual, is the idea that success in language
learning depends on our motivation, the time you put in and the ability to notice.
The ability to notice, we'll develop naturally if we
have an effective strategy.
But how do we maximize or optimize our MTN with a strategy of repetition?
So the first question is, what do we wanna repeat?
Do we just repeat the words that we are trying to learn over and over again?
Or do we repeat phrases or do we repeat sentences?
Or do we repeat lessons?
Do we repeat by listening repeatedly, or do we repeat by reading?
Repeatedly, or do we repeat as I often do at LingQ by reviewing
my words in sentence mode?
All of these things are effective ways of repeating, but my
underlying strategy is that I don't focus on the words necessarily.
Rather I focus on repeated exposure to content.
So this could be, first of all, listening, and then if I listen
and there's many things I didn't understand, then I will read it.
So that's, again, repeating the same content in two different
ways of accessing that content.
I will often listen more than once, and I'll explain that strategy when
we get into the when and the how.
But the what in my mind is I want to repeat the content,
listening and reading primarily.
And in doing that, I'm quite convinced that the words and the phrases
which are contained in that content
will come to me because there's quite a bit of research that demonstrates
that we need a rich context for what we're trying to learn, for
the words we're trying to learn.
Even with little children, when they listen to a story, if that story is
repeated, they'll pick up more the second time and more the third time,
to a certain extent.
However, as those children become more, uh, advanced, then they need a
greater variety and simply repeating the story is not so effective.
But what does happen is because the first time they're trying to understand
the story, they're less focused on the individual new words in the story.
Whereas the second time, as they understand more of the story,
they will then focus in on some of the new structures or new
words that are in that story.
So that is similar to what I do with my mini stories, where starting into a new
language, I kind of know the mini story.
All the words are new to me,
but I will listen to that story many times and I will read that story many times.
I will save words and phrases in order to be able to understand the
story better, and I will keep on doing that fairly frequently at
the early stages in my learning.
But the target for me of my repetition is the overall context, the story, which is
creating a variety of rich associations.
For example, if we think of having a, a memory of a dog.
If we think of the dog as a, an aggressive animal, that's one association.
If we think of the dog as a friendly, cuddly, wooly animal, in other
words, there can be a variety of associations with dog, and similarly
with words, if we have a variety of associations with the particular word
we're trying to learn, then we will have different pathways that will
reinforce our understanding of the word.
So what I want to repeat is the context in which the word is found.
In other words, the whole story.
So then the next question is, well, when do we repeat?
So with regard to the story, I have a different strategy depending on where I
am in my sort of progress in the language.
So at an early stage, I will repeat the mini stories very often, not at
one sitting, as I've said before.
I will do story one and then two, and then three, even though I don't
understand story one very well.
And then I go back to story one and I'll continue doing that until I have
covered all of the 60 mini stories.
But it'll be a repetition that sort of reiterating going back to the beginning.
And I'll see, according to our statistics, eventually,
that I've listened to the story 30 times, read it 10 times.
So all of that is repeated exposure to the actual story.
And within that, of course, I'll be exposed to the words and phrases Now,
insofar as repeating the words and phrases, I will review those words and
phrases, uh, immediately upon completing a page in the lesson so that I will go
through some form of retrieval, exercise flashcards, typically matching pairs,
which is easier to do very, very close to
when I listen to or read the story, I find that that first exposure
is the one that helps the most.
The further away I get from being engaged with the content, the less effective
that repetition or retrieval Exercise is.
So the when it's early on I do a lot of repetitive listening and reading and
as I progress in the language, I listen less often and when I get quite good
in the language, maybe getting close to B2, I never listen more than once.
And people have often asked me, do you listen many times to stories
once you understand them fairly well?
And the answer is no.
I listen often at the beginning when I don't understand much.
I'm motivated to listen often, but as I get better in the language and
I understand more and I've already understood what's in the story, I'm
not motivated to listen to it again.
So the motivation dictates for me how often I listen.
In other words, the frequency of repetition and it dictates there
for how much time I'm gonna spend.
Now the next issue is how should you repeat?
There's kind of two approaches in my view.
One is that, uh, you follow your interests.
So it's kind of a random repetition, random repetition of content, random
repetition of words, and the other is to have your repetition dictated
by some form of space, repetition system where there is an algorithm,
which dictates how often or how frequently you're gonna see these items.
As I've said before, I'm not a fan of space repetition.
I like the idea that I can choose what I wanna repeat, when I wanna
repeat, when I wanna review.
I prefer seeing words and phrases in context rather than reviewing
them in a list far removed from, you know, the story, but other people
have had different experiences.
So by all means, the main thing is to maintain a high level of
motivation and put in the time.
So I guess one of the problems with my approach is that as we progress
in the language, whereas at the beginning, high frequency words
appear quite often and so we're, you know, we have a good chance of a
getting enough exposure for those memories to stick with us.
As we progress in the language, we are dealing with overwhelming number of
low frequency words, and we know that frequency declines very, very quickly.
So the argument in favor of spaced repetition systems is that you can grab
all those low frequency vocabulary items and review them in a deck of flashcards
or whatever it might be, or you can use mnemonics or some other system to
deliberately learn, deliberately memorize.
I don't do that.
I'm not saying that that's a bad thing to do.
I don't do that.
I'm quite convinced that over time the words will repeat
according to some random pattern.
To some extent, the, uh, content that I'm dealing with is going
to limit the vocabulary that will appear, and I am motivated by the
statistics that we have at LingQ, which drives me to save more words,
drives me to move more words to learn.
These are kind of like the mechanical rabbit in the dog
races that dogs go chasing after.
And I chase after my statistics at LingQ, my coins, and that kind of keeps me going
during that difficult period when we are sort of past the early struggle and
still we think that we'll never, ever,
you know, learn all the vocabulary we need to learn in order to do
what we want to do in the language.
But I'm motivated, as I say, my driver is my motivation, and so I try to access
more and more interesting content.
I struggle with the difficulty, but gradually I understand more
and more that's been my experience.
And if I understand more, I will eventually be able to speak more.
So my approach to frequency, especially as we progress in the language, is that
there is some kind of random pattern which governs how frequently words show up.
My interest in subject matter will determine whether I listen or read more
than once to a particular content item.
And as I've said, as I progress in the language, I will listen less frequently,
but nevertheless, words and structures will reappear with a certain frequency.
My own preference is to have more of a top down approach to language learning, which
means dealing with the larger context of the language and in so doing the bits
and pieces, the words, the phrases, the structures will gradually become clearer
to me as I progress in the language.
So that my strategy just to summarize, is even though I want to learn words, and
I think the word count is important in defining our potential in the language.
I don't deliberately repeat the words.
I don't deliberately study lists of words or phrases.
I'm confident that if I have a strategy which involves an appropriate level
of repetition, of stories, of context, that there will be enough repetition
of words and phrases that I will get used to these and eventually not only
understand them, but be able to use them.
I'm not trying to be dogmatic, people will do what they enjoy doing.
For me, it's very important to maintain my motivation so that I put in the time.
And, uh, if I have enough variety of context, uh, that I am dealing
with different pathways to these words, not forcing or deliberately
trying to memorize things, then I will eventually achieve my goal.
I will notice more and more.
And as I notice more and more, then I will be able to retrieve more and more.
And if I can retrieve more and more, then I'll be able to speak
better and better as I go along.
So that's kind of my take on a strategy of repetition.
I would be interested in your views.
Thank you for listening.
Bye.
