Thursday, September 6, 2007

On repetition

I've mentioned previously that I am not one of those people who can hear a word once or twice and then repeat it. I have to hear things several times, sometimes an absurd number of times, and even then it sometimes doesn't stick. Although in my previous post I sang the praises of learning through conversation, I can also point to any number of examples where someone taught me a new word, I didn't write it down, it wasn't repeated, and so I almost immediately forgot it. However, if I wrote it down and reviewed it, or if the word was repeated some time later, I would remember it easily.

So, let's refine the previous post a little bit. If you learn something in conversation, and you feel some strong emotion at the same time, you have a good chance of remembering it even without repetition. But if you don't feel any heightened emotion, you will need some repetition to reinforce the memory.

This is a well known effect in psychology; there's a great deal of research on memory, short- and long-term, reinforcement, and so on with which I won't bore you. Instead I'll share an old saying, "Repetition is the mother of learning".

When I started learning Spanish, I did some reading on the Internet and found that a lot of people recommended a particular CD course called Pimsleur. They have lessons for various languages, so I got the Spanish one out of my library and started using it, and was immediately struck by its effectiveness; I made a huge amount of progress in what seemed like no time. So, I started thinking about why it was so effective.

Its two distinctive features, as opposed to other audio courses, are these:

1. It trains you using active recall rather than passive recall
2. Words, phrases, and structures are repeated using graduated intervals

"Active recall" means that they prompt you to say something, and then you say it. The prompt might be in English, or in the language that you're learning. After you say it, you hear the correct answer. Active recall is contrasted with passive recall, which would involve you hearing the foreign language and trying to understand it.

The repetition using "graduated intervals" just means that, when you first learn something, it's repeated a lot; then there's a little delay during which you study something else, but then you go back to the new thing. This keeps happening, with longer and longer delays between repetitions.

So, I did some reading on the subject and found a great deal of interesting research. In a nutshell, unless you are in some special emotional state when you first learn something, you'll only remember it for a short while, but if you repeat it, you'll start to remember it for longer and longer intervals. As this happens, you can space out the repetitions more and more until you can remember it for months at a time without any repetitions.

Now, Pimsleur has some pretty significant limitations. (I've only used the Latin American Spanish course and the Russian course, so maybe other courses are different.) First, there's no written component, it's pure audio, so you will remain completely illiterate. In the case of Russian, this is a huge problem because the Cyrillic alphabet is so different. You can try to guess at how the words they're using are spelled, and go look them up, but this is at the least labor-intensive and at the worst extremely difficult. Another problem with Pimsleur is that it doesn't explicitly teach grammar, and the amount of vocabulary you learn in the whole course is quite small (although you learn the hell out of it).

For all these reasons, I decided I would try to supplement Pimsleur by using flash cards for vocabulary and grammar, but I would try to emulate its strong points: active recall and graduated intervals. So I set about studying the flash cards, prompting myself with the English side, translating to Spanish, and using the same general graduated recall system as the Pimsleur lessons did, and, lo and behold, I was able to absorb a great number of flash cards, and the words and phrases I learned from them, after many repetitions, were retained. To this day I can recite the opening lines of Isabel Allende's "La casa de los espíritus", which I learned from flash cards:

Barrabás llegó a la familia por vía marítima, anotó la niña Clara con su delicada caligrafía...

Now, a critical reader will object that, while memorizing and repeating in response to a prompt will certainly build memory, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can use what you memorized in writing or in conversation. And that is absolutely correct. However, you have a much better chance of being able to use that word or phrase in conversation than someone who never learned it so thoroughly, and once you use it in conversation the first time, you will find that it springs quickly to the tongue the second and third and subsequent times you need it.

I have a very strong memory of talking with a friend, who spoke some Spanish and with whom I had some intellectual rivalry. He challenged me to think of the Spanish word for "blanket"; I thought for a minute, and got a little embarrassed because I couldn't think of it right away, but then a phrase from a flash card popped into my head and I was able to tell him it was "la frazada". That whole sequence — challenge, embarrassment, recall after a delay — perfectly crystallized my memory of that word, and I never had trouble remembering it ever again, to the point where reviewing it on a flash card would be superfluous.

Your initial exposure and the repetitions are laying the groundwork for the final stage, which is using the word in conversation. You can think of there being three stages. The first stage is when you can understand a word, phrase, or grammatical structure. The second stage is when you can produce it when prompted (in Pimsleur, or using flash cards, or what have you). But the final stage is when you can use it extemporaneously, that is, in writing without consulting your books, or, hardest of all, in live conversation. But once you have used a word extemporaneously — once you have been challenged to think of it, then successfully hauled it out of whatever dusty corner it was lodged in — it will remain much, much longer in that final stage.

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