You CAN’T Memorize A Language

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.