Overlearning?

[rdearman]

An interesting article (to me at least)

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how- ... y-to-learn

[Cainntear]

Definitely interesting. The one note of caution I'd add is that the study looked at an isolated task, which is a bit different from language learning where things are interrelated.

At the risk of stating the obvious, overlearning doesn't necessarily mean doing the same thing again and again and again in language learning, because the skills or knowledge you're learning can be applied in a number of different ways by combining with previous knowledge.

The big disagreement about retrograde interference has always been on whether to attack it head-on by presenting both potentially-confused forms side-by-side, to force them to co-exist in the brain or whether to keep potentially confused things isolated from each other for as long as possible.

[Cainntear]

What I'm trying to say (again, probably stating the obvious) is that this paper doesn't really give an argument for overlearning individual steps towards the target skill -- i.e. there's no reason to conclude you should overlearn conjugation tables before starting to use conjugations in sentences, because both are practicing the same knowledge, so there's no retroactive interference.