Memorization and You

General discussion about learning languages
rlnv
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Re: Memorization and You

Postby rlnv » Wed Feb 22, 2017 1:09 am

I've had an odd relationship with memorization of L2 words, and I do believe that I have a "bad" memory. Two extremes and everywhere in between has occurred to me. There are words that I see the first time, which have no apparent relationship for me to English, and I lock them into memory immediately. Some I'll encounter 50 plus times, and I still have to pause a moment to recall the word nuance.

What does work for me is repetition in context, and multiple contexts, aka lots of reading, and also plenty of Anki reviews. Sooner or later they all stick and become familiar, just at different rates. For sure some words drop out of memory. I believe it is a normal part of burning them into memory. When that occurs, its like starting the memorization cycle over for the particular dropped word, only it's likely the second time, memorization will be faster than the first time. Persistence and continued effort does pay off.
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Re: Memorization and You

Postby Carmody » Wed Feb 22, 2017 1:14 am

rlnv

Thanks so much; very helpful.
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Re: Memorization and You

Postby Cainntear » Sat Feb 25, 2017 9:18 am

Some people say that the brain never truly "forgets", and that all that happens is the memory becomes too weak to recall. Later revision makes the old information accessible again. I'm not sure that's 100% true, but it's not far off.

I don't think that necessarily counts for memorisation, though, because memories need some associations.

yong321 wrote:Whether a mnemonic, or etymology as well by the way, serves as a memory aid or becomes an extra burden depends on the person and the word being studied. My observation is that it's more like an aid when the person is relatively old, knows more than one language, especially when the language being studied is related to what he already knows. Young children definitely don't want a mnemonic unless the hint is extremely obvious (e.g. 山 in Chinese means "mountain"). Adults knowing one Romance language studying another will passively or actively search for a cognate to help remember the word.

I think there's a very big difference between using cognates and using mnemonics.

Cognates are linked in both meaning and form, and therefore have part of the "target knowledge" to be learned, so I consider that more "learning" than "memorising".

A good mnemonic will describe both meaning form and meaing, but in that case the mnemonic is really used as a "teaching" device because every time you use it you will be practising form and meaning. In the end, you would expect to recall the word without the mnemonic, meaning it is "learned", not "memorised".
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Re: Memorization and You

Postby yong321 » Sat Feb 25, 2017 4:18 pm

Cainntear wrote:
yong321 wrote:Whether a mnemonic, or etymology as well by the way, serves as a memory aid or becomes an extra burden depends on the person and the word being studied...

I think there's a very big difference between using cognates and using mnemonics.

Cognates are linked in both meaning and form, and therefore have part of the "target knowledge" to be learned, so I consider that more "learning" than "memorising".

A good mnemonic will describe both meaning form and meaing, but in that case the mnemonic is really used as a "teaching" device because every time you use it you will be practising form and meaning. In the end, you would expect to recall the word without the mnemonic, meaning it is "learned", not "memorised".


Absolutely! When I lump mnemonic, cognate and etymology together, I don't mean to say they are the same thing. Finding a cognate is part of etymology, and as you said, is part of knowledge. Finding a mnemonic with no etymological basis is only to help a human to remember things; there's nothing beyond that. What's common to all three is just that they help you remember.

The quality of a mnemonic depends on how close its pronunciation and meaning are to those of the target word. (For the sake of argument here, I restrict "mnemonic" to one without etymoligical basis.) But even if it's a good one, it's only helpful at the initial stage of learning the word. It becomes useless and is forgotten once you reach fluency. A cognate or associated etymological knowledge, on the other hand, can be retained as part of the cultural background.
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Re: Memorization and You

Postby reineke » Sat Feb 25, 2017 5:12 pm

I don't look for cognates. I let them find me.
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Re: Memorization and You

Postby William Camden » Sat Feb 25, 2017 6:53 pm

I find SRS quite effective, but it is interesting how some words are almost burned onto your brain immediately as though with a branding iron, while others might as well have escaped from Pandora's box and you can't lock them in your memory. Also passive vocabulary is a lot larger than active.
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Re: Memorization and You

Postby William Camden » Sat Feb 25, 2017 7:10 pm

reineke wrote:We don't date or otherwise see each other. She's unfaithful and dumb.

"Einstein’s memory was notoriously poor. He was unable to remember dates and could not remember his own phone number. As a student, one of his teachers claimed that he had a memory like a sieve. Once when he was traveling on a train, the conductor approached to collect his ticket. Einstein began searching his pockets, but the conductor recognized him and said he could ride for free. Einstein responded, “Thank you, but if I don’t find my ticket I won’t know where to get off the train.”

"A reporter interviewed Albert Einstein. At the end of the interview, the reporter asked if he could have Einstein's phone number so he could call if he had further questions.

“Certainly” replied Einstein. He picked up the phone directory and looked up his phone number, then wrote it on a slip of paper and handed it to the reporter.

Dumbfounded, the reporter said, "You are considered to be the smartest man in the world and you can't remember your own phone number?”

Einstein replied, “Why should I memorize something when I know where to find it?”

I am glad we share at least some traits.

Einstein learned English in his fifties and he also spoke French in addition to his native German. Apparently he could also lecture in Italian. I am getting some conflicting information about his French as some online sources are referring to his low grade in school French. No, he did not fail math.

There's a book called "Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Our Children Really Learn--and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less".

I'm curious if anyone has read this book.


I haven't read it. Apart from English, it may be significant that French and Italian are languages of Switzerland, where he spent much of his early life and received much of his mathematical and scientific education. It sounds to me like he did not bother memorising things he knew he would not need.
Memory is odd. Roy Cohn, a controversial US lawyer and aide to Joseph McCarthy, reportedly had a memory so sharp that he rarely needed to consult the phone book. He died of AIDS in 1986, and one distressing sign for him of the progress of the disease was that his once razor-sharp memory began to fail.
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Re: Memorization and You

Postby reineke » Mon Mar 06, 2017 3:18 am

Forgetting So We Remember

We accumulate so many memories that it's a wonder our brains don't clog, strangling us on the trivia of our daily lives. How do we recall the memories that are important to us without flooding our brains with the details of every insignificant event? How do we separate the memories we need from the mountains of garbage?

According to ongoing research, we separate the wheat from the chaff by shutting down some memories, at least temporarily, to allow that one chosen treasure to resurface. In short, we forget, so we can remember.

New research into "retrieval-induced forgetting," an awkward phrase that is easily forgotten, is reshaping much of what we have known about how memories are organized and retrieved. Psychologists Benjamin C. Storm of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Robert A. Bjork of UC Berkeley, along with other cognitive scientists around the world, have produced some potentially game-changing results.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/human- ... d=17831379
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Re: Memorization and You

Postby reineke » Mon Mar 06, 2017 3:43 am

How lexis is stored and organized in our brains and implications for the MFL classroom
Excerpts

"During my MA TEFL at Reading University, nearly 20 years ago, I stumbled into a book called ‘Words in the mind’ by Aitchison’ (1986; but latest edition: 2012). That book changed the way I teach vocabulary forever because understanding the way our brain stores, organizes and forgets the words we learn meant being able to come up with strategies to speed up and consolidate lexical learning.

Before discussing how vocabulary is organized in Long-term memory (LTM) one need to understand a few important facts about it.

1.Long-term memory (LTM) and Spread of Activation

As you may know, once information is learnt, it is stored in LTM, a vast neural network connecting every single piece of information we have acquired in our lives. Thus, in actual fact, our LTM makes us what we are as it contains all our emotional and sensorial experiences, every cognitive and motor skill we have learnt and, basically, all we know about the world, including lexis and grammar rules.

The LTM ‘space’ where we store lexical items is referred to as ‘Mental lexicon’. Contrary to what scientist believed in the past, any information that makes it to LTM, is stored there permanently, and forgetting does not occur due to decay of the memory trace (see below).

When we need to translate a given ‘thought’ (or ‘proposition’, as psycholinguists call it) into words, the brain fires electrical impulses which travel at very high speed through LTM’s neural pathways in search of the words that match that thought. During this process, every single word associated with that thought receives activation.

2.1 How first language words are organized in our brain

When a lexical item is stored in LTM, the brain does not place it in just any random place along our neural networks. Insight form research on the slip-of-the-tongue phenomenon and aphasia indicates that the neural connections between the lexical items in our mental lexicon are determined by specific associative mechanisms which involve the physical aspect of a word as well as the metalinguistic, semantic, sociolinguistic and emotional domain...

Words are associated at the ‘physical level’ based on their spelling (graphemic level) and sound (phonological representation). Thus, words that look and sound similar (alliterate, rhyme and chime with each other) are more likely to be very strongly associated. Consequently, when our brain (our Working Memory) attempts to retrieve the word ‘dog’ from LTM, for example, and activation spreads in order to ‘fetch’ it, all the monosyllabic words starting with ‘d’ and ending in ‘g’ will receive strong activation (e.g. Doug, dig, door, etc.). Interestingly, even the anagram of ‘dog’, ‘god’ will be highly activated...

This phenomenon explain slip-of-the-tongue errors, which are basically ‘computing mistakes’ often due to processing inefficiency, whereby instead of retrieving the word we need, we retrieve a ‘near homophone’.

Words are very strongly linked to each other, based on their meaning (Field theory). Synonyms and other words that refer to items frequently associated in real life will also receive strong activation during the retrieval process. Going back to the ‘dog’ example, words like ‘pet, ‘bone, ‘puppy, ‘tail’ and ‘bite’, amongst others, will be activated during the retrieval process, each receiving more or less activation in our brain depending on: (1) how often I will have processed (receptively or productively) those words in conjunction with the word ‘dog’ in the past; (2) how frequently, in my personal life, the items those words refer to, are associated with the notion of ‘dog’.

Semantic associations will also be affected by the connotative meaning that a specific culture of sub-culture attaches to it. Thus, whereas the word ‘fox’ is associate both in Italian and English with the notion of ‘shrewdness ‘ and consequently to the related nouns and adjectives,

An English person will associate ‘dog’ with the phrase ‘a dog’s life’ or ‘to work like a dog’ for example; an Italian, on the other hand will associate it with the idiom ‘solo come un cane’ (‘as lonely as a dog’) or ‘fa un freddo cane’ (‘it’s freezing’ or literally: ‘it’s dog cold’).

Every lexical item is also strongly associated to personal experiences and memories stored in our Episodic Memory.

In a fluent foreign language learner with a sizeable vocabulary repertoire, the way words are stored in their L2 mental lexicon will be pretty much the same, except that there is another very important association, the one between an L2 word and its L1 (and L3,L4, etc.) translation(s). So the word ‘dog’ in the brain of a speaker of Italian, French and German will be connected with the words ‘chien’ , ‘cane’, hund, etc.

Consequently, when spread of activation occurs in search for the word ‘dog’ in one language, say ‘French’, all the words in the other languages will be activated too (Parallel activation theory); all languages one speaks will be activated simultaneously with different levels of activation, with the language in use being the most activated, and the weaker language(s) being the least activated.

The fact that in a less fluent learner with a relatively small vocabulary repertoire there are fewer and weaker connections of the kind outlined above and therefore fewer neural pathways, majorly affects recall in that the more connections we have, the more likely we are to retrieve any word we need successfully and with little cost on Working Memory efficiency. Why? Because the successful retrieval of a word depends on two factors; (a) the strength of the memory trace, that is how often we have processed that word and (b) the use of an effective cue which helps Working Memory find that information in the brain; the more the connections a word has with other information stored in LTM the greater the chances of its successful recall will be.

In order to better understand the implications for teaching and learning one needs to be familiar with the notion of ‘Cue-dependent forgetting’.

4.1 Cue-dependent forgetting

The reason why we often fail to retrieve a word that we learnt is usually due less to a weakening of the memory trace than to failure to find that word. The factors that determine such failure refer to the context in which that word was encoded (‘learnt’) as that very context provides the cues crucial to its retrieval. For example: if we learn a word highlighted in red, on our teacher’s whiteboard whilst sitting near a specific classmate,the colour red, the teacher’s whiteboard and that classmate have the potential to be effective retrieval cues for that word. The absence of these three factors may prevent recall of the same word.

In the context of vocabulary learning, this implies that the more associations are created by the foreign language learner in learning a word, the more likely s/he will be to remember it, because each association will have the potential to serve as a retrieval cue.

4.2 Forgetting from consolidation

Another possible reason why we forget is that when we take in new information, a certain amount of time is necessary for changes to the nervous system to take place – the consolidation process – so that it is properly recorded. If this consolidation process is not completed we will lose the information.

For this reason we need to recycle the information over and over again until this information is stored permanently in LTM.

Pedagogic implications

In view of the way words are organized in our brain, these may be some useful teaching strategies:

In any given lesson we ought to teach words that are as closely related as possible at semantic and grammatical level. This is often done by textbooks.
When teaching new words, in order to facilitate their storage and recall, teachers should try as much as possible to hook them with previously learnt lexis which alliterates, chimes or rhyme with the new vocabulary. This can be turned into a game whereby students are given the task to find (under time constraints) a rhyming or alliterating word for the new target vocabulary;
We should also ensure that, from the early stages of acquisition students are aware of the word class an item belongs to. This will provide the learner with an added retrieval cue in the recall process.

The learners should also be involved in activities requiring them to perform more elaborate semantic associations (deep processing) between the new target vocabulary and previously learnt lexis.

Teachers should be careful when teaching cognates that are graphemically or phonologically very close in the two languages. This sort of L2-cognates can be ‘tricky’ as they are so closely associated with their L1 translation that they can give rise, under processing-inefficiency conditions to the retrieval of first language form. I often experience this phenomenon (called cross-association) myself when speaking or writing in Spanish."

https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2 ... classroom/
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Re: Memorization and You

Postby Iversen » Mon Mar 06, 2017 6:01 am

I can see that the notion of "one thing more to remember" has popped up several times in this thread. I have used it back in the HTLAL days to describe a test setup where the stated purpose was to show whether there actually were "visual learners" or not. As I remember it, the method included showing one group of test subjects a picture at the same time as they were asked to memorize some words. The control group weren't shown a picture. The assumption was that visual learners - if they exist - would remember more if they were shown a picture when they memorized something.

But there is a basic flaw in this argument, namely that it doesn't matter where the picture comes from or whether the learner can relate to it - so in principle any picture of a dog should help visual learners to remember the word "canis" in Latin. But in my experience the imagery that really supports memorizing has to be either chosen by the learner him/herself or at least occur in some natural setting - such as in a shop, where you learn the name of a fish while looking at it (or a restaurant where you eat it). If the picture is just forced upon you it will become 'a thing more to remember'.

I have also discussed this issue in chapter 2.4 "Context and associations" in my guide to learning languages.
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