Sans Forgetica - new font to help you remember

[tommus]

Besides being an interesting play-on-words, the newly invented font Sans Forgetica is an interesting concept that claims to improve memory of written material. It was invented and tested at the RMIT University in Australia, and is free to download.

Sans Forgetica - RMIT University

Some more articles about San Forgetica:

Researchers create 'memory-boosting' font

Sans Forgetica is the Typeface You Won’t Forget

A couple of concerns I have about using Sans Forgetica for second language learning are:

1. Would Sans Forgetica distort the text enough to make reading in your L2 too difficult and perhaps unbearable?

2. If you spent a lot of time learning your L2 by reading in Sans Forgetica, would you be less likely to recognize L2 words in regular font?

Someone wrote a comment to a Sans Forgetica article that said his handwriting would accomplish the same thing!

Anyone going to try Sans Forgetica with their L2 reading?

[Izabela]

I don't know, at least for me it seems so uncomfortable to decode and read that it might discourage me from reading in it any extensive period of time.

OTOH, maybe there is something to the idea that that process will force you to remember it, sort of like a traumatic experience!

[Ani]

I could see myself using this on occasion.
I remember when the first nice e-ink e-readers came out and we realized we could read much faster than on paper. It didn't take long also to realize that reading so easily had a cost to memory.
This effect is combatable through font changes or just by reading slower & more deliberately. It's interesting to have a font that proves to be the best here, but doesn't make it any sort of magic.
A lot of L2 study is not about memorizing content at all, so in that case you wouldn't want to be slowed down like this, but maybe changing a grammar into this font before reading through it would be helpful.

[gsbod]

Surely over time your brain would get used to decoding the font and any possible memory benefits would therefore wear off?

[Doitsujin]

I couldn't find any papers from the font developers, which usually isn't a good sign. Maybe another LLORG member with better Google-Fu than me can find it.
However, according to interviews with the creator, Sans Forgetica increased the retention rate by only 7%, which isn't that much, also, according to some scientists hard-to-read fonts aren't as good as they're cracked up to be.

[Deinonysus]

Fraktur.png

[Cainntear]

Setting aside the reliability of the evidence, the first question is really whether the principle applies here, as Ani alludes to.

The principle behind difficult-to-read is about forcing concentration, but it also relies on us being cognitively prepared to fill in the gaps. In your native language, you don't actually have to process the shape of every letter, because your brain happily recognises what it's look at. This even works in words you haven't seen before (foreign borrowings excepted) because you know which combinations of letters are possible.

However, with a relatively new language, you don't have that same background knowledge to help you, which means there's a risk that your brain might misinterpret the word forms based on L1 patterns. Of course, that might not be the case. But then again, if the point of difficult-to-read is to force your brain to make an effort... well, isn't it already difficult to read in a foreign language? There obviously must come a point where layering difficulty upon difficulty leaves things as "too difficult", plain and simple.

If you're talking about isolated vocabulary learning, it looks even more dubious to me, because when reading facts and information, we also have sentence context to help alleviate the difficulty, which is entirely absent in vocab lists, flashcards etc.