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As someone very interested in this topic I don't get this article at all. I've been studying Japanese for 10 years. That means learning and retaining thousands

by eska 6y ago

As someone very interested in this topic I don't get this article at all. I've been studying Japanese for 10 years. That means learning and retaining thousands of characters, terms, pitch accents, multiple readings (about 2-10 per character), stroke orders, components of characters, example sentences, levels of politeness, etc. He says one shouldn't just repeatedly look at the information, but quiz oneself. Even in school, as inefficient as our education system is, I wasn't told to just reportedly read the information. Instead, one should cover one part and guess it, so to speak. The whole spaced repetition aspect seems to be missing in this article however, and it also was missing in school, since you'd mostly be able to forget about things after the exam. Looking at the penny example he seems to suggest that I should study the character 犬 by putting 太 next to it and ask "which one means dog?". I think this will only make you better at multiple choice tests and confuse you because you conflate unrelated knowledge with each other.

Novukus 6y ago
I'm not sure you read the article with good faith. After the penny example, he goes on to talk about how important retrieval and exertion is to solidifying memories. > Quizzing/testing/assessing one’s knowledge via answering recognition or recall questions, for example, is more difficult than simply rereading notes. He then quotes: > “Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention. We’re easily seduced into believing that learning is better when it’s easier, but the research shows the opposite: when the mind has to work, learning sticks better.” (5) Going by what he says, I would suggest that his preferred learning strategy would be to, if you know you're going to be quizzed on what a penny looks like, try to recall what it looks like from memory. Then compare it to the actual penny, note what you got wrong, then try to recall it again. That's the kind of repetition and retrieval practice he's recommending in the article.

by eska 6y ago

Novukus 6y ago

I'm not sure you read the article with good faith. After the penny example, he goes on to talk about how important retrieval and exertion is to solidifying memories. > Quizzing/testing/assessing one’s knowledge via answering recognition or recall questions, for example, is more difficult than simply rereading notes. He then quotes: > “Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention. We’re easily seduced into believing that learning is better when it’s easier, but the research shows the opposite: when the mind has to work, learning sticks better.” (5) Going by what he says, I would suggest that his preferred learning strategy would be to, if you know you're going to be quizzed on what a penny looks like, try to recall what it looks like from memory. Then compare it to the actual penny, note what you got wrong, then try to recall it again. That's the kind of repetition and retrieval practice he's recommending in the article.