It's active memorization vs passive memorisation. What words do you need to teach a kid to memorise for them to read Harry Potter? What if they get into Lord of

It's active memorization vs passive memorisation. What words do you need to teach a kid to memorise for them to read Harry Potter? What if they get into Lord of the Rings instead? So you teach kids to sound out the words. To decode them. Mug-el = Muggle. But you're not sounding it out for long, you'll memorise it pretty fast. And if you forget it, you'll decode it again. The point is the memorization will happen automatically to avoid doing the recognition. But if you just jump to memorization you've got no fallback and no way to ever memorise more, you have to actively learn it again. It's like putting cache layer above a database for recently retrieved values. Hell of a lot easier than trying to cache everything or manually predict the best values to cache.