Fluent Forever : How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
In Search of the Perfect Interval
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| In Search of the Perfect Interval
You want to remember as much as possible now, later, and much later. To choose how often to practice, you have to balance efficiency and comfort. In general, you’re not studying for a single test with a specific date, so you can’t pick an optimal interval and run with it. For the extreme long term, you’ll get the best efficiency if you wait years between practice sessions, but that won’t help you in the short term at all. Moreover, your practice sessions would be extremely frustrating. After such a long delay, you’d have forgotten almost everything. On the other hand, if you practiced all the time, you’d be able to remember almost everything, but your old words would come back so often that they would bury you in hours of daily work. The thread between these two goals—remembering now and remembering later—starts small and grows rapidly. You’ll begin with short intervals (two to four days) between practice sessions. Every time you successfully remember, you’ll increase the interval (e.g., nine days, three weeks, two months, six months, etc.), quickly reaching intervals of years. This keeps your sessions challenging enough to continuously drive facts into your long-term memory. If you forget a word, you’ll start again with short intervals and work your way back to long ones until that word sticks, too. This pattern keeps you working on your weakest memories while maintaining and deepening your strongest memories. Because well-remembered words eventually disappear into the far off future, regular practice creates an equilibrium between old and new. You’ll spend a fixed amount of time every day learning new words, remembering the words from last week, and occasionally meeting old friends from months or years back. By doing this, you’ll spend most of your time successfully recalling words you’ve almost forgotten and building foundations for new words at a rapid, steady clip. Playing with timing in this way is known as spaced repetition, and it’s extraordinarily efficient. In a four-month period, practicing for 30 minutes a day, you can expect to learn and retain 3600 flash cards with 90 to 95 percent accuracy. These flash cards can teach you an alphabet, vocabulary, grammar, and even pronunciation. And they can do it without becoming tedious, because they’re always challenging enough to remain interesting and fun. Spaced repetition is a godsend to memory intensive tasks like language learning. It’s a pity that it wasn’t a subject back in school, when I had a lot more to remember. At its most basic level, a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) is a to-do list that changes according to your performance. If you can remember that pollo means “chicken” after a two-month delay, then your SRS will automatically wait four to six months before putting pollo back on your to-do list. If you’re having trouble remembering that ropa means “clothing” for more than two weeks, your SRS will put ropa on your list more frequently until it sticks for good. What does this look like in practice? SRSs come in two main flavors: on paper or on computer. The computerized versions will perform all scheduling on their own. Every time you access your computerized SRS, it will automatically teach you twenty to thirty new cards and quiz you on the hundred or so cards you’re about to forget. Your job is to tell your SRS whether or not you remember a particular card, and your SRS’s job is to build a daily, customized to-do list based upon your input. This list is designed to help you memorize as efficiently as possible, so that you can spend your time learning instead of micromanaging. A paper SRS accomplishes the same feat using a flash card file box, a carefully designed schedule, and a few simple instructions. It’s basically a simple board game. The game contains seven levels, which correspond to seven labeled sections in your file box (i.e., level 1, level 2, etc.). Every card starts on level 1, and advances to the next level whenever you remember it. If you forget, the card falls all the way back to level 1. Whenever a card gets past level 7, it has won its place in your long- term memory. Every time you play with your paper SRS, you’ll consult your schedule and review the levels of the day (e.g., December 9: Review levels 4, 2, and 1). This is your daily to-do list, and it adapts to your performance because of the way your cards gain and lose levels. By following the rules of the game (see Appendix 3 ), you create a primitive, paper computer program. This program is just as effective and fun as a computerized SRS and is satisfying in an “I did this by myself” sort of way. At the end of this chapter, we’ll compare paper and computerized SRSs in depth, so you don’t have to make up your mind just yet. tải về 3.86 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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