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Portuguese (Brazil)
Repetition is one pillar of memorization along with association and emotions.
According to Barbara Oakley from the course Learning How to Learn she says that focused practice and repetition help our long-term memory.
In order to enhance the power of your learning, first, you should understand the meaning of what you’re learning. Understanding is key to memorization because after a while our brain starts to connect these pieces of information called chunks. These chunks start small then they get bigger and bigger. It’s like a scaffold we prepare the foundation in our brain then it grows in a geometric progression that will lead us to fluency.
I’m going to show you two techniques that helped me in my English learning process.
Spaced repetation
Have you ever wondered why we forget things?
Our brain is an important and smart machine that cuts-off what is not used.
“Use it or lose it”
I’m a big fan of spaced repetition. There’s an app called Anki. It’s a flashcard program where you can add cards with words in sentences that you want to learn, then you grade these cards according to the difficulty. So, It’ll show you the hardest cards more frequently, whereas the easiest ones less frequently
I’ve been using Anki since the beginning. It’s been helping me a lot throughout these years. Now my collection is over 8.000 cards made by myself one by one. I’ve written an article “How to get fluent with Anki.” Check this out here.
I’ve experienced adding someone’s deck in my Anki, however, I didn’t like it. Some cards were basic for me, and it made me think that I was wasting my time.
So, I highly recommend you do your own cards. For me, I feel pleased when I come across a word/expression that I don’t know then look up the meaning and finally add it in my Anki. I love this process because I know that I didn’t know that before. Inwardly, I recognize that it’s one of my “deficiencies”. If I study someone’s cards, I feel that I’m learning things from people’s “deficiency”, that not necessarily as same as mine. So only YOU know what you really need to learn.
I love this Confucius’ statement:
When I hear, I forget. When I see, I remember. When I do, I understand
Anki is a two-way road learning. It works like this: I add cards with words that I want to learn when I see them again either on books or podcasts or TV series I recognize them. Sometimes the opposite happens, I listen to a learning word, it rings the bell, I know that it’s on my Anki, but I don’t remember the meaning. So, when I come across that learning word again on my Anki I have that “aha moment” thinking to myself “it’s what I listened to before on that podcast/tv series.”
Listening repetation
I started learning English by myself, following AJ Hoge’s methodology: repetition through mini-story-audio lessons. The goal is to understand about 90 to 99% of the audio, once understood you can move on to the next audio-lesson. One part of the lesson is answering questions about the mini-story. It helps a lot the understanding, especially for beginners. I went through the 4 levels course for over a year. I used to take one lesson for at least 5 to 7 days on my way to work.
This methodology can be applied with any other media: videos, podcasts, TV series clips, and so. It’s important to be short in length (5 minutes top). If you have the transcription, that’s even better.
Here some useful websites where you can find your medias:
So, if you want to increase your vocabulary and remember what you have learned I encourage you to find out for yourself a process of repetition that works for you. 💪🏼
I started learning English from scratch. At the time I didn’t know even the verb to be. 😅 Thus, learning through repetition is vital to me.
Some people feel fed up repeating the same thing over and over again. Some of them think this is a waste of time adding cards to their Anki and learning them later on.
Of course, everyone knows themselves better than someone else does. But I just want to point out how amazingly it worked for me and might work for you as well.
I’d love to hear from you. Please, tell me in the comments below, what you do to revise things that you’re learning.
If this article was useful for you, please share it with your friends, it might help them as well.
Thanks for reading.
See you next time.
