Unlock the Language – How to learn a Language

I’m sure most of you do things like this anyway, but if not, this will help.

It is an exceptionally easy thing to do to round off your flashcard sessions.

Do your flashcards, 5 cards, 10 cards, however many you do…..

Then grab a pen and paper, and start writing down from memory the words you covered in your session.

Writing freehand has been shown to improve retention.

If you remember the words, fantastic, if not, well, you know you’re not quite there yet with these words. It is a quick way of testing your progress.

Note down the words you used in the session, that you did not remember.

Next, with all the words, start writing some sentences with them in. Don’t look at the words unless you really have to.

If you can use them to self relate, such as write about your current day, even better, another thing shown to improve retention, is relating things to yourself.

And don’t worry about the complexity of your sentences, you just want to use them in some form of context, even if the sentence is “the sky is blue”. As you improve, so will the complexity of what you produce.

This can also be a really cool thing to keep hold of and look back on in reflection session, because you have in your hand, a tangible record of improvement, where you can look through this, and see the depth of your vocabulary and expressions increasing over time.

You’re looking to take advantage of a couple of things here:

Self relating makes the information more relatable, and to your mind therefore, more important, it also relates the information to memory you already have. If the brain thinks something is important, and it is related to knowledge you already have, encoding and retention increases.

The self testing effect, which reinforces neural pathways, making retrieval easier in the future.

The generation effect, where information created, or generated by yourself is remembered better than information that is just read or received.

It is also adding another active step to your learning, and interleaves things, rather than just relying on recognition and cue based recall when you see the flashcard.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this helps improve your sessions!