19 zeros then a 1

Last night I had a dream about language learning. Don’t know if the dream was in color, but it certainly had a binary feel. 

I saw 19 zeros in a row, followed by a one. And I knew what that meant. 

It takes on average 20 times before a language item sticks i.e. you forget it 10 times before you remember it long term.

These instances are regarded as failures by school. You got them wrong.

But THAT attitude is wrong. Each instance of forgetting is an improvement. Each zero is actually a ‘1’.

I'd go so far as to say each so-called 'zero' is real, rational and positive too! They graph upwards.

Now, you might think that this represents awfully slow progress. After all . . . forgetting something 19 times. How can that be efficient?

Here's how. 

You take a whole swag of language up that slope at once. You improve a thousand items at a time, which you can do with light, comprehensible and enjoyable input (ListenRead to a book). Twenty tries to internalize a thousand items. That's not bad at all. Work it out!

Notice without concentrating

Learning a language is a delicate balance between extensive and intensive application.

When you are doing things in an extensive way, you process a lot of text lightly, skimming over it, skipping the stuff you don't know, being satisfied with grasping the overall story. 

The intensive approach is more intense. You concentrate hard on the language's features and try to remember them. 

That's study, in other words. That's work. It's forcing your short-term memory to do a job it's not designed to do. It's like heaping on the fertilizer in order to achieve artificial growth. And then you return the next day to see that your plants have collapsed. Or, if they still stand, see that they have mutated.

Nevertheless, you need a balance of both approaches. The balance point should favor the extensive side, but it's human nature to try to control the learning process by heaping on the intensity.

Don't think of 'learning', 'studying', 'memorizing', or 'drilling'. Instead, think of noticing various features of the languages as you gloss over it.

Miyamoto Mushashi tells us to perceive that which cannot be seen.

Yesterday I noticed that with Spanish some words start with a double 'L' and that sentences may not start with a capital if it is a 'small' word such as 'y'. I noticed how n's with a ~ above them are pronounced. 

I must have noticed a 100 or more features. Each time that they do, they seep into my long-term memory a little deeper. I internalize them naturally. And all those features support each other in an organic, holistic, intertwined . . . what's the word I'm looking for?

Notice without concentrating

Learning a language is a delicate balance between extensive and intensive application.

When you are doing things in an extensive way, you process a lot of text lightly, skimming over it, skipping the stuff you don't know, being satisfied with grasping the overall story. 

The intensive approach is more intense. You concentrate hard on the language's features and try to remember them. 

That's study, in other words. That's work. It's forcing your short-term memory to do a job it's not designed to do. It's like heaping on the fertilizer in order to achieve artificial growth. And then you return the next day to see that your plants have collapsed. Or, if they still stand, see that they have mutated.

Nevertheless, you need a balance of both approaches. The balance point should favor the extensive side, but it's human nature to try to control the learning process by heaping on the intensity.

Don't think of 'learning', 'studying', 'memorizing', or 'drilling'. Instead, think of noticing various features of the languages as you gloss over it.

Yesterday I noticed that with Spanish some words start with a double 'L' and that sentences may not start with a capital if it is a 'small' word such as 'y'. I noticed how n's with a ~ above them are pronounced. 

I must have noticed a 100 or more features. Each time that they do, they seep into my long-term memory a little deeper. I internalize them naturally. And all those features support each other in an organic, holistic, intertwined . . . what's the word I'm looking for?

Face recognition

How do we recognize faces?

Not by analyzing them, certainly not. We don't make an Excel file of proportions, coloring, distances that we ponder over in our free time, trying to memorize the data.

Instead, we form a gestalt of the overall pattern without being conscious of how we do that.

Humans learn complex things-- faces, chess, dance, sports and so forth--using pattern recognition.

And language falls into this camp too.

When you break a language up into its basics to study them one by one, you destroy any relationship between its elements. You destroy the pattern.

So acquire language in large lumps.

Redirect your perfectionism

So you’re a perfectionist. Are you aware that that will have ramifications when it comes to learning a language? That’s because you can’t learn a language tidily. Rather, it’s a messy business.

You’re going to make tones of mistakes. You’re going to forget stuff over and over. You’ll make a fool of yourself speaking. You’ll use the wring word, or you’ll use the right word but in the wrong place. You name it, you’ll do it.

Think of juggling, riding a unicycle, tightrope walking. With every one of them you’ll fall, only to get back up. That goes for any language too—your own also when you started out (and perhaps now too).

But there could still be a place for perfectionism. I believe that you can re-direct it towards your learning techniques and overall system. Search out the very best resources. Tweak endlessly with your routine. Just as long as you’re making gazillions of mistakes along the way.