I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about memorizing as a means of learning Chinese this week, for some reason. (I just came across another reference from my fellow countryman at Peeling Mandarin.) I’ve alwas believed in different horses for different courses, and so on, but I must say I don’t really believe in memorization as a learning tool. I think it has very little value.
This may depend greatly upon my definition of memorization, of course. So, before I say my bit I’d be interested to hear about your definitions and your views on memorization. Let’s getthe Big Brain on the case. She’s been quiet of late (though not for much longer, I expect).
Ken Carroll
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{ 33 comments… read them below or add one }
The only thing I explicitly memorize is how to write characters. The only thing that seems to work for me is writing them over and over and over, regardless of how dreadful that is.
One thing I do, though, is review material repetitively. Using Genius on my Mac, I might enter a sentence using a new vocabulary word, or a particular grammar structure, and then let the software show it to me every once in a while. I don’t memorize it, per se (though I find after a while I do remember exactly what the sentences say), but rather just read it and confirm to myself that I know what it means, how to pronounce the words inside it, etc. I feel that this not only exposes my brain to important structures and vocab on a regular basis, but also helps build a mental picture of how various statements are constructed, which I can then (unconsciously) use when creating statements of my own.
I’ve alwas believed in different horses for different courses, and so on, but I must say I don’t really believe in memorization as a learning tool. I think it has very little value.
Hmmm, I think the Chinese would disagree with you. I know my wife would. Things like learning multiplication tables and a bunch of other mathematical facts which simply have to be learned and used for a long while before children can understand maths.
Also, I find that I simply have to learn, pretty much by rote, the strokes in a character, although I am starting to see the substructure in characters and some of the reason behind the pronunciations of some characters as well.
Memorisation is the goal. If people misuse this word to refer to one of the tasks sometimes used to reach that goal, then discussions go round in circles.
Over the past year you have probably memorised the name of the main female teacher on these podcasts, the make and/or model of your friend’s new car or computer, the location of the next Olympics, how high the temperature reached during that really stinking heat wave, where to buy food late at night, four or more completely useless items offered by spammers, part of a Mandarin song or nursery rhyme, what reaction to expect when Aric talks about smoking, how to find our student Forum, a few new advertising slogans (that you’d rather forget), the procedure to transfer podcasts to your latest player, the current approximate amount of your quarterly fuel bills, and the domain names of a few interesting Mandarin-related web sites. What method did you use for these, huh? Come on, call a spade a spade.
Whatever you want to learn yo have to use your memory and store the information in your brain. This is memorisation. You always have to memorisate. What happend is that this process has different stages and distinct ways to achive it. The main goal everyone pursue is to achive the memorisation without ‘pain’ and with the less effort as possible. There are a lot of techniques for this. Ones the brain has stored the information on it, the next step will be to use the new information suddenly, intuitive and unconsciously.
I think is similar to learn how to ride a byke. Initialy you have to pay your attention in the new procedure and memorize it, after that it is done without one realizing.
I agree with AuntySue and Antonio, memorising is simply the process of coming to remember things. But if by ‘memorisation’, Ken, you mean just endlessly learning long lists of words, with no context, then I agree with you, I don’t find it all that helpful. I like learning songs and poems by heart (that’s ‘memorising’) or even short stories (like Aesop’s fables) or proverbs, because they give you a context for the words and they also teach you phrases and grammar without your even noticing. Face it, that’s how children learn language, isn’t it?
Oh yeah, and I checked out ‘Peeling Mandarin’ about flashcards–yes, they are useful, but I find them especially helpful if you use a programme like ‘Chinese Practice’ which lets you enter whole phrases and sentences on the card instead of just single words. AuntySue, I think you use ‘NineThings’ on the Palm in much the same way, and it’s great.
Ken, you’ve got me thinking now. If you don’t believe in (memorisation, drills, whatever) as a learning tool, what do you believe in?
We’ve heard a lot of great insights into what teachers should and shouldn’t do when they teach and about their approaches to teaching. We’ve heard a bit of good stuff about students’ approaches to learning in general terms. But not much about what to do, physically, to learn what’s staring us in the face.
What sorts of things do you think are good for students, or yourself as a student, to _actually_do_ during those long hours dedicated to private “learning” or “studying”?
Aunty Sue you are playing my tune. In fact, how could memorization not be important? And by memorization I mean the “activation of memory”. IMHO there is hardly anything in language learning more important than memory. Even motor memory (pronunciation for example) is a kind of memory. The problem of course is that the memories we make must be memories of the right thing and it should be done in a way that makes things easy to retrieve.
The question we need to answer is not whether memory is important but rather how can we find ways to easily store the right “items” so that they are is accessible for quick retrieval. It does no good to store something in a form that is unusable or unneeded or that takes eons to retrieve.
Memory is a tricky thing. I like the studies that show that you can retrieve something more easily in the context where it was learned than in a new context. In other words, memory is context specific.
Next comes the thing about memory that we all know by experience. Repetition is probably the most effective mechanism (perhaps only short of strong emotion and music) for helping store memories. Repeating something on a regular schedule helps you remember something. Of course the reason this is so is that memory, in the end, is chemical in nature and repetition activates the chemicals that create memories (please don’t ask me how).
Because memories are chemical in nature they respond to all the other chemical storms that happen in our body. Sleep restores or nourishes these chemicals. Good nutrition helps. Some chemicals have been shown to have positive impact on memory. There are memory pills on the market even as I write. Negative emotions seem to send out little storms of chemicals that dampen the learning process (sounds like Krashen’s affective filter heh?).
Now, Krashen said that we don’t learn languages but that we somehow acquire them. With that one statement the rider (or the ability to profit from and direct your own memory) seemed to have fallen off the horse. It seems that we are no longer able to benefit from memory; the thinking is that the horse will go where it wants and we are somehow along for the ride. Learning things in the wild, letting the horse go his own way is to be preferred over consciously directing the horse (and consciously remembering things)
I like Krashen and I don’t know how to solve this conundrum. I’m convinced however that some kinds of input are more brain friendly than others kinds. This however does not IMHO obviate the importance of memory. We can make it easier to remember brain friendly input just as we can make it easier to remember brain unfriendly input. And make no mistake; there are ways for educators to make it easier for us to remember things.
Why doesn’t education make the final step, by stepping up to the plate and agreeing that their job is to make things easier to remember and start doing this in as friendly and individual way as possible?
Heh, all you language educators up there….. don’t spend time arguing over the existence of memory. Acknowledge its role and start helping us find ways to make remembering easier. Maybe even help us get our hands on those little pills.
I assume that what Ken means is Active memorization vs. Passive memorization. In many of the broadcasts Ken stresses that your brain will do much of the work if you will immerse yourself in the dialoge with repeated listenings. If I lived in an environment surrounded by Mandarin I suppose there would be a whole lot less to actively memorize because I would be constantly inundated by the language. However, that’s not my situation. I get about an hour a week with a native Chinese instructor and most of that is asking him to repeat what he said.
As it stands I do spend a lot of time memorizing things because it’s the only way I know how to learn.
On a side note I wish I had one of the Mandarin channels so I could watch and listen for hours at a time. One can dream…
Oops, wrong link to my blog.
When I read Ken’s post, it hit home with me a bit. My previous method of study with Chinesepod was to enter every new word into a study journal and then *occasionally* look at this list. The few times I did study it, and try to memorize by rote, I found it ineffective and boring.
And I think that’s what Ken’s getting at here — simply making a long list of words and trying to shove them into one’s brain with no context (much as Margaret described it) is probably more harmful than helpful. Why harmful? Because it turns you off to the process of learning a language, which should be fun. How many times did you complain (or hear complaints) in High School French class that all you did was memorize vocabulary lists or grammar tables?
There are, of course, many other reasons that rote memorization doesn’t work, but that’s my reaction to it.
As for how I study now – I’m still kind of looking for the best way to use Chinesepod. Right now, I’m just listening to the podcasts as they are published, I’m not writing anything down. (But the idea of a study journal does still appeal to me) The point is, I’m not trying rote memorization anymore, but just exposing myself to the language.
I think what Ken was referring to is perhaps better understood as ‘rote memorization’.
I can’t offer any insights apart form making it even more complicated by trying to demonstrate that it is also not what you know but how you know it.
I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that my brain is too weird to really worry about best practice etc. I should just do what feels natural to me. For example I never had a comfortable relationship with rote learning. We can say that somebody knows their multiplication tables but what do we mean by know? it that memorized?
Early in my school days there was a horrible torture whereby random little children would get selected and expected to blurt out a given multiplication table. This was very stressful and I for one was one of those kids that just could not learn them. As the initial exercise was just to plug through the table I realized it was easier to learn how to do the mental arithmetic on the fly and blurt out the table in realtime, it worked shouty teacher was happy. Eventually the questions became random and skipped across tables, no problem I learned a few reference points and could merrily skip back and forth in real time also realizing obvious little shortcut like 8×7 is the same 7×8 (surprising how long it took some children to know this under the prevailing system). Later on other Children had to struggle to learn that you could run through 20 times table or the 30 times just by shifting the decimal point (obvious to me in next to no time). Finally I later got to sit on my Schools mental arithmetic team and still hadn’t memorized my multiplication tables (at least not explicitly but multiple impacts had increased to reference points to 100%).
How does this help with language learning, well that is almost impossible to articulate but I can assure you that it does. The key thing being that there are many ways to know something. So what I am trying to say is that it is not what you know but how you know it, how the data is stored and how relationships are mapped. When it comes to a word a language there is not just one level of know but an almost infinite scale of the faintest glimmering to complete familiarity in all its uses and relationships with other words. Not only do you need to remember the words but also train the mechanisms that manipulate them.
If you have a couple of strong reference points you can understand a new sentence you hear even if many of the other words are much weaker. It takes longer to construct language because the construction mechanism need to work with far more strong references but every time you parse one of those new sentences all those weak words get touched again.
This is why I prefer the ‘natural methods’ flashcards grammar, rules learning to write characters as you learn the words: all taste of learning the multiplication tables to me.
This is my head, I understand what is going on in my head, yours may be different but I think there are still some lessons to be taken away from the natural methods even for those that are not suited to them. I don’t care how much Chinese I have memorized just how much I know. The good news is that in attempting to learn Chinese I have learn’t much more about my mind and how different we all are.
以后我学中文就好了。
我不想和大家分享的是我的看法。
大家加油！
Here’s a good overview on memory and learning:
http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_07/i_07_p/i_07_p_tra/i_07_p_tra.html
“Human memory is fundamentally associative. You can remember a new piece of information better if you can associate it with previously acquired knowledge that is already firmly anchored in your memory.”
This seems to give support to the value of learning a language in different contexts and lexical patterns (versus rote memorization, which is a less efficient/effective process).
When I began to get addicted to Chinese, I used to take a Chinese book and write down ‘all of the characters’ I don’t recognize, look them up in the dictionary and learn the meaning and try to remember the strokes. Very frustrating, I know. That’s the reason I stopped with memorizing all the characters.
Now when I take a book to read, just read through the whole chapter and think back what characters were foreign to you, you obviously should have a basic comprehension of mandarin. If you don’t remember read the chapter again, and when you see those characters, first try to guess their meaning, and look them up. When you see the definition for it, it’ll stay longer in your head and you might actually use it when you talk to people, and bump into it again in some text somewhere else. For so far I’m pretty satisfied with this kind of method learning Chinese apart from Chinesepod.
Don’t go learning list of words that don’t have a meaning to you. Of course there is definition next to it, but what I mean is that you never really let your mind digest the word thoroughly and naturally, like any child would learn new words through listening to what adults say.
I think learning is simply memorization with understanding, so idealing you need to do both at the same time.
There’s another sentence ruined by a stupid typo. That will be there for all time in the endless abyss of cyberspace now. LOL
Do you think you can master playing a musical instrument without rote memorization? Without memorizing notes, scales, drills, and endlessly repeating sections until you get it right?
A good example of the associative process of memory and learning is in one of John Pasden’s Sinosplice blogs which described how he learned to remember the correct tones for individual characters.
Did John use rote memorization ? Absolutely not. He would associate a specific character, for example yu2 (fish), with something he already had in memory. In this case, he pictured a fish jumping out of the water, in an upward direction that corresponded with the angle of the rising (second) tone mark.
I’m not saying that he couldn’t have learned by rote. He could have simply listed a bunch of characters on one page with their tone marks, and simply reviewed the list ad nauseum. Eventually, he would have incorporated this into long-term memory.
For myself, the associative method (ie: using pneumonic devices), has proven to be the most effective system. In answer to whether one can learn to play a musical instrument without rote memorization, I’ve also done this successfully using associative memory.
The human brain has a built-in program for acquiring any natural language on earth. It’s how children acquire their first language. Adults acquire language in much the same way (albeit with some differences).
Rote memorization is a left-brain activity and learning a second language isn’t
One of the reasons so many people drop out of traditional language programs is that teachers rely on left-brain activities for a process that is primarily right-brain in nature. These traditional left-brain activities include explicit grammar instruction, translation tasks, and rote memorization of vocabulary and other items. The right brain operates on two simultaneous tracks while it internalizes without analysis which, pardon the pun, translates into high-speed learning. The nit-picking left brain operates single track and has to analyze everything. This slows learning to a crawl and brings on boredom and fatigue. This is an agonizingly slow (if not impossible) way to acquire a language. That’s not to say there isn’t a place for some explicit grammar instruction or other left-brain activities found in traditional textbooks. However, they should be reserved for the advanced levels, or for whenever beginning students have subconsciously internalized the morphology, phonology, syntax, usage rules, etc of a given unit of instruction.
The internalization process: comprehension precedes speaking
Why comprehension is important
Comprehension and speaking are located in different parts of the brain. Understanding takes place in Wernicke’s area located in the temporal lobe; talking from Broca’s area located in the frontal lobe of the left brain. When an instructor asks students to “listen and repeat after me”, the brain can become overloaded because these two parts of the brain are activated simultaneously. And translation isn’t very helpful for most people, either, because there is no long-term understanding and you’re activating yet another part of the left-brain.
When students translate and memorize as a way to comprehend, their short-term comprehension usually ends the moment they leave the classroom, or sooner. To learn with grammar translation and vocabulary methods, especially at the beginning and intermediate levels of learning, is to learn painfully and in slow motion.
An alternative to translation and memorization?
TPR (Total Physical Response) and TPRS (Total Physical Response Storytelling—later Teaching Proficiency through Storytelling) are powerful tools to help students acquire language naturally. TPR relies on instructor commands that students physically respond to; TPRS uses engaging stories told through action and repeated in various forms by both the teacher and the student. Using these methods, students also naturally learn grammar as well (but they might not be able to explain it). Also, these techniques seem to work effectively for children and adults. There is no age or memory barrier because there is no rote memorization. So, have another beer!
I wrote the flashcards Brendan was talking about on Peeling Mandarin, and I do find them to be a very effective memory aid.
One of the big problems I have with learning Mandarin is remembering everything I have already learnt. If it doesn’t get used then it eventually gets forgotten. By having the flashcards set up to ask me a phrase that I haven’t had an opportunity to use for a couple of months or more (depending on how many times I have got it correct previously) I am giving my memory that little push that it needs to retain the phrase, along with all the words and sentence structure that it contains.
I think that flashcards are just one more very usefull tool in my Mandarin learning tool box that needs to be used along with all the others to realy work well. Most days I listen to Ken and Jenny for about an hour which teaches me a lot, but my minimun 10 minutes of flashcards a day helps me to remember it all.
I strongly believe in memorization, even “rote” memorization if you want to call it that. I memorize phrases, individual words, short stories, and poetry. I use a lot of flash cards…mainly the paper and cardboard kind. Yes, it is a lot of work…hard work, and utterly boring. It takes a lot of time on a regular basis and constant review. However, nothing worth doing is easy. If you want to play you have to pay. Many of the comments that I read in the blog have to do with finding an easy way or the easiest way. I have some news. If you want the right words to come out when you open your mouth you can’t be translating them simultaneously in your head. They must be in there, firmly in place, and if they are, when you open your mouth they will jump out in the right order. Listening to podcasts over and over and dissecting them and studying the characters and practicing writing them is also important. Listening to things like Word on the Street and the Saturday Show (when they stay on the straight and narrow) are also helpful to round out the cultural understanding. In the end, though, it is the things that you put firmly in your memory bank as a regular and permanent deposit that are going to pay you dividends when you want to speak. I had my first “Mandarin Moment” today on the streets of Leon, Guanajuato. I overheard an elderly couple speaking Mandarin and I went up to them and introduced myself and told them where I was from and what I was doing in Mexico, all of this in short simple Chinese phrases that I had memorized from flashcards. They were just as amazed as I was. In fact, I was doubly amazed because they are Chinese immigrants to the United States who lived in Berkley, California for many years and moved to Mexico to retire. In fact, they also speak excellent Spanish as well as English. The lady told me that my pronunciation was very good and asked me how I learned to pronounce Chinese words. I told her that I regularly repeat after my Chinese teacher, Jenny Zhu. She said to tell my teacher that she is doing an excellent job so thank you, Jenny Zhu, your are doing great. Now I have to stop blogging and get back to studying. Too much blogging is no good for your memory. Clogs it up.
Dogma rarely leads to enlightenment. In my mind the best educational system is the one that recognizes the need to be flexible enough to allow the learning experience to fit a particular learners strengths (and weaknesses). Someone who learns Chinese through self-study in Corn Field, USA will have a much tougher time depending only on lexical chunks than someone living in Shanghai who is truly in immersion mode. One tremendous advantage I found when using flashcard programs is that even if I originally learned a word as part of a lexical chunk, seeing it displayed over and over again with it’s alternate meanings has allowed me to apply that word to many new situations that the lexical chunk would never have opened my eyes to. Memorization absolutely has a valueable place in learning.
I loathe flashcards with a passion, it’s just drill to me, but I do run a little “reminder” app on my desktop (http://hanzihelper.sourceforge.net), which goes through my list and displays each character for ten seconds in the corner of the screen. When my mind wanders from work, my eye falls onto the current character and whispers “hello, mate, I remember you”, then I wake up and get back to work.
The presence/absence of the translating part of learning is interesting. The way I learned the numbers turns out to not include translation. I can read them, take dictation, and perform simple arithmetic in Mandarin, but translating to English is very slow. It’s not obvious at the time whether we’re learning translation exclusively or not at all, but a middle ground is necessary.
If you have kids learning times tables try my “two chairs” method for a couple of weeks: “You will take your book and sit in one of these chairs (side by side at table) to do your work. Here are the rules: (1) In this chair, you can work it out any way you like but it must come from your brain, no calculators or other tools can be used, and I’m not interested in checking your methods. (2) In this other chair, you will do all of your work with a calculator, and the only thing I’m interested in is to make sure that you always do use the calculator before writing anything down, no cheating with the brain. (3) If ever you want to use the other method, that’s fine, you can pick up your book and pen and move to the other chair. I encourage you to change chairs as many times as you like. Of course you can ask me a question if you’re stuck, but you’ll find it easy. Everything is up to you, and so long as you follow these three rules I really don’t care how you do it.” Then give the plenty of easy work to build confidence. No rote learning required.
I believe in rote memory as a valuable teaching method if one has the goal of attaining literacy in Chinese.
Having done Cantonese Primary school I appreciate the memory skills learnt. Each lesson was very much like a Chinese pod lesson. There were more Chinese words and characters though, about 60 lessons per year, with around 10 new characters per lesson. In all we learnt to write, recognise and pronounce 3200 basic primary school characters in traditional form. We also learnt to write and recognise 1000 simplified characters. In primary school there were about 5000 basic Chinese words made up of more than one Chinese character.
In addition to all of that we had to be able to recite each lesson by heart, up to the end of grade 3 in front of the class. The rote memory system was easy and effective. On graduation from primary school the students could read pretty much any basic Chinese novel and newspaper without referring to a Chinese dictionary.
The vital point here is that once one could read fluently the words and characters seemed to take up permanent residence in one’s memory. We were told that if you are having trouble remembering characters and words then you are not reading enough.
The Chinese education system also uses rote memory as one of the tools to teach English to native Chinese. It is very difficult for native Chinese to learn English but somehow they manage it.
If one has the goal of becoming literate in Chinese then I cannot see how that is possible without the discipline of rote learning the required characters, vocabulary and sentence structure patterns.
…furthermore, I think people sometimes confuse rote learning and repetition, perhaps because rote learning is the only repetitive learning they remember being exposed to. Rote learning is something I hate, but repetition is essential and I love it.
Another way of looking at it would be that rote learning is a labour saving device for the teacher, whereas providing repetition on demand is a gift to the student. I know that’ll stir some hornets!
I found that “rote” memorization helped me in a very specific way. I memorized a number of short stories for which I had both a transcript and recording by a native speaker. I truely believe that listening to the recordings over and over again, after I had memorized the transcripts, helped me to get to a point where I could distinguish Chinese phonemes at natural speed. If I hadn’t memorized the transcripts I wouldn’t have been able to associate the sounds with the words. At the time, samples of spoken Chinese were relatively hard to come by. So, I think this was a good way to make the best use of the small number of samples that were available to me.
Since then, I don’t know if you would call what I do memorization or not, but I do listen to Chinesepod lessons repeatedly, and read the transcript repeatedly until I can recognize all of the characters in the transcript without looking them up, and understand the meaning of what I’m reading and hearing overall. I think I am again trying to retain more of the limited input that is available to me than if I just went over the lesson once and went looking for new input (a child’s way of learning language).
I seem to be making progress in my ability to communicate in live conversations with Chinese people in this way (for me a scarcer resource than Chinesepod lessons). However, I have no idea if this is the most effective way to study, or not, but it is the study method I’ve settled on for now. I’ve been trying to improve my study methods to make the best use of my limitted study time, but to be honest I’m mostly relying on my intuition about what seems to be working for me. I don’t have any scientific basis to say what is more effective and what is less effective.
马克
In the words of the Flying Circus, ‘I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition’.
My reasons for using flashcards, and the way in which I have started to use them, will perhaps throw some light on things.
Why:
1) Because I’m not living in China. Indeed memory is associative and I acknowledge as much on this blog entry. But I don’t get a whole lot of opportunites to make those associations. Note that I never used flashcards for German, French or Italian as I was surrounded by those languages while I learned them.
2) Because I have a shockingly bad memory. While I might be acquiring a feel for how to speak the language, I’m impeded by my lack of vocabulary.
3) Because I’m a nerd. I’m a software developer whose laptop is his office, so I’m much more likely to actually run jMemorize than I am to take out the printed handout and read it. Also, jMemorize makes me work to remember – I figure I’m strengthening the neuron connections more than if I were able to sneak a glance at the translation on the same page.
How:
1) I use the words that appear in the lesson handouts that my teacher provides me with. So they are not merely random words without a context – the flashcards help me use the boomerang method that I learned in secondary school an awfully long time ago.
2) I don’t just use flashcards. I also use flashcards.
So in summary, I totally understand where you’re coming from Ken. A ‘feel’ for a language can never be acquired through a rote learning system. But some memorization is necessary for adult learners (actually anyone over the age of 12 or 13 – why on earth do Irish schools wait until highschool to teach languages!!!???) and I’m hoping that flashcards provide me with enough vocabulary ‘ammunition’ to fire out chinese sentences more quickly. Apologies for the bellicose metaphor!
There’s no need for dogma on either ‘side’ of the argument. It’s a matter a pragmatism.
A big ni3hao3 from Cork, Ken.
Uh-oh — another “Brendan” posting on Chinesepod. I see trouble and/or hilarity ahead…
I don’t think that there’s as much of a black and white dichotomy between “natural learning” and “memorization” as you suggest, Ken. To be sure, cramming words into one’s short-term memory via flashcards and caffeine-fueled all-night study binges isn’t a viable long-term learning strategy, but I don’t think that most memorization happens that way. Things like replacement drills, while less than exciting, seem to be to be a closer mirror of the way people acquire words, and repetitive (or “rote,” if you prefer) writing of characters, as dull as it may be, is as far as I’ve heard the only way that anybody – be they first- or second-language learners – picks them up.
It’s an interesting topic, at any rate, and I’ve recently had a few conversations about it with people much smarter than I am. May try to write something longer and more coherent on the subject in the next few days.
Well this Brendan really is called Brendan
(just read your ‘five things you didn’t know about me’ post). Trouble or hilarity. Hmmmm. Decisions decisions.
Ow, zing!
There – that’s better. Now it doesn’t look like you’re having a conversation with yourself.
I see you 2 are getting on famously.
Ken
We have two Barry’s now as well. In case you didn’t realise, I’m one of them.