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I love learning and am always eager to learn how to learn better.
I came across an article by Inc. about 10 scientific ways to learn anything better and faster.
I, of course, thought about language learning as I read the article.
Below are 5 tips from the article with my comments on how they apply to learning a foreign language:
1. Say out loud what you want to remember
This is key to learning a language. Don't just practice in your head. Say it out loud. It will help you memorize vocabulary, improve your pronunciation, and internalize grammar structures. Practicing out loud is one of my power tips to learn verb conjugations too.
2. Take notes by hand
When I was in school, I used to create cheat sheets by hand. I knew I wasn't going to use them during exams, but the act of creating them helped me memorize what I was writing about. Science confirms that taking notes by hand enhances comprehension and retention. So, how about doing writing exercises by hand? You can also take notes by hand during your lessons.
3. Distribute your study sessions
You know that feeling of frustration when you put a lot of effort into a long study session, but later you cannot remember a lot of what you studied? This is normal. It happens because our brain needs to retrieve information in order to store it solidly in our memory.
Studying something only once, even if you study really hard for many hours, is not the way to remember things later.
Reviewing information and practicing what you studied in different study sessions is an important part of learning and remembering.
To learn more about this, search for distributed learning. You can even be more specific and search for distributed learning in language learning.
4. Test yourself often
This is related to retrieval and to recall, a simple technique to learn more and better. I wrote about recall here.
5. Change the way you practice
You need to practice what you learn in different ways. Do the practice exercises from your book or class. Practice free writing, which will require you to retrieve whole chunks of information from your brain and put them in context. Listen to music and sing along. Listen to audio files and repeat what you hear. Read. Reading offers amazing learning benefits. And you absolutely need to practice speaking in real life conversations. This is key to learning a language and speaking it with ease.
Two more things
Did you know that regular exercise and sleep improve learning and memory? Yes, they do. So get on that treadmill!
Tell me about your study methods! What works well for you?
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