Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking With Einstein, learns a language with spaced repetition.
You’ve probably already heard of Joshua Foer and his excellent 2011 bestseller, Moonwalking With Einstein. Foer chronicles his ascent (or descent) into the magical world of memory, a trip that takes him all the way from ancient Simonides to contemporary experts like Tony Buzan, and ends with winning the U.S. Memory Championship.
But there’s one aspect of memory work he seemed to miss entirely – spaced repetition. Until now.
In a recent article for the Guardian, Joshua Foer explains how he “learned a language in 22 hours”.
Wow. Really?
The subtitle is even more exciting:
He’s never been good with languages, so can Joshua Foer really hope to learn Lingala in a day?
One day!
However, the URL to the article ends with a
different title: learn-language-in-three-months.
Which makes you wonder what Foer’s original title was.
Because these “22 hours” were actually spread out over two and a half months. His longest single study session was 20 minutes, and his average was four minutes.
Is this a letdown? Not for me. I’m excited to see Foer spreading the word about spaced repetition.
Besides, three months, in four-minute sessions, is still incredibly fast. I’ve been trying to learn Spanish by Christmas for much longer, and as Christmas draws near, it doesn’t look like I’m going to reach my goal.
What have Foer and I been doing differently?
English-Based Mnemonics
We both focused on learning the 1000 most common words in our chosen languages. Actually, he learned an entire dictionary’s worth, but apparently the language, Lingala, only had 1,109 words in this dictionary.
Difference #1: Foer used English-based mnemonics. He would make strong visualizations for the word, but this visualization could rely on an English word.
… for motema, which means heart, I visualised a beating organ dripping blood on a blinking and purring computer modem.
The associations go like this: motema (heart) -> modem -> mental image of heart + modem
You’ll see this approach in many memory books.
I, on the other hand, tried to use no English at all, instead pairing the Spanish words with pictures. I was following the lead of an opera singer who has learned several languages using (among other tools) picture-based Anki flashcards.
My association would go like this:
corazón (heart) -> mental image of heart
According to this school of thought, pairing English with your foreign word is the last thing you want to do. You want to forget English, and connect these new words directly to the things themselves.
But does this approach actually work? For me, corazón is more like:
corazón (heart) -> “cor” is Latin for heart, right? Something like that… -> mental image of heart
And I have plenty of Spanish words that I remember by similar English words. It’s complicated.
Maybe I should take another look at English-based mnemonics.
Difference #2: Foer actually finished making his cards.
Finding images for Spanish vocabulary proved exceedingly difficult. I still can’t believe that no one, anywhere, has gotten around to making simple picture flashcards for the first 1000 Spanish words. I’d buy them in a heartbeat.
Myself, I got tired of hunting through clipart. This was supposed to be the fast way to learn a language.
Thus, Foer stuck with his “inferior” method and apparently now speaks Lingala. I took the high road and gave up.
Difference #3: Foer actually visited a place where they speak the language.
Never underestimate the power of immersion. Foer was surprised to discover how easily he was speaking Lingala, but this happened after he was in Africa.
When I finally decide to make Spanish a priority, I’ll spend a few weeks in a place where I’ll use it every day. Until then, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that my progress is slow.
Much More than 22 Hours
As a side note, Foer does mention that making his own Lingala mnemonics “required a good deal of work”. How much work? It doesn’t seem to matter, since it was “fun and engaging work”. Which is the right attitude.
But it’s important to include this time commitment, considering the headline’s giddy promise of “22 hours”.
Is Memorizing Vocabulary Enough to Learn a Language?
Plus, don’t you need more than 1,000 common words to actually learn a language? Of course, says Foer.
But it turns out to be just enough vocabulary to let you hit the ground running once you’re authentically immersed in a language. And, more importantly, that basic vocabulary gives you a scaffolding to which you can attach other words as you hear them.
He also notes that as he got all these words into his mind, he started to notice patterns and relationships.
I still wonder how he learned the syntax. If you read the short conversations in Lingala, you can see the verbs changing form. He does mention an old Foreign Language Institute textbook.
If I look over the most common Spanish words, I actually do recognize an awful lot of them. On paper. In their basic form.
But when I listen to spoken Spanish, or try to watch TV, I’m still lucky if I catch every fifth word.
Anyhow, on balance, I’m encouraged. One of Foer’s most charming characteristics is his unremitting insistence that he’s an ordinary guy who simply hunts down super-smart techniques. (Then follows through and uses them.)
If he learned a language with a web-based flashcard program (Memrise), English-based mnemonics, an old FSI textbook, and a visit to Africa – that’s good news.
Learning in the Breaks
Perhaps his most important point is that Memrise was just fun enough that he reviewed cards as a break. Between tasks.
What if instead of tabbing over to the web browser in search of some nugget of gossip or news, or opening up a mindless game such as Angry Birds, we could instead scratch the itch by engaging in a meaningful activity, such as learning a foreign language?
It’s an exciting vision.
What do you think? Do you use Anki, Mnemosyne, or one of those programs as a break? Or do they feel like more work?
Do you think the extra “game” features of Memrise could be a crucial difference in helping people follow through and keep learning their flashcards? Could the “game” factor change everything?
Comments
Timebox to match break length
I limit an Anki session to five minutes, and I review sessions as work breaks. If I've more time to review, then I change top-level decks after each session.
N.B.: Memrise has decks for emacs and for org-mode.
Hi Jay! Thanks for the note.
Hi Jay! Thanks for the note. I’m glad Anki works as a break for you.
Emacs and org-mode decks, eh? Have you tried
M-x keywiz?Thanks for another
Thanks for another interesting article.
Titles of articles may be extremely misleading in order to be more eye-catching as the one you mentioned.
I think the most important aspect of success of the person you mentioned in your article was the fact that he spoke with people in the target language. Modern scholary system put us into thinking that the language somehow is more text-based or as if the language is dictated by grammar rules when it's exactly opposite (there may be some exceptions like bokmal I guess), that's the speakers of the language who form the language as it is. Also speaking with native speakers of the language forces us to think in that language in order to respond quickly to what they're saying and also to understand everything. I'm not a big fun of mnemonics in learning a language, because as you've once written, it may disturb you from the real meaning BUT I think it may be helpful to some extend like remembering more difficult words or the spelling. I think that learning meanings of words in a foreign language by translating them to mother language isn't bad until it's overdone. It's something like practicing music with the metronome, it is very helpful, but it's bad if you depend on it all the time and can't play without it.
Maybe instead of trying to imagine a word as a picture, it would be a better idea to try to learn it from a definition from the target language as for example "Tiger is a big yellow cat with black stripes", which could be a definition given from the native speaker after being asked "What is a tiger?". But in order to understand such a definition one needs to know the words describing it, and in order to learn them one may learn those words by translating them to mother language. It may be another reason why speaking with people and overall contact with the language is so crucial in language learning process.
I wish I could fully express my thoughts but even if I write fast I can't cope with the tempo.
Your articles about daily thinking schedule encouraged me to capture my thoughts before sleep last night. My mind and thoughts are in a great chaos lately, or maybe they may just seem so. When I think about a subject many thoughts leads to another, one concept is linked with a lot of others, which may seem to be unrelated at first and I have problems with writing everything down on the go, so I decided to record my thought process instead of writing everything down and I found it much easier this way. I don't want to forget my ideas and conclusions and I think I'll give myself a chance and I'll record myself when I feel inspired. This made my thought process clearer after I spoke everything out laud. Maybe it somehow forced me to be more organized as if I were talking to a person.
Sorry that the form of this comment is much more messy that the one of the last ones but I have a really busy period in my life at the moment and I just can't to spend hours to make it perfect and still I need to spend more than an hour to write it down and make it understandable and because of that I don't write so many comments, but I decided to write the comment even if it's not so perfect or aesthetic than not to write it at all, I just hope that what I wrote makes sense and is readable.
I guess it's still not everything what I wanted to say. I hope it's not totally rubbish.
Keep on writing. What you write is inspiring and writing this comment down also led me to have some new ideas.
Hi Radoslaw, thanks as always
Hi Radoslaw, thanks as always for your thoughts. They’re not rubbish at all, and you certainly don’t need to feel you have to polish everything into perfect prose. Thanks too for your encouragement, it means a lot.
And I’m glad to hear you enjoy capturing your thoughts. Sometimes I have that sensation too, of too many thoughts at once, too many connections that don’t want to stand in neat lines of text. Have you looked into “mind maps”? When I feel flooded with connections, a mind map lets me get just the main ideas down, and show how they connect. It’s very different from prose, and can be fast and compact.
I was thinking about using
I was thinking about using them to write down my thoughts, I've read about them, but still I didn't got used to them. Maybe that's because I didn't manage to find "perfect" software for it, and writing things on paper is somehow tiring for me, because of the conciousness, that I could type something down, much faster that write it by hand. Maybe learning shorthand would be a good solution for this problem? And thanks for your reply!
Shorthand is hard to read, but abbreviations are great
Well, I tried Gregg shorthand and similar systems for awhile, but I found they are very difficult to read later, because they’re ambiguous. Did I write “caught” or “cot”? It worked fine for secretaries, because they would transcribe their notes into English while their memories were fresh. But it doesn’t work so well when the whole point is to avoid having to transcribe.
Abbreviations, on the other hand, are amazing. My favorite set of abbrevations is a long list of abbreviations that were used by telegraph operators. Because their use case demanded complete accuracy without any later transcriptions, these abbreviations are extremely easy to read later. Unlike shorthand, every abbrevation has only one possible meaning. Plus, you can use them whether writing or typing.
I find that abbreviations for common words make my mind maps much faster and more pleasant to write. Plus, I can fit more in the small spaces.
I don’t have a link to that list offhand – I’ll have to dig it up for a future post.
I’ve never found any mind map software I liked. A huge part of the charm of mind maps, for me, is the complete freedom of paper, the real colors of markers, and getting away from the screen. Trying to click around with a mouse defeats the purpose. Maybe this would be different with a tablet and a touchscreen.