Tuesday's Tip for Language Learning #11: Understanding How Remembering, Forgetting, & Lapses Work Can Make Your Language Learning Easier

Excerpt from Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star

Memory, Forgetting, and Lapses

 Just to reinforce the matter—or in case you are skipping around in this book and did not see the earlier memory discussion; there are three stages to memory: awareness/attention, encoding/storing, and recall/retrieval. In this section, we are focused on what happens after you have learned something and need to use it.

When you want to remember, you will need to recall the information you have learned. One of three things he can happen, and we have all experienced all three: we remember it perfectly (yippee—hope that happens always, but it does not), we remember it imperfectly (oh, too typical), or do not remember it all (even if we remember having spent time studying it). Knowing what has happened in each case, brings us to a point of orienting our study and actions for better recall, as well as teaching us not to beat ourselves up when we have a glitch or lapse.

Remembering perfectly

For perfect recall to happen, you have to be aware of what you are learning, let’s say it is the word, magazin, in Russian, a false cognate that means store. You must be aware that the word means store in English, and it would help to have an image of a Russian-style store in your mind.

You then store the word, together with its picture if you have one, in your long-term memory through repetition and elaborate rehearsal. Perhaps you see a Russian store in some news reports (written or broadcast). Perhaps you use it in a role play in class. Perhaps you write a little story about how you would stock a store. The ways to store this word are limitless, but elaborate rehearsal works better than simple repetition.

Now you need to use the word for a discussion or conversation. Or, perhaps you are given a picture of a store on a quiz and have to identify the picture, using the Russian word magazin. To do that, you have to recall the word—and you do.

 

Remembering imperfectly

You may well have noticed all the important aspects of the word and stored it solidly, but when you are asked to recall it, you identify the word as meaning magazine. Tricked by the false cognate! But you know better! You paid special attention to the fact that it is a false cognate. What happened?

You have experienced retrieval error. Something went wrong. We don’t know what it is—and it probably won’t happen the next time. Still, it happened this time, and that caused you embarrassment or a lower grade. In retrieval error, you have trouble pulling together all the parts associated with a piece of information. Colors, shapes, intensity, semantics, image, etc. are stored in different “compartments,” and your working memory has to open all those compartments and pull the piece of information back together properly for perfect recall to occur. It is amazing that most of the time we do have perfect recall.

In this case, a connection should exist in your mind between the word that sounds like magazine (meaning store in Russian and journal in English) and two pictures, store and journal. The retrieval error that occurred was hearing the Russian word and connecting it with the English picture. It happens. Brush it off, and go on. We cannot prevent retrieval error. It just happens. Just like in your own language when you get your “mords wixed” or pull up the wrong up. We have all experienced retrieval error and more than once. I once “retrieved” the word bardak (brothel) in Russian when I was really searching for baidarka (canoe/kayak); I very much confused the person I was with, who did not speak English, so it took a little effort to unwind what had happened. So, again, brush it off, and go on.

 

Not remembering

Forgetting can happen when you start with incomplete understanding without realizing it, encode something improperly, or have some form of memory impairment. And then sometimes, everything was understood and properly encoded—and right on the tip of your top but does not roll off. That happens not just in your foreign language; that happens also in your native language.

Incomplete understanding.

If you only partially understand, there will be little to remember because you will not have all the parts of the information needed for encoding properly. So, only pieces are going to make the trip to your long-term memory, making it not possible to retrieve the whole of the information. So, don’t leave a class or a study session until you fully, completely, no-questions-asked understand.

If you indeed do not have information stored to make a perfect recall, time to spend more time with the information, whether it is words, phrases, texts, grammar points, or cultural tidbits. Read, read, read. Reading provides for elaborate rehearsal. If you know something in part, it allows you to complete the full picture. If you know something weakly, all the extra repetition will have you know it strongly, which is what you need for perfect recall.

 

Improper encoding

Similar to incomplete understanding, if you misunderstand something, you will “encode” it (store it) inaccurately, which may make it impossible to retrieve. Paying careful attention helps. Make sure when you repeat it, you repeat it correctly

For listening and speaking, think about building your ear-sharpening skills. A lot of sounds in your target language do not sound like they do in English; there may be a similar sound (or not), and there is a pretty big range of “coming close” (as in yellow blue bus for ya lyublyu vas) that permits a native speaker to understand you though you are speaking with a very strong accent. The other way around, however, does not work well. If you cannot say it right, chances are you are not hearing it right in a classroom environment where the teacher and other learners can help. However, when you are watching movies or listening to broadcasts, you may not understand a word that you really do know because you have been mispronouncing it or pronouncing it poorly. Go back, ask your teacher or native-speaker friend for help, and get it right! If it is properly encoded, you will remember it when you need to (except for an occasional, unpredictable, pesky, and fortunately rare retrieval error.

An important condition in learning to think that can affect coding is situated cognition (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Situated cognition research tells us that our acquisition of knowledge is constructed within and linked to the activity, context, and culture in which it was learned.

 

Memory impairment

Certain medicines, such as antihistamines and allergy meds, can block memory and make you seem to forget. You can compensate by increasing the number of memory strategies you use.

There are other things that can impair memory, too, like alcohol and drugs; if you want to be a super star language learner, avoid them.

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