MSI Press Blog

  Most people use calendars, apps, flashcards, sticky notes. I use something else—something harder to explain and impossible to hold: a memory system that's lived-in, patterned, and quietly persistent. When I was a scholarship student at Penn State, I participated in three memory experiments. I liked being a subject—it paid, and money was tight. But each time, I ended up skewing the data. The researchers weren’t sure how to process results that didn’t show the typical learning curve. After the third experiment, I was gently asked not to participate further. They weren’t allowed to ask follow-up questions, according to protocol. But if they had, I could’ve told them exactly what was happening. One experiment presented 52 three-word sentences in a made-up language, each translated into English. The first ten sentences introduced new vocabulary; the remaining ones simply rearranged or repeated those words in different combinations. Afterward, we were asked to translate additional se...

  Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication) from My 20th Language by Betty Lou Leaver, Ph.D. --  Chapter 1 The Incredibly Important Role of University Studies By the time I graduated from Penn State University shortly after my twenty-first birthday, I was definitively fluent in five languages by any reasonable definition of fluency: English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish, listed in order of proficiency at that time (though today Russian would rank right after English). I had completed advanced courses in literature, stylistics, linguistics—including morphology, syntax, and advanced grammar—and composition in all of them. I had also taken teaching methods in Spanish under a professor widely considered the best in foreign language pedagogy. My proficiency extended well beyond basic communication. I could write essays, poetry, and fiction in all five languages, tailoring my language use to specific audiences. I could read virtually anything and grasp cultural implicatio...

  If there’s one truth all language learners must face, it’s this: memory matters. Whether you’re building a basic vocabulary, mastering grammatical structures, or internalizing entire passages of speech, your ability to remember and retrieve what you’ve learned is central to your progress. And yes, this includes the much-maligned practice of rote memory. While modern teaching often favors “natural” learning and immersion, there’s no getting around the fact that some elements of language acquisition—like spelling, pronunciation, and syntax—benefit from repetition and memorization. But not all repetition is created equal. If you’ve ever struggled to retain a long word, complex sentence, or structured piece of discourse, you might be practicing in the wrong direction. Let me introduce you to a technique that makes memory work more efficiently : backward buildup . What Is Backward Buildup? Backward buildup is a simple yet powerful strategy that involves memorizing language startin...