MSI Press Blog

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. Reme...

  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...

  I am a linguist. That means I live and breathe words: I analyze them, collect them, play with them, and use them professionally every day. So when I take memory tests that rely heavily on recalling lists of words, I tend to do... oddly well. Maybe too well. Case in point: I volunteered for an Alzheimer’s research study recently—just doing my part for science. One of the first tasks? A verbal memory test. I breezed through it. Actually, I aced it. Perfect score. As a 70-year-old, that put me in the same memory tier as a 40-year-old, and the researchers raised their eyebrows. I was declared an “extreme outlier” and—because I had agreed to be part of the study—was promptly invited to donate some of my DNA for further analysis. I tried to explain: “I get paid to remember words.” They smiled politely and handed me the blood draw kit anyway. Now, here's the question that still nags at me: is this kind of test really measuring memory across the board, or is it just measuring one k...

  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...