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How I learned a language in 22 hours.
Okay, he didn't become fluent: what happened is that he used classic memory techniques to memorize a large list of the most commonly-used words in a particular African language, and he did it in short sessions spread out over several months, totalling 22 hours. But it was enough to enable a sort of basic communication.
Okay, he didn't become fluent: what happened is that he used classic memory techniques to memorize a large list of the most commonly-used words in a particular African language, and he did it in short sessions spread out over several months, totalling 22 hours. But it was enough to enable a sort of basic communication.
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tl;dr-- learning != memorization. Language learning really, really != memorization.
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He's also using the concept of learning vocabulary to talk about the process of getting things into your short-term memory and then into your long-term memory, and how scientists have found that the usual methods of studying don't work as well as short bursts of studying repeated at differing intervals. As someone with ADHD and the resulting abysmal study skills, I can see how this would be immensely useful to me: yes, memorizing vocabulary lists, formulas, facts, etc. Making the connections between them is something I'm decently good at (that's how I skated through all of school and grad school with acceptable but not stellar grades: grasping the connections, but not the minutiae) and can worry about later.
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*shrug*
Different language-learning techniques work better for different people. If all I had to learn a language from was a glossary, I would have to start by breaking the word list down into a morphology problem set and abstracting everything I could about the structure before I even tried to memorize the words; if I went the other way, the vocab would just be a distraction. This is why my Latin is still so much better than my German, even though I've used it much less-- I was taught Latin by an approach that didn't even attempt to teach vocab until we hit the second-year curriculum, because we could always look it up.
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