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Comment by historia_novae | Hacker News Reader

>I'm of the opinion that this leads to a good rule of thumb: never memorize anything

Did you ever learn another language? It's impossible without memorizing a massive amount of things, especially when the writing system is different than the one one is familiar with. In fact the most famous researcher in vocabulary learning (Paul Nation) states in one of his book that rote learning is one of the most efficient use of time.

I'm of the reverse opinion that memorizing things is a "secret trick" particularly effective, that is put aside by a lot of people because it takes effort.

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I can't speak for the GP, but my personal experience is also that I really dislike memorization. That being said, I speak 5 languages, have written books in two of them, have given public presentation in three and can introduce myself and go and buy bread in a few more.

That's in addition to computer languages, of course :)

I suspect that the parts of the brain involving in learning by rote and learning a new language are somewhat different. When I learn a new language, I'm desperately trying to connect anything I see to something I already know. When I learn a multiplication table or a list of unrelated dates, it doesn't work nearly as well.

I also dislike it. As a small child, I remember hating the boredom of needing to learn by rote the times tables at school. That left my appreciation of mathematics scarred for many years. Only when I was approaching my teens I started to like math again, when presented geometry at school. That makes me think, does this traumatic experience with arithmetic tables right at the beginning is what gives math a bad reputation among lots of students, setting them in a course to hate the subject for life? Sometimes I think it would have been better for society to settle in a number system with a smaller base, say 8 or 6, instead of 10, so the tables got a lot smaller (64 or 36 entries, respectively, instead of 100), giving young students a better experience with aritmethics from the outset.

I speak 7 languages (learning an 8th) and can relate to remembering things in context being more effective than rote memorization.

That said, some types of rote memorization do help accelerate learning. In language learning I often come across fundamental words that don’t occur frequently enough for me to internalize automatically but yet occur frequently enough to block comprehension when encountered (it’s little words like “put” or “place”). For these words, I just put them in Anki in sentence context and do a few rounds of spaced repetition to get them in my system.

In my opinion Anki shouldn’t be used for core vocabulary but it’s useful for reinforcing and “cleaning up” words on the fringes that one doesn’t encounter that often but that are very useful.

I speak two languages, one of which is English. I learned them in my early formational years, so I wouldn't consider myself to have learned them using "active" memorization. I was also conversational in Finnish as a child, though I've since completely forgotten the language.

Learning new languages no doubt involves a lot of memorization no matter which way you look at it, but I think you'd agree that the "active" kind is much more mentally taxing than the passive "immersion" kind, the latter of which I take no issue with. I also don't contend that learning a new language as an adult necessarily involves active rote learning.

I have had to learn other languages at school, including ones with non-Latin writing systems. It did involve a lot of rote learning, which I did to pass the classes, shortly after which I forgot everything. I personally don't value learning new languages, an opinion which I realize might come across as a bit uncultured.

Curious, I've learned English to a nearly native level without memorizing a single word.

How does one learn a language without committing it to memory (the meaning of memorizing).

conscious vs unconscious memorization

This seems to focus on the wrong part of the benefit of memorization, I don’t think the method of putting the information in or ‘active’ memorization is what provides the benefit so much so as it is that the information is available for active recall.

One doesn't, but there is a clear distinction between attempting to learn a language by memorizing its words and grammar, and learning it through context.

To actually understand a language in the same way we understand our native language, we cannot learn the language by memorizing the meanings of words and treating each sentence like a logic puzzle to be solved.

Practical knowledge of language is largely tacit.

A native speaker does not need to know what tense a word is in to use them, they do not even need to understand what a verb is. Explicit grammatical understanding can help us reason about a language, but it is not necessary to learn it.

I’m curious about your definition of the word memorization here, surely you’re not looking up every word in a multi-lingual dictionary?

I draw a distinction between active learning (which takes place when you practice a language) and rote learning. I speak quite a few languages (with varying success) and learned most of my vocabulary from practice (which includes reading). I never thought of learning words as exercising my memory, it's just practice.

Active recall is a key component of successful memorization, which is why the popular system of spaced-repetition flashcards is very much based on it. Actually, even pre-flashcard systems of organized rote learning tend to feature it, e.g. via being asked to recite some short text (the "lesson") word-for-word until it is learned by sheer habit.

For me a language is easier to learn if I can actually use it. For me his rule of thumb is less a rule and more like how my mind works (and to agree all I guess). I can memorize unused facts, but it gets lost in big life changes usually which is really frustrating.

edit: add side note

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