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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

> If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.

I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?

And there's also the Kiwi chap, Nigel Richards, who memorised the whole French Scrabble dictionary in order to win the French world Scrabble championship, without learning any French in the process.

(Whether you call what he did to the French word list 'understanding' is up for debate, I guess. I am fairly sure he went much deeper into understanding the underlying probability distributions of letters in French words than most speakers, but he couldn't read a newspaper.)

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I went to a Saturday school for many of my childhood years, as my dad wanted me to learn Arabic. They were bad at teaching the language, but did get us to read the script and memorise several Quran verses. You were supposed to get "rewards" in heaven just for memorising without understanding. To this day I can recite Al-Fatiha [0] despite not understanding a word, being an atheist, and not having prayed for maybe 15 years.

[0] https://myislam.org/surah-fatiha/

Same, as a kid there were a whole bunch of bible verses to memorize, which was required. To this day I can recite quite a few of them, and (despite now being an atheist) I still occasionally have some of them pop into my head in situations where it might be relevant. Memorization is an extremely powerful tool, and particularly religions have known and used this for millenia.

The difference between your experience and mine is that I have no idea what the verses are saying! They almost never pop into my head because I can't relate them to situations.

It's possible to just memorize the words, of course. But for myself, I find that very tedious and difficult to make myself do (nor very worthwhile), and much prefer becoming deeply acquainted with the text in order to memorize it.

Yes, understanding can help memorisation. I was merely arguing against understanding being _necessary_.

Memorisation without understanding often ends up producing things like Mariah Carey's classic hit "Ken Lee".

So?

I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?

True, I am doing this myself. 4 days a week and plan to continue for the next 10 years. Memorized several pages so far with a lot more to go without understanding any of it.

May I ask why? I as an atheist did memorize some part of the Bible for the fun of it but I understand the language.

Because it is important to me as a Muslim. Also it is challenging, interesting, to try and memorize an entire book.

... but wouldn't it make to learn classical Arabic alongside with that?

In Islam there's a certain reverence for memorizing the Quran, unlike in Christianity.

In fact, being a Hafiz or your child being a Hafiz is a point of pride.

This in part goes back to Islamic lore/history.

Another part is that there is the belief that there are rewards associated with, being accompanied by angels iirc.

> I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?

I think the main issue being described in the article and in the comments is that rote memorization like you described is both much harder and also meaningless. In fact, it is much harder because it is meaningless.

So yes, it can be done, but also: why?

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