It may seem like trivial advice, yet for some reason, few of us actually follow it. Since our school days, they’ve drummed it into our ears: “You must study regularly,” “You must study regularly.” And what do we do? It goes in one ear and out the other. And that’s a shame. This only shows that we fail to see the profound meaning in what seems banal; we don’t fully grasp the benefit of this advice. And we don’t grasp its benefit because we’ve never seriously considered how our memory works or how our thinking functions.
The point is that learning a language requires very active work from memory. And memory is structured such that it absolutely needs information passing through it to be repeated fairly often in some form or another. Otherwise, memory discards that information as cluttering junk.
Nature is designed so that what is genuinely necessary for life and activity is remembered much better. But how can memory know whether something is needed for a person’s existence and activities? Very simply: it makes a forecast. Yes, yes. Memory, or rather the human brain, knows how to make forecasts on a subconscious level.
If information enters the brain once, it remains there, but only in short-term memory. If the brain doesn’t receive similar information soon after, a rapid process of forgetting begins due to the information’s perceived uselessness and irrelevance.
Why does this happen? Every moment, a massive stream of information flows into us. Remembering it all is impossible, and also unnecessary. The human brain is forced to somehow determine what’s valuable among the incoming data and what isn’t. The simplest way to do this is to check how often a particular piece of information repeats in the incoming stream. If it enters only once, forget it like a bad dream. Moreover, it’s easiest for the brain to check information for repetition over a short period, say, a few minutes. For several minutes, it can still retain almost the entire incoming stream of information, albeit subconsciously. After those few minutes, it will simply be forced to push out the old information to clear space for the new.
So, the brain checks if any information has repeated within a few minutes. If it has, that information moves to the next storage facility: medium-term memory. Unlike short-term memory, which has the highest capacity but the shortest lifespan for each piece of information, medium-term memory has medium capacity and medium storage time.
Let’s return, however, to the memorization process. So, some information has passed the first hurdle – short-term memory – and landed in medium-term memory. What now? Now the brain isn’t in a hurry; it no longer needs to check every few seconds whether any part of the information in medium-term memory has repeated. The main thing is that it repeats at least a couple of times before the end of the medium term, which starts counting down immediately after the information moves to medium-term storage. This term can range from an hour to a day; the storage duration is individual for each person.
If the information repeats, the brain transfers it with a clear conscience to the long-term memory department, which will do its utmost to keep it active for as long as possible, perhaps even for a lifetime.
This is how I envision the workings of human memory.
What conclusions can be drawn from this?
I. Studying regularly is extremely essential. II. You should try to repeat the information you’re learning at least 3 times: the first time a few minutes after the initial encounter, the second time after an hour to a day, and the third time after a week to a month. This is necessary to ensure the memorized material sequentially moves from short-term to medium-term, and then to long-term memory, and stays there for a long time. III. Repetitions of material portions overlap: in one lesson, it’s desirable to learn something new, repeat what was covered in the previous lesson, and reinforce material studied relatively long ago. IV. This leads to the necessity of regular study.
It is precisely this model, for the reasons described above, that I tried to implement when developing my vocabulary trainer, Open Book, as well as in the English reading course based on the fairy tale The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I will use this model in all my future developments as well.