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Rote learning: A bad rap? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5660 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 9 of 16 19 October 2010 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Neither can I, if the alternative is to remember something the first time you come across it. Most folks have to rely on frequent repetition. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6002 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 16 19 October 2010 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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"Rote" is not the same as "repetition".
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| oneplus Diglot Newbie South Africa Joined 5181 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: Russian*, English | Message 11 of 16 19 October 2010 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Whether it only about reading, or listening as well? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5336 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 12 of 16 19 October 2010 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't learn anything by rote, be it in language study, science, history, philosophy or anything else. Concepts I remember well; concrete facts and items I struggle with. So what I do is wrap things up in a web of meaning which I can then easily re-call, as with meaningful concepts one doesn't have an arbitrary list but a series of connections which one can "pull" from any side at will and then everything else follows by its own logic.
I despised learning in school because it was all by rote. I think I could number the things I learnt in all those years with the fingers of my hands. More to the point in language study, I don't memorize declension tables or conjugation lists either. I simply let them sink in through example sentences. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ocius Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5581 days ago 48 posts - 77 votes Speaks: English*, German, Ancient Greek Studies: French, Latin, Sanskrit | Message 13 of 16 19 October 2010 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
What is "rote," then? According to wikipedia:
And according to google:
I guess one could claim the difference is the "lack of understanding," whatever that means? Personally, I would put vocabulary (flashcards, wordlists), declension tables, etc., under the rote learning category, even if one uses mnemonics, etc., to aid the process. "Rote" to me just means repeating something to the point where it is nearly automatic. Edited by Ocius on 19 October 2010 at 7:34pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6002 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 14 of 16 20 October 2010 at 10:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
If "rote" only meant "repetition", we wouldn't need the word "rote" at all, because we all know and understand the word "repetition". It is all down to "lack of understanding". Consider history. Rote learning is the list of dates of battles, kings, presidents etc. Meaningful learning is learning about the political contexts behind the various events. So you can learn by rote that Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, or you can use the political context to learn meaningfully. Kennedy vs Nixon, Kennedy came across better on TV. Lots of pictures of the two together. Kennedy was shot. Who was his VP? Johnson. Johnson became president. Johnson was re-elected by the largest majority ever. Some claim this landslide was public reaction to the assasination. Finally Nixon got in. What do we associate with Nixon? Watergate. Nixon resigns, so it goes to his running mate, who was... Ford. "I assume the Presidency under extraordinary circumstances.... This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts." Ford inherited a dire situation -- the economy was in a terrible state, so he never got re-elected. As I'm not American, I didn't actually know who Ford and Johnson were until I wrote this example. But because I built a meaningful framework around them, I will now remember much better than if I had spent hours on end saying "Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford". Repeating all the little links in there is repetition, but it's not rote. It's using a framework of interlinked events and meanings to remember, not a litany of discrete facts or events. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6694 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 15 of 16 20 October 2010 at 10:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I agree that the lack of any attempt to understand the data is central in rote memorization - you get a set of data, and you get the order "learn those". And the most obvious, but also least efficient way to deal with that order is to repeat, repeat, repeat...
The kind of data you are most likely to assciate with rote memorization would be lists of any kind, and in that case the systems used by memory artists may be very efficient. They are mostly based on associations to previously learned series of data, but rhyming etc. may also be efficient because we learn one 'Gestalt' easier rather than 27 single items. But most linguistic data are not found in the form of fixed lists, and then the trick is to make those data meaningful. The point is that if you do make the data meaningful then it will also be easier to learn them even as series ... such as lists of rulers with the years they reigned, as illustrated with American political data in Cainntear's message above. Or the cases governed by prepositions. Of course this means that you aren't really doing rote learning any more, but you learn data in a systematized way that is closer to rote learning than it is to simple unstructured 'absorption'. Edited by Iversen on 20 October 2010 at 11:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6033 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 16 of 16 20 October 2010 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It only has one meaning. Look it up in a dictionary. This thread isn't a copy of Through the looking glass. 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean Here are a couple of definitions thanks to google memorization by repetition The process of learning or committing something to memory through repetition, in a mechanical way, usually by hearing and repeating aloud, often without full attention to comprehension or thought for the meaning; Mechanical routine; a fixed, habitual, repetitive, or mechanical course of ... rotely - By rote, in rote fashion; machine-like learning: A learning technique which avoids grasping the inner complexities and inferences of the subject that is being learned and instead focuses on memorizing the material so that it can be recalled by the learner exactly the way it was read or heard.
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