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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5407 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 9 of 10 22 April 2014 at 11:20pm | IP Logged |
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I agree that we need time to integrate and consolidate what we learn, and believe that sleep plays a very important part in that process.
On that note, one of the questions I've been pondering recently is whether I have to keep reviewing words and phrases (e.g., after 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, etc.) until the point that I can expect they will reappear naturally (e.g., within 1-2 years, depending on my listening/reading habits), or if there is a cut-off point where further reviews are no longer necessary because the words and phrases I've learned are now adequately embedded in long-term memory? Drawing upon my own experience, I learned elementary level German in school, and then didn't use it again for 20 years. After living in Germany for a few days and trying to initially chat in German with any unlucky soul I could find, I discovered that most of what I had learned in school came flooding back. Miraculously, the words were still shelved away in my dusty library of a brain, and all I needed to do was to get the librarian to spring clean a bit and fix up the filing system. I've since been further encouraged by studies concerning long-term memory recall in second language learning. Bahrick and Phelps (Bahrick, 1979; Bahrick and Phelps, 1987) indicate that it is possible to learn a list of 50 Spanish-English word pairs and review them each day for just one week, and then score 73% on a multiple choice recall test 8 years later without (apparently) any further reviews. This number reportedly rose to 86% for a comparable group who reviewed the same list each month over a period of half a year, and were then also tested 8 years later following their last review. So how long do we need to keep battling away with reviews before it really starts to sink in? According to the Anki 2.0 User Manual, "a mature card is one that has an interval of 21 days or greater", where a graduating interval is defined as "the delay between answering Good on a card with no steps left, and seeing the card again." Assuming a basic spacing algorithm where intervals for easily recalled "Good" cards are doubled each time, reaching a 21 day interval could take at least somewhere in the region of 1-2 months. This aligns with emk's findings above, and it makes me wonder if scheduling spaced reviews beyond this is really necessary, or whether instead 1-2 months might be enough time to adequately "digest"? A time period of 1-2 months is just a simple estimate here of course, and the real time it takes to reach that 21 day interval would naturally vary from person to person, and from phrase to phrase, as well depend upon the amount of time a language learner can invest and the regularity in which this occurs, and the sophistication and adaptive nature of the formula they use for scheduling ongoing Anki reviews. However, I'm intrigued by this optimal 21 day threshold. Does anyone know why the guys at Anki settled on this interval for card maturity? I've heard 2-3 weeks being suggested as a key threshold in the longer ongoing process of memory consolidation from time to time (although I've forgotten the exact studies right now), as well as 30 days for habit formation being quoted on a variety of popular blogs. Perhaps these sources, or some other experimental findings, support 21 days as a key interval. Any ideas? And what does "maturity" really mean in this sense? Is a "mature" word or phrase more fixed in memory and resistant to forgetting? And doesn't this also hinge upon it reappearing and being applied in a variety of contexts? Or perhaps "maturity" here simply means that a certain level of automaticity has been reached beyond which further reviews in the same context would lead to very little improvement (see Automaticity and language learning for further discussion)? A subtly thought-provoking thread, this one... :) Edited by Teango on 23 April 2014 at 12:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Elanguest Newbie Malta elanguest.com Joined 3717 days ago 19 posts - 26 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 10 05 May 2014 at 1:27pm | IP Logged |
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I once had the experience of taking a break from Spanish for about a year--both study and practice--and after that
I had a conversation with some old friends in Spanish and they said my Spanish was better than before. I could even notice the difference myself. I think sometimes allowing a bit of time to "ripen" can really help. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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