The Velcro Theory of Learning

I like this analogy (and the photo on the blog post is awesome). I'm a huge believer in repetition -- I've found it's the only thing that works for me -- but repetition in a single context gets boring after a while. I think working more angles from which learning items can approached is a key to helping learners move from one level to the next.

It's definitely a case of different strokes for difderent folks, but the type of rote memorization that many people use is actually of little value, to my mind.

Yes, I think you don't really learn a word until you "internalize" it by encountering it in a dozen or more different contexts, over an extended period of time. In many cases, this can only be accomplished by extensive reading, since there are many words that simply don't come up in conversation often enough. Sometimes there's a shortcut when a context has a particularly strong emotional association or personal significance for you. In those cases, sometimes even a single encounter with a word will be enough to remember it permanently. But that's exceptional. It's important to have as many different contexts as possible, with not too long a time gap between each of them. Intensively studying words in the same context over and over again (reviewing the same lesson repeatedly) seems to have little long-term retention value, at least for me. It's also very tedious. And if there's a word you've never seen before and you're unlikely to encounter it again in the reasonably near future, then it's probably a waste of time to try to learn it at that point: just release it back into the ocean of words, and you'll catch it again some time in the future. Trying to religiously remember all new vocabulary items presented in any given ChinesePod lesson is a mistake, I think. Rote memorization does have its uses in specific instances. It can act as a temporary "scaffolding" for remembering words or characters until you're able to permanently "internalize" them. But this is only useful if there's a word or character that you're on the verge of learning (you've seen it before and feel like you really ought to remember it but don't). In that case, rote memorization can hold it in your mind long enough until the next few times you encounter it in new contexts, at which point you'll have internalized it. However, rote memorization of vocabulary or characters that you're unlikely to encounter again soon in a natural and unforced way is very likely to fail. In particular, if all your learning of vocabulary or characters was acquired through rote memorization, then if you take a break from learning Chinese for a year or two you'll find you've forgotten everything and have to practically start from scratch. On the other hand, once you've internalized a particular word by encountering it naturally in multiple contexts, then it stays in your mind, and even if you take a break of several years, you can get back to nearly your previous level of reading and listening proficiency within a few weeks. However, ease of conversational ability, ie actively producing language instead of merely passively understanding it, might take a bit longer. Having a good memory can actually be a drawback for learning languages, in that you can be tempted to fall back on your ability to memorize rather than going through the natural process of internalizing vocabulary. That can be disastrous because sooner or later we all take an extended break from language learning. One final case where rote memorization can be useful is cases where you find yourself repeatedly confusing two things that you really ought to know, especially when learning something new messes up something you already know. For instance, if you've learned 暖 from the Global Warming lesson, and later you learn 援 and 缓 and the new characters introduce confusion which wasn't there before because now you can't remember anymore if 暖 is huan or nuan or yuan, then rote memorization (in the form of flashcards) can help. In other words, rote memorization is only useful for stuff that you already know, or ought to know, or are on the verge of learning, to get you over one final hurdle to "internalization". In most other cases it's of little permanent value.

aeflow, Lots of good points here. (Are you a language teacher?) Reading certainly can help your learning, but remember that spoken vocabulary and lexis are quite different from the written forms. (Sometimes they act almost like different dialects.) Your other point about words that you are not likely to re-encounter in the near future is also valid. There's really very little point in memorizing words that you will not see again. You have to be selective about this because there's only so much you can retain.

aeflow, Great points. Very intelligent observations.

Another possibility with regards to "context" -- I have found that in my attempts at "massive comprehensible input" (via my iPod and iTunes), I've begun to associate words with the physical context that I'm in when it repeated a certain time. When I think of the word 铁公鸡, for instance, I think of an old woman near that I saw at the subway stop near my old job, because when I heard that word in that particular Advanced lesson that's who I was looking at, and it clicked. I don't know if this means anything in the greater context of learning and memory, but it works for me :)

I agree with many points made here. What I find really works for me is using a word or phrase in a real life situation. After that I seem to always have it in the back of my head to use again in similar situations etc. Nothing beats learning and being able to use what you learned in everyday life.

Finding other contexts for words isn't easy though... When I find myself trying too hard to memorise a word it usually means I haven't had enough exposure to it. When that happens I usually type it into a search engine (baidu.com is good) and read over the results. If that doesn't help, I just press the '图片‘ button and up pop hundreds of photos of the word in question.