Notes on remembering.
Tactics for tutored learners, the memory science we build on, and the odd look behind the curtain. New posts most weeks.
The testing effect: why recalling a word beats rereading it
Rereading is the world's favorite study method, and one of its weakest. Pulling the answer out of your own head, even clumsily, does more for a memory than 10 more looks at the page.
Your tutor taught you 15 words. You kept 3.
italki admits the retention half of your lesson is your unpaid job, then hands you a tool that shut down in 2016. Here's the method it skips.
Why you understand the show but not the person at the counter
You follow 50 minutes of television, then a barista says six words and you're gone. Conversation runs 222 words a minute against a lecture's 173, and the words lose their edges.
When you are actually ready for your first novel
The test takes one page and a tally. Nation put a number on the answer: 8,000 to 9,000 word families reads a novel, and even then 1 word in 50 is new.
How many flashcards a day should you actually do?
Set 50 new cards in week 1 and by week 6 you open the app to 400 reviews and close it again. The new-card number is a standing order, not a daily choice.
Is it too late to learn a language at 40?
669,498 people gave the famous answer: a change at 17.4 years. Read the paper and it measures how fast you learn grammar, not whether you still can.
How many words you actually need before the trip
The counts people quote are for reading. Nation measured speech separately, and it is cheaper: the first 1,000 word families cover more of a conversation than of a page.
Why you know the word in the app and not at the restaurant
You knew servilleta at 8am on the sofa. At 9pm with a waiter waiting, nothing. The word is not missing, it is filed somewhere the restaurant cannot reach.
How to pick a first show that is actually at your level
Every list sends beginners to Narcos. Researchers counted the vocabulary each genre demands, and the gap between the easiest and hardest runs to thousands of words.
The production effect: why saying it out loud beats reading it
Reading a word aloud made it far easier to recognise later. Then MacLeod ran the version where everything was read aloud, and the whole advantage disappeared.
What to ask for in your first lesson so lesson 2 is better
Researchers coded 686 corrections in real classrooms. The one teachers reach for most, repeating your sentence back fixed, worked the worst. Ask for the other one.
Subtitles: target language, native, or none
Dutch viewers who read native-language subtitles got 17% worse at hearing new speech. Viewers reading target-language subtitles got 19% better.
Graded readers work, for the opposite reason they are sold
25 new words went into one graded reader. About 1 was still there 3 months later. The books still earn their place, just not for the reason on the back cover.
Do bilingual brains age slower? What 86,149 people showed
A study across 27 European countries found multilingual speakers were 2.17 times less likely to show accelerated brain aging. The effect scaled with the number of languages.
The pretesting effect: why guessing before you learn works
Duolingo shows you a word you have never seen and asks you to pick its picture. You get it wrong. That wrong guess teaches you more than reading the answer would have.
Sleep and memory: why your vocab consolidates overnight
The word you half-learned tonight gets replayed, filed, and judged somewhere around 3am. Skip the sleep and you skip the filing.
Interleaving: why mixing your words beats blocking them
Studying one theme at a time feels tidy. Shuffling everything together feels like a mess, and it doubled test scores in Rohrer's classrooms.
Dual coding: why images make vocabulary stick
A word stored with an image lives in two memory systems, and either one can rescue the other mid-sentence. The research, plus one wry catch.
The 20-minute rule: why cramming before a lesson backfires
You block out an hour before your Tuesday session and drill the whole deck. It feels productive. It's quietly the least efficient thing you could be doing.
The word-frequency curve: why 650 words does so much
Spanish has maybe 100,000 words. You'll use about 1,000 of them for nearly everything you say. Zipf's law is the best deal in language learning.
Why your brain forgets Tuesday's vocab by Friday
The forgetting curve is old, brutal, and remarkably precise. Here's what Ebbinghaus figured out in 1885, and why it still runs your review schedule.
Comprehensible input vs. flashcards: do you need both?
One camp says just watch shows. The other grinds decks like a part-time job. The research has an answer, and it'll mildly annoy both camps.
How to grade yourself honestly on a flashcard
The scheduler believes every grade you give it, and a deck full of generous grades quietly falls apart. A rubric for the moment after the flip.
Desirable difficulty: why the struggle is the point
Spacing, testing, interleaving: every method this blog recommends feels worse than its alternative. One framework explains why the worse-feeling one keeps winning.
Cognates and false friends: your unfair head start
You walked into Spanish already knowing thousands of words. The research says they're cheaper to learn and slower to forget. A few of them are lying to you.
Sound before spelling: why native audio matters
A word is a sound long before it's a spelling. Learn it from text first and your English reading habits will pronounce it for you, badly, forever.
Speaking anxiety: getting through your first tutor sessions
Your heart rate has no business being this high over a video call about the weather. The dread is real and measurable, and specific things shrink it.
How FSRS schedules your reviews (under the hood)
Every card in your deck is secretly three numbers. What they mean, how your grades move them, and why this algorithm earned the job on a billion reviews.
Learning plateaus: why progress stalls and how to push through
Month 2, every week felt like a level-up. Month 8, the needle just sits there. You haven't stopped improving; you've stopped being able to see it.