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.
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 630 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.
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