Hello there.

Welcome to Ling-oh! issue 2.

Our brains are amazing. But let's be honest, they're also annoyingly good at forgetting stuff.

As language learners, this poses an interesting challenge. To learn a language we need to get a lot of new words, phrases and grammar into our heads, and we need it all to stick around for a while.

It would be really helpful if we could just turn off forgetting.

Well, the good news is, we sort of can.

Why do we forget?

In 1880, the German psychologist Ebbinghaus ran experiments on memory to figure out exactly how we forget things. His work on The Forgetting Curve is still relevant today.

He discovered that memory drops sharply at first but then levels off. The most significant amount of forgetting happens soon after learning. Newly learned information is halved in just days if no effort is made to retain it.

This shouldn't be too surprising. It's easy to imagine how the brain has evolved this way. If we don't need a piece of information, why should our brains want to keep it?

But that really gets in the way of language learning.

How do we turn it off?

Now this may sound strange, but let's look at people with big biceps for the answer.

The body doesn't need big biceps. You don't get them from going to work, cooking dinner or taking out the trash. Unless you have a lot of trash.

You get big biceps by taking smaller ones to the gym and putting artificial strain on them until the body adapts. You hack the body into believing it needs them.

It turns out we can do the same to our brains to remember things for longer.

It's the trying that counts

Flashcards are a popular way to achieve this, but why do they work?

Flashcards combine two useful approaches for strengthening the neural connections in our brains. These neural connections are essentially our memory.

First they challenge us to recall information we've previously learned. The very act of trying to remember is exactly what makes the memory stronger. It's not even important whether you're right or wrong, just that you try to recall.

Back in 1602, the famous butcher Francis Bacon wrote:

"Hence if you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite it from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails."

And yes, you got me! Mr Bacon was not a butcher. I was just making sure you were still with me!

The second thing flashcards do is space out these recall sessions.

By spacing out our attempts to recall the information, the information gradually gets promoted into our long-term memory as the brain starts to see that it is needed.

So, just like biceps, we take our brain to a mental gym and we do reps.

We artificially ask it to recall things we want to keep, and eventually the brain adapts, and those things become stronger memories.

Remember anything

And the best bit?

This isn't about language learning. If you combine active recall with spaced repetition you can keep anything in your head long-term.

PS: I use the app Anki for this. It's a bit old school, but it's tried and tested. It has been around so long it is rumoured that Jesus used it to remember the names of his disciples.

If you want remember better, hack your brain into thinking it needs the information by recalling things at spaced intervals. If you're not sure how to get started, just grab an app like Anki.

Happy brain hacking.