I am learning French (B2+) and German (B1) and have from the outset struggled to remember German words. The weakness is primarily in active recall, rather than passive recognition. Recently I’ve noticed a marked improvement in my ability to recall words, in both languages, especially German, but also French. In French I am finding that can recall words the day after I encounter them for the first time. In German words that were a nightmare to recall, now come to me relatively easily.
I’m curious if others notice step improvements in long term memory recall. Does it become easier to remember words the more one studies languages, or the more languages one knows, even for distant languages?
I am aware that ability to recall words improves as one’s language skills improve. Luca Lampariello has likened it to building a spider’s web. At first the holes are large, and flies pass through. Later on the holes are small, and flies get caught. I believe this reflects the fact that we do not remember words as distinct well defined objects. Rather a word is stored as a mass of connections to other memories in the same language. Thus as a simple example the German word Fahrstuhl is easier to remember when we know both Fahr and Stuhl. Thus the more items we have in our memory, the easier it is to make connections, and hence store the word. In other words, previous knowledge acts as a frameword for new words.
That said, my recent improvements seem to be more about my ability to retrieve memories, it’s almost as if language learning is improving my ability to recall items from long term memory.
We know from studies that London taxi drivers have a significantly enlarged brain region - the hippocampus - resulting from long term training.
One possible outcome is that experienced language learners might be better at learning in part due to physical changes in their brains resulting from long term language study and use. And it could be that some language learning methods are better suited to experienced learners, whilst others are better for novices.
Interesting study I looked at before starting Language learning. Probably a correlation based on sample size but worth a look.
The final sample consisted of 184 patients diagnosed with dementia, 51% of whom were bilingual. The bilinguals showed symptoms of dementia 4 years later than monolinguals, all other measures being equivalent.
Before starting my own language learning journey, like many others I severely underestimated the amount of time it would take to be on par with a native speaker. It’s like when you see someone who makes something look easy and you think. “I could do that, no problem”. Reality is often a kick in the nuts as a lesson in humility.
The process is easy, translate the word, translate the sentence, listen, read, speak… Like Luca’s analogy with more time spent with these foundational things the easier it will be over time to add new layers. I have vague memories learning English, but still remember the pain of completing assignments and using a thesaurus.
Emotions are something else to think about. I remember most conversations I’ve had in Finnish. Especially strong when its embarrassing because I’ve said the wrong thing or the native didn’t understand part of my translated sentence.
Yes health benefits are often given as a reason to learn foreign languages. Clearly something about learning and using an L2 is beneficial, although mental exercise per se has not been proven to be beneficial.
I’m sure most of us, like you, underestimate the amount of work that it requires. I certainly did.
Unfortunately this fallacy is encouraged by language learning adverts, and videos on YouTube by so-called language teachers.
I never felt that I had any competence in German.
I had a lot of trouble with German for the first 18 months or so, which I believe was due to a combination of bad learning methods (online apps auch as Babbel) and, later on, unstructured input material (LingQ).
My belief is that a beginner benefits greatly from a structured course, with curated materials that introduce the language gradually, with significant repetition. Most online apps including Duolingo, Busuu and Babbel have insufficient input, and a simplistic approach to language learning. I completed the Babbel German course, which claimed to take me to a B2 level. Two years later and I am a B1 level.
Indeed, negative emotions severely reduce one’s ability to focus and hence the ability to learn. Some people can happily babble along in an L2, and not worry about mistakes, others including myself find such situations unpleasant and stressful.
An interesting topic.
I expect you have come across the book “Make it stick; the science of successful learning”? [Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, Mark McDaniel; Harvard University Press, 2014]. Some interesting perspectives there on memory.
One of the particular problems with learning German is coping with gender, compounded when you then have prepositions dictating the case of the following noun or pronoun in the mix too!
For some learners all this can easily produce “pronunciation paralysis”, or indeed “memory issues”, as you struggle to overcome these hurdles.
But the good news is what I think you have found; it does get a little easier the more you work at a language. And particularly when you start to have “aha” moments like your “Farstuhl” revelation and make connections in a “lego” language like German…
Yes I read it a while back. It’s only somewhat applicable though, as it deals with semantic or declarative memory - learning facts - which we use for example when cramming for an exam. Language learning uses both semantic and procedural memory, arguably procedural is more important.
Gender isn’t so difficult especially as compound nouns take the gender of the root component e.g. der Vorteil. The endings on articles and adjectives are tricky but logical and regular. Knowing which preposition goes with each verb is a pain. As for word order, yet another interesting challenge.
Indeed, it is a Lego language. Learning suffixes such as heit, schaft, lich etc takes time, but is doable. Cases are just a case [no pun intended] of practice makes perfect.
But as I mentioned earlier, I’ve noticed a step change in my memory in both languages. It’s as if ability to both notice and focus have improved. I do wonder if others have this experience while learning.
Yes, I’ve noticed something similar. I think that what happens is the root words in a language start to stick and recombine for you at some point, and your “Abstraktionsvermogen” (capacity for abstract thinking) is able to fill in meaning from context.
Another thing I am noticing with age is that it becomes more important to “prime the pump” for things to stick. In other words, you need to look over the vocabulary and go away for a while-- a day or two, a week or two, a month or two, or more. When you come back to the vocabulary, the brain says, “OK, we’ve come across this stuff before, so we’ve decided it’s not just more junk and information overload.” Because this information is somewhat familiar, the brain is now convinced it is worthwhile to put the new information into your memory storage. As an example, I went back recently and looked at a language I haven’t done much with for 5 years. Suddenly, it’s looking familiar, and the words stick, the way they did when I was 20.
My doctor says that her bilingual brain stores both her languages in the Broca’s area, because she learned them as a very small child. She says I only have one language in my Broca’s area due to learing my additional languages later in life. I have tried to get around this issue by listening to videos from the sister YouTube channels of “Epic History” in German, Spanish, Russian, and French, listening to the same video repeatedly, and moving from my strongest to my weakest languages, without ever listening to the Engilsh. The idea is that I am trying to get my memory of the content into my Broca’s area, without activating memory storage in the English language.
Tried this multilingual (no English) history video approach for a few hours a day for 2-3 weeks, and then I went in to a doctor’s appointment. It was quite surprising how much more fluently I could speak during my appointment, without feeling limitations of “this language I’m speaking is harder than English”.
I imagine it more like a well-done mind map and if the new word only has one or two connections, it will just automatically disappear after a short amount of time, but if the word has many connections, then the amount of time before it automatically disappears is longer. I imagine it also as the size of the arrows also indicate the strength of those connections, which also plays a role.
These connections don’t necessarily need to be in the same language though. Full and partial cognates are the easiest words to learn generally cause you connect the new word with a word/s in another language/s you already know. An illustration of connections across languages is that I can tell you the German word for information is very similar to the English, French, Italian, and Russian words for information, but I can’t remember in this very moment how to exactly say it with a good German accent. The details of the ending of the German word are fuzzy and I can’t tell you what the pronunciation is.
Another example of connections going across languages is the fact that I confuse words in other languages all the time. I imagine this is quite common, as, for instance, Steve himself used words in different languages than the language he was trying to speak when he was doing his speaking in 10+ languages video. He was speaking and didn’t even realise he used a word from the wrong language (he pointed this out in his critique of his own video). This happens to me too. It’s good when you realise that the word which popped into your head is of a different language, because then you can hold your tongue, but you don’t always realise this. Sometimes, if I realise this, I just need to keep trying and the word in the desired language will pop into my head, but other times the word in the desired language doesn’t even pop up at all, only words in even more other languages.
Furthermore, these memory connections don’t only happen with other languages, but with any kind of memory. As an example, I was trying to remember a Russian word the other day. I had a mental image of what I imagine when I think of the word (based on an image from a Russian movie I watched), I remembered some details about the movie associated with the image I have, I remembered the literal English translation (which would be a non-sensical translation), I remembered the English definition of the word, and I remembered the second half of the word, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember the first half of how to pronounce the word. This just illustrates that the word I was thinking of was associated with an image, a story, a translation, and a bilingual definition, but the word itself was broken up into at least two separate parts in my brain (the first half and the second half) which were associated separately. The ‘Lego’ of the word is more fundamental than Fahrstuhl = Fahr + Stuhl, but sometimes much tinier, seemingly-non-sensical-but-really-based-on-pattern-recognition-or-other chunks. Eg. information = in + for + ma + tion. But really it’s probably also chunked as information = infor + mation and probably several other ways too.
In sum, at least in my brain, the web of connections consists of all sorts of memories interconnected together, not solely limited to the one language. Eg. I try and think of an Italian word, and instead an image from a movie, the location where I was when I watched that movie, the sound of a Russian word, and the definition in English all pop in my head and in the end I simply fail to recall the Italian word in that moment. However, perhaps the next time I try, I may actually recall the Italian word accurately and quickly.
Me too. My opinion these days is the Foreign Services Insitute probably gives a very decent estimate of how long it will take (if you double the number of classroom hours to take into account the amount of homework they do!). Eg. FSI’s estimate for the average person to reach a decent level in Italian is 552 class hours means that it’ll be ~1,104 hours to get to a decent level of fluency for an average English speaker (some more, some less, but a good estimate).
I dunno about a step improvement, but improvement is definitely more noticeable around A2+/B1ish to lower B2ish. It depends on how exactly you’re studying, but this period can be incredibly satisfying because you notice such obvious improvements. This can be a particularly addictive part of language learning and I think those who dabble haven’t experienced it or haven’t experienced it very strongly - the fact that after every session you leave and you realise you have actually learnt several things and you remember them is a powerful experience. Really I think this is half got to do with noticing, but it’s definitely coupled with some sweet spot of you can actually remember stuff now without a hundred repetitions and you still have plenty of high-frequency words to learn. Even if you do it correctly and the intermediate plateau is non-existent (i.e. always increase the difficulty of content), there comes a point where Zipf’s law becomes so much more obvious, and it feels like that constant sense of everyday achievement isn’t as obvious. On the positive side, at this point, you can replace it with consuming actually interesting content you understand.
In theory, yes. Previous knowledge is the framework of all new knowledge (and new words). From my understanding, related previous knowledge is the biggest predictor of speed of acquisition of new knowledge.
In practice, yes, mildly so. But alas, it’s just not as easier as you’d hope it would become. One benefit is increasing the amount of partial cognates which other new languages can draw on. For distant languages, this would be less so, but there’s still a little something in it because the previous knowledge is only a little bit related (such as maybe similar sounds or a new expression might remind you of a similar expression in different language, etc.).
One benefit is increasing the amount of partial cognates which other new languages can draw on. For distant languages, this would be less so, but there’s still a little something in it because the previous knowledge is only a little bit related (such as maybe similar sounds or a new expression might remind you of a similar expression in different language, etc.).