OP and others here are stretching the definition of “memorize” to mean “anything that leads to something being retained in memory.” I reject this idea.
The trauma of burning your hand on a hot pan creates a memory you won’t soon forget, but almost no one would understand it as an act of memorization.
Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty “learning” practices wherein we believe that by using language to drill exposure to an abstract representation of a concept, that somehow we will absorb the concept itself.
We do this mainly because experts suck at empathizing with learners and fail to understand that the symbol has meaning for them but not for the learner.
It’s the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone.
Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1. They aren’t being “drilled” to learn “mama.” They have actual needs in an actual social context and attend to nuanced details of that context to make complex statistical inferences about the world, their perceptions, and their body. Mostly subconsciously.
Yes, there are specific areas where drilling can help us accelerate or catch up. Many kids seem to need explicit phonetics instruction in order to make the leap to reading words. Phonological speech interventions are often drill-like. Practicing musical scales does make you more fluent in improvisation. Drilling the mechanics of a repertoire piece frees your mind to focus on higher-order expression and interpretation. They’re valuable, they have a place.
But this is just a small slice of learning. It’s disproportionately important for passing tests (And getting hired at tech companies!), which to me is the crux of the issue.
If I had to reformulate OP’s argument to something I can get behind, it would be more about deliberate practice or “putting in the reps.” This is also often boring, and differentiates highly successful people from average performers. But it’s a broader and more purposeful set of activities than “memorization” would imply.
The EEs I have known that carried around a card with:
because they couldn't remember it were all bad at EE and bad at math.If you can't remember the pieces making up a concept, how are you going to remember the concept?
I don't remember anyone who couldn't pass tests but was really a great engineer.
BTW, one of the tests fighter pilots go through is they are blindfolded, and then have to put their hand on each control the instructor calls out.
I also have some written tests for certifying pilots. There are questions like max takeoff weight, fuel burn rate, max dive speeds, etc. Stuff a pilot had better know or he's a dead pilot.
But there are plenty of people who can pass tests and are terrible engineers. When people talk about memorization they talk about remembering the words without understanding the concepts, such a person is no better off than the person carrying around a text note with the concept written down.
When you understand these concepts you will remember those formulas, but memorizing the formula doesn't make you understand it. Therefore creativity doesn't fundamentally comes from memorization, there is something else there.
Without memorizing at first, it is much harder to understand the topic. Memorizing builds fluency, fluency builds proficiency.
You cannot build complex electronics without having Ohms law in your mind as something fundamental you don’t have to look up.
Yes at some point you build up experience so you never really think of it but for it to become intuitive it needs to be learned by rot repetition
But I learned Ohms law without learning any formula, or memorizing any picture. I just internalized that electricity are electrons that gets pushed by a force against a resistance, so it is obvious that the amount that gets pushed through is force divided by resistance. I couldn't write down the formula for that, because I don't remember which symbol represents what, but I understand the concept as good as any expert and I never need to look that up because my intuition instantly solves any related problem.
Most of the basic electric circuit formulas comes trivially from that fact, so I never had to study for that in physics. And as we know memorizing that fact doesn't mean people know how to do the electric circuit formulas, so memorization isn't enough, rather internalizing concepts is a completely separate process from memorization, and the quality of your internalized structure is the most important part here not how many objects you memorized.
Most of the basic electric circuit formulas comes trivially from that fact, so I never had to study for that in physics. And as we know memorizing that fact doesn't mean people know how to do the electric circuit formulas, so memorization isn't enough, rather internalizing concepts is a completely separate process from memorization, and the quality of your internalized structure is the most important part here not how many objects you memorized.
If you mean by rote learning and just remembering information in an arbitrary manner, then that's memorization. I doubt that such a person have even acquired the knowledge, except maybe for the simplest case such as multiplication tables.
I know how multiplication works actually, but I never used them. Instead I go for the memorized answer.
But all knowledge a person have is based on memory. How you acquire it is up to you, preferably in the most efficient way possible so that we actually retain the information and don't have to "study" as often.
No it isn't, tacit knowledge isn't based on remembering something it is based on having made a model that parses something. That is what you want to build, memory itself is mostly redundant compared to those models, as those models lets you easily rediscover information but memory doesn't let you parse problems.
Memorizing something implies there is a piece of information you can later recall. If there is nothing to recall such as with tacit skills then you don't learn it by memorizing, you learn it by practice and thinking and theorizing until it "clicks".
A computer can remember everything trivially, but it hasn't built any models based on the information so all that information is useful. The same happens in our head, the value isn't in the memory it is in the structures you built as an answer to that memory. The memory itself is a red herring, don't chase it, chase the understanding.
So for example, I have made a model in my head that parses electronic circuit problems for me, with that I don't need any formulas as it does the work. There is no memory tied to that model, it just solves things, there is nothing to recall, nothing to write down etc, it isn't a piece of information it is an active skill I have built. Saying otherwise is like saying that you memorize how to move your arm, no that is you building up intuition and reflexes, that isn't what we call memorizing.
You can call that a pattern matcher, you can't recall one of your heads pattern matchers. Pattern matchers can be tied to recall, but pattern matchers can also solve problems for you by themselves without ever invoking any memory. Pattern matchers are much more powerful than memories since they can solve a whole slew of similar problems while memories just solves one thing, so there is no need to go memory -> pattern matcher, you can go instantly to pattern matcher without ever commiting anything to memory.
It's all memories to me whether that's concepts, models, tacit or otherwise. They are all just information stored within our brain.
Otherwise we're arguing semantics.
So you call practicing a serve etc memorizing" excercises? That makes you very strange.
You have the strange definition here, most people don't all sorts of brain updates "memorizing". Memorizing is when you commit something to memory for later retrieval, people do not include all brain updates under this word.
Anyway, then we can agree that committing facts to memory to retrieve them later is not the main way to become more creative. Instead it is better to do other form of brain updates that doesn't involve storing exact information in the brain.
Did you simply intuited RC circuit design without anyone teaching it to you? How about the calculus needed to design an opamp circuit? Feedback circuits?
I doubt you could ace the MIT first electronic circuits final without taking the course.
Internalizing it is memorizing it.
The point they are trying to make is it comes from memorizing the right things. You don't become a chess master by memorizing opening moves, you become one by memorizing strong and weak states on the board.
The ability to memorize opening moves may lead you into a stronger mid game, but it's not creativity. Creativity is searching for patterns where they can mate in three, or spotting positions where the bishop can attack two pieces at once in two moves.
No it doesn't, understanding a concept doesn't come from memorizing N facts, if it did we could easily make everyone understand math in school but we can't.
Some people understand math trivially with no effort and no work memorizing (they wont remember the formulas, but they can explain how it works and can reproduce something similar to the formulas), others don't understand even with massive amounts of effort and memorizing every formula.
That is just a theory, there is little behind that. Much more likely you become a chess master by training a board state evaluator in your hand that is really good at evaluating board states, not by memorizing lots of board states. Memorizing board states is deep blue, it is much worse than AlphaGo etc, so that is for sure not the best way to get good, and for sure not the way humans get good, humans get good similar to how AlphaGo gets good, not how deep blue did it.
That board state evaluator allows you to also remember board states easily, but you don't build that by memorizing board state patterns.
Memorizing is clearly a necessary, but not sufficient part of learning. If you are to become an expert in any subject whatsoever, from math to football fandom, you will need to develop an ability for remembering huge amounts of raw facts. One of the first hurdles in a math education is memorizing the multiplication tables. In biology or medicine you have to learn literally hundreds of systems that happen to exist in a certain way, and from all of the raw facts, could very well be a different way.
Sure, you can wing it at a primary or high school level if your teachers are impressed by your understanding. But you will never become a math expert if you don't remember the specific formulae, and many other more complex things. Even if you are fully able to deduce the theorems from scratch, you won't be able to function if you have to invent and then prove every single theorem you want to use.
No, it is precisely the other way around. DeepBlue is deducing how good a board state is by trying to calculate all possible follow-up moves up to a depth of 13 or something. In contrast, AlphaGo has memorized patterns occuring in billions of games (in a lossy archive format, of course) and basically can recall games that are close enough to the current game and what you need to do to win from the current position. And this is exactly how chess masters mostly work as well, to the extent that it has been studied, and based on their own reporting. They just recognize positions or certain aspects of a position, and can recall how the game works from that position.
I think memorization is a tool to deep understanding
The science/engineering/math tests I took at Caltech were all open book, open note. They were not about regurgitating facts and formulae. But if you didn't already know them, you didn't have the time to open the book and learn about them.
Yes, you can be a bad engineer even if you pass such tests. Don't underestimate how far mindless pattern matching can take you, you can get pretty high up in international competitions just by dumb pattern matching and very little broader understanding, tests average students can pass are a piece of cake even at MIT level compared to that.
But of course such an engineer can be useful to solve constrained problems, but I wouldn't call them good since they don't really connect to the larger picture so they need a lot of oversight.
Of course. But the issue is can you be a good engineer if you flunk the tests?
That's a nope.
Creativity comes from a deep understanding of concepts
You don't want a pilot who is creative when it comes to max takeoff weight.
Obviously there are good reasons to memorize certain things, creativity just isn't one of them.
In certain combat situations, or when smuggling coke across South and Central America, you certainly do.
Gravity works just as well if you're in combat or smuggling coke. They don't suddenly give you the ability to takeoff under too much load
The max takeoff weight in the book isn't the actual maximum. It's the "certified" maximum. Anything beyond that may cause structural issues during takeoff, but probably won't be that big of a problem until you land. You'll need to be especially creative on getting very low on fuel, so you don't crash through your landing gear.
Sure, there are hard laws of physics.
Until you get to those, you'd be surprised how far some creativity with weight distribution, getting rid of unneeded cargo or even plane parts, using stuff to your advantage, and a little daring to push the plane to its limits, goes...
Way beyond what the "by the book" pilot who isn't creative can achieve in times of need.
Not to mention that in combat, you need to understand the limitations not only of your own plane but also of both the allied and enemy planes in your airspace.
But you don't want CIVILIAN pilots to get too creative, though. Running out of runway with a 747 is no joke.
You can't be creative if you don't remember the facts.
BTW, bombers in WW2 were routinely overloaded on takeoff, at high risk to the crews. If one of the 4 engines wasn't delivering the max power, the result was crashing inside a planeload of fuel and bombs.
Forgoing factor of safety is not creativity.
You most certainly can be creative without remembering the facts.
I've seen enough episodes of "Aviation Disasters", each of which dissects a crash or an averted crash, to not buy that.
There was once a 727 that suffered an autopilot failure, which rolled it over into a steep dive. The speed exceeded them max speed, and due to separation the controls could not "bite" into the air. The creative pilot thought he might increase the drag by lowering the landing gear in flight, which is a giant no-no. But he had nothing left to lose, and lowered it. The landing gear doors were ripped off and the gear was bent back, but it slowed the airplane enough that he regained control and saved everyone's life.
I know of another case with an F-80. That was the first US jet fighter, and it had straight wings and a powerful engine. They found out that if you overspeeded the airplane, which was too easy with its engine, it would violently pitch up and tear the wings off.
One day, in the Korean War, an F-80 pilot had a Mig on his tail that he couldn't shake. So he thought, I bet the Mig couldn't follow me in a pitchup, and so he rammed the throttles forward. The F-80 did pitch up, and the wings stayed on, and he shook the Mig.
When he landed, the wings were visibly bent up, and the airplane was scrapped.
I know about this because my dad flew F-80s in combat in the Korean War.
This is just confirmation bias. Either you're in a field where you must have a degree, so everyone who couldn't pass tests simply never became an engineer (eg EE) and whether or not the test is a good measure is irrelevant because it nonetheless gates your sample
OR you're in software engineering and the people who struggled on tests work beside you, but they don't tell you about their past performance on tests because you have a chip on your shoulder and they don't want you to look down on them.
I failed a lot of tests in college and now I'm a great software engineer.
I also failed a lot of tests and I like to think that I am currently a good engineer. Frankly I do not see much overlap between what I was expected to do in school vs. what I do at work besides lab work and projects, which were the things I did do good in.
Many engineers manage to avoid using any of the tools (such as math) they learned in school and just wing it. You can often get things to work that way, but they'll be inefficient and more expensive.
I remember an EE who was trying to reduce the noise in a circuit. He tried adding random parts for days, with no success. Finally a real engineer looked at it, did a calculation, stuck the right capacitor in and solved it.
Zero of the EEs I have known need that (where did yours graduate from?)
The mnemonic to remember V = I * R is as a triangle with V at the top and I, R on the second row, the same way you remember the relation Distance = Speed * Time or Mass = Density * Volume in high school. Or any other triangular multiplicative relation.
That's odd to me... if I were to visualize any product relationship, it would be a box with edges labeled with two factors and the inside (area) labeled with the product.
You touch upon the different levels of knowing it. Yes, having to carry a card with the formulas on it shows no knowledge. But, if you have to memorize the formulas, your knowledge is still not adequate. You're just regurgitating a formula that you memorized so you can plug in numbers. You don't understand the "why" of Ohm's law. Of course voltage is equal to current times resistance, it's obvious by what these things are! It should be as self-evident as "Of course distance is equal to speed times time!"
Another example: You can have the Lorentz transformation formulas memorized but still not really understand the "why" of Special Relativity.
I never said it was. I said that being competent required that knowledge, not that that knowledge was sufficient.
My high school had majors and one of them was effectively EE; the 14/15 year olds in my major had those formulas down inside of 3 weeks... what EEs did you know that couldn't outperform teenagers?
...I mean, I didn't even go to that great of a college and no one would have made it past the second year of EE without memorizing 10x more formulas than that.
I'm just completely lost on how it's even possible to have an EE degree and needing a card. Signal processing classes required math 100x more difficult than that. I had to know quaternions by my second dsp class.
Amazing, isn't it? The word "cheating" comes to mind.
This is not mere memorization. The GP's point that not everything that makes you remember this is simply "memorization", and certainly all of those things contribute differently to creativity.
Yes, piloting is one of the tasks where you absolutely need lots of random information memorized. You should also not do a lot of "creativity" in it.
A lot of pilots have saved their lives by being creative when the checklist solution didn't work. They were successful being creative because they knew the airplane's systems inside and out.
Isn't that exactly the result of a focus on memorization instead of understanding (yes yes at some level that also involves memory), though? To a certain type of person memorizing an arbitrary arrangement of 3 symbols is quite difficult but OTOH it's easy to remember that current goes up with voltage and down with resistance.
It's a linear relationship. An exponential relationship could also go up and down, but is very different from linear.
Saddest part is that you only need first one and and then with memorization of most basic algebra you get the others.. Not even need to do it symbolically.
Yup.
This is different memories? the one for the formula and the one for the concept. So you can remember the meaning of the word but don't remember how to write it. So can reproduce the formula from your deep understanding, but it is quicker to check it out instead of apply the first principle every time.
Some times the brain is wired to intuit the concept. That's something that fascinates me. You grasp the idea before any articulate explanation. Somebody shows you a problem and rapidly you start discussing solutions with the other person and even go further.
Most of the time memorization is a key role for creativity, the easier you can jump between ideas the more combinations you can explore (seems like the brain is constrained by some cache bottleneck in a way).
I hear you; but teaching deep expertise is really hard. We can use your example of a child learning their first language. They will really understand it. But people are famously, hilariously terrible at teaching their native tongue. We know how to conjugate, and how to use verbs and adverbs and all the rest. But it’s all intuitive - we have no symbolic understanding of it. If that’s the case, we can’t explain it in words.
Here’s a weird fact: if you look around the room you’re in now, I bet you know what it would feel like on your tongue to lick everything you see. We probably learned that in the “put everything in your mouth” baby phase.
You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.
I believe a lot of real learning is actually like that. When I taught programming, I think I was a frustrating teacher. My students would ask things like “what’s the best way to structure this program?” And I would say “I don’t know. Let’s brainstorm a few ways then you should pick at least one and try writing it like that. Figure it out in code.” I think you become great at programming by licking all the programs you can find. Same with music and art and languages (go have conversations with native speakers).
There is only so much the best teacher can teach. Sometimes you just have to walk around licking things.
You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.
This is such a weird and amazing analogy. Thank you for sharing it! I don't know if I've ever heard this concept explained in quite this way before.
Actually, I don't agree with that. If I look around the room I'm in now, there are a LOT of different objects, and I can imagine what they'd feel like on my tongue, even though I've never physically licked the vast majority of those types of objects. To give a couple of examples: a partly used candle, the "lighting" side of a matchbox, guitar strings, lightbulbs, new bike inner tube. The reason I can imagine how they would feel, despite never having actually licked them, is that in our early years we're just exploring the world and building a mental model. We stop licking everything quite early when we figure out the class of things that's generally food, but by that point we've learned how to correlate the sense of feelings we get from our tongue with the sense of feelings we get from our fingers, because we also touch all those items a lot with our fingers. With enough examples, we become pretty good at pattern matching across senses, so e.g. I can look at an object, from the shadows see that it's bumpy, and have a pretty good idea what it'd feel like if I rubbed it with my fingertips or even licked it, or if it's glass, plastic, metal, fabric, I'd know it'd produce different feelings ranging from differences in friction, thermal conductivity, etc.
That's quite a lot of text, but the TLDR is that we don't need to lick everything to have a pretty good idea of how it'd feel on the tongue, just enough to have a general idea of the properties of different classes of materials. Given that most babies stop licking/chewing everything before they've reached nursery age, it's clear that for objects we encounter in later life it's not the licking per-se that matters for this "skill", but whether we've learned to associate the senses.
I guess taste is a bit different, but my default would just be to assume that most objects are tasteless unless they also have an odour.
I feel like you totally missed the point and then reiterated exactly what they said in another way.
Not really. Their point was that you need to lick a lot of objects. My point is that it doesn't need to be a lot, just enough to be able to form generalisations based on other observable characteristics. It's about the degree of "a lot".
I don't think they were being serious about licking. After all, you cannot "lick" a computer program.
And I actually disagree with you. My son went through a period where he put nearly everything in his mouth, bugs, bottle caps, spices, food, phones, credit cards, toys, rocks. Pretty sure we all did that at some point.
Are you sure you never licked those materials as a child?
I'm not sure when my earliest memories date from any more — some of what I thought were memories turned out to be dreams of things that never happened, others have mutated with each re-recollection — but one thing I can be sure of is that I don't remember any of the "stick random things in mouth" stage of my life.
When I look around my room, I find there are indeed things I cannot imagine what it would be like to lick them, but they're all made of materials I didn't have access to as a kid: soft touch rubber.
You're right that there's a problem with recollection. I can't remember going through such a phase either, but I know I did because there are photos of me as a baby sticking things in my mouth (although in the photos these are things designed for babies, like plastic cubes big enough to not be swallowed, but small enough to be easily handled by a kid, etc). In fact, I had no idea of the ages involved, so I searched online and found that most babies start this phase around 6 months and usually stop by 12 months, although some kids continue on until 3 or 4 years old.
But yeah, materials like the rubber in my inner tube... I'm pretty sure my parents wouldn't have allowed such stuff near me as a baby, likewise I wouldn't have been allowed near boxes of matches etc. I also can't imagine I'd ever have decided as an older child that I should try licking a bike tube or the striking surface of a matchbox. And so, I'm about as confident as I can be that I'd never have licked an inner tube in my life, but I can make a good guess from feeling it with my fingers what it'd likely feel like on my tongue.
There's very little where I'd go as far as to say "I cannot imagine what it'd be like", except maybe for things that would involve a chemical reaction, and where I might have some idea from extrapolation with foods - e.g. fizzing, an exothermic reaction, etc., but wouldn't necessarily be able to guess from looking or feeling with my fingers what the result might be. Most of the interesting ones are turned into food anyway, e.g. sherbert dip or sour sweets.
I definitely have had some surprises in later life - I remember first having ox-tongue when I was in my 20s and finding the texture quite uncomfortable, and since high single-digit ages, I've never been able to correlate the texture of liver with something that's edible.
I guess another example is with unfamiliar "exotic" fruits - there are some that would surprise everyone with their taste, but you can guess most of the texture characteristics of a fruit just by looking at it and cutting it into pieces, and you might be able to have a guess at taste from its smell.
Yes. Tacit knowledge is hard to teach.
Right. And, I think, real expertise in any subject is choc full of tacit knowledge. Even - and especially - in areas where we have good symbolic representations. (Like music, math, programming and languages.)
The problem with English is I don't actually know the rules. Something just feels "off" sometimes when someone makes grammatical mistakes.
I doubt I will ever gain this feeling (for lack of a better word) with another language. I mean how could I? Everything sounds weird and "off" when you're a beginner, right? For example: el bano, el agua, la naranja, la sillas. You're constantly suppressing warning signs flashing in your head.
For example, I remember being forced to memorize the multiplication tables. I doubt we do that in schools anymore. I feel like all that time could have been better spent learning something else.
Schools still teach multiplication tables to this day. They remain useful in a myriad of everyday situations.
I think this is a function of hours of practice. I remember the point when I started hearing the silent "h" in Spanish and also when I stopped understanding what native speakers were saying after 3 months because I'd progressed beyond the level where they felt they had to slow their speech down for me. Lots of plateaus in the learning curve.
No it's not; this is the point of apprenticeship. It's just not compatible with the educational institutions people actually pay for.
This is not contradictory. If your idea of teaching is just lecturing at people and occasionally verifying specific knowledge, obviously they're not going to learn very much. Your job as a teacher is to facilitate a growth curve of increasingly more difficult and unwieldy problems to solve.
Apprenticeship is hard, there is a reason people don't accept just any apprentice, if it was easy people wouldn't be so picky who they want to teach.
Well, they're now only offered through unions, too. I suspect there's a great demand for such opportunities.
Love this metaphor. To truly learn we must have a lick for ourselves, pun not intended.
There's being taught and then there's exploring and practice. It's the exploring and practice that is often missing today, IMO because we all want everything to happen so quickly.
In my sport of choice, jiujitsu, there's been a shift happening in teaching. Traditionally the teacher would show a move or two then have the class drill the move. The shift now is more conceptual where the teacher might say the goal is get chest to chest and then have the students operate at 20% figuring it out on their own. While there are some pretty vocal camps on both sides, I think having both methods is the best to learn from. Being taught a solution to a problem a student discovered on their own during discovery is when learning really takes hold IMO.
Finally, the best way to really learn that I have found is to teach something.
I quite liked your licking metaphor/symbolism. In fact, if I find out that something tastes good after licking it, I'll go even further. I swallow it. Ha ha.
My intuition is that creativity is a more of a feeling one has, rather than the result of some teaching method or cultural background. It seems very closely related to one's interests and also the novelty effect. Just think about the first time you experienced something, like a great song or your first love. The mind is just bubbling with thoughts. How can that feeling be experienced again with the same object like it was the first time? It can't. It's never the same as the first time. Even if we can mentally forget, the subconscious somehow remembers it's had that experience, so it isn't fresh anymore.
So, yes, you need to make connections between existing things to come up with something new, but once the fascination with a thing dissipates and it becomes familiar, any further creativity in that area quickly dies off. Our interest just moves on.
Perhaps the really creative people are just the ones who have this ability to see familiar things with ever fresh eyes?
All those really learning a foreign language get to the point, where they "chug it" and jump into the deep end, surrounding themselves with native speakers and going to that learning by context mode. Its the toughest phase, but works.
Those are not opposite activities. Drilling vocabulary flashcard is the most efficient way to start being able to read/listen/speak; and it's not even clear from research that output (speaking and writing) is useful at all for learning.
Also good luck learning to read Chinese or Japanese without rote learning a few hundred characters. Even native speakers learn them by repetition. You can't be serious advocating "just go read stuff" as a way to learn a language. Some foundation, acquired by explicit learning, is required to even start reading.
That's a bad argument: the life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult. A young child has basically nothing but figuring out what's going around him (including language) at least 16 hours per day, every day. An adult has much less time for that.
Also it takes a surprisingly long time for children to learn language. I used to think it sorta-kinda happened over a year or two, but having children myself revealed how wrong I was.
I have written up a fairly hefty dictionary of words they mispronounce or even just invent on their own because they don't know the one in their native tongue. My oldest rarely contributes individual words to this dictionary anymore, but he still improvises expressions and idioms.
> I have written up a fairly hefty dictionary of words they mispronounce or even just invent on their own because they don't know the one in their native tongue.
Ah, beautiful little displays of an attempt to understand, not merely memorize.
Sometimes those made up words were way more fun than the correct ones.
I could usually see why my little ones combined them that way.
I remember one where the kid was asked, "do you want some half-and-half?"
"No, I want whole and whole!"
Understanding coming from years of exposure leading to memorizing the whole low hanging words of a language and their meaning.
They don't merely understand the words as a concept, they also remember the word sounds attached to the associated concept (and later have to remember the spelling of those words as well). All the while commiting to memory all kinds of facts about the world, starting from their name and the ABC.
Grammar might come closer to exposure-grasping a generalized concept -- then again nobody said understanding concepts is not hugely important, or is done by memorization alone: just that memorization goes hand in hand, and is hugely important in being effective in being able to use and think with not just the concepts but also the relevant facts related to them).
An anecdote I once heard provided in support of this point in a lecture: there are aspects of Spanish grammar that native speakers typically don't grasp until their teenage years.
I suspect that, if one were to sit down and count hours of practice so that we could do a better apples-to-apples comparison, we'd find that children learn languages at a glacial pace compared to adults. And the rest is pure selection bias.
The one thing children can learn that adults generally cannot is native pronounciation. If that is included in language proficiency, then adults take an infinite amount of time to learn!
True, but I really dislike the amount of focus people put on that. With the right techniques, it's not particularly difficult for an adult to develop decently good pronunciation that allows them to be comfortably understood. And placing the bar for having learned a language to a high level of proficiency at "able to hide evidence of where they were born from native speakers" smacks of internalized xenophobia.
I also read in a second language acquisition textbook a while back (so, decent chance of being out of date, also decent chance of my memory of what I read being less-than-perfect) that the strongest predictor of how native-like an accent someone develops isn't actually the age at which they started learning the language, it's the lag between when they started learning it and when they started socially integrating into a community of native speakers. And it happens to be the case that, for all sorts of practical reasons, there's a strong correlation between this lag period and age. Which isn't to say that there's nothing to the critical period hypothesis - there is - but when we're talking about children it's difficult-to-impossible to root out selection bias effectively enough to permit even a convincing stab at partial identification of causal effects. Which creates a risky situation for the purposes of drawing firm conclusions, because our prejudices love to helpfully answer the questions that science won't.
In grad school I had a social science textbook that dubbed these kind of questions "Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions" in the first chapter, and in subsequent chapters simply described them as "FUQ'd".
I've tried this for years with Japanese kanji and never really got very far. Just didn't work well, they largely were just a big blob of lines.
Then I found an Android app (Kanji Study) that mixes this in with informational screens that break down kanji into radicals and puts them alongside a bunch of multi-kanji words and uses them in sentences so we can see them in context, and it's actually been working.
Learning to read Chinese is done by learning to write Chinese. The strict (but structured) stroke order while writing becomes part of muscle memory, and in turn, becomes a kind of kinesthetic mnemonic device while reading.
The app I mentioned has that too, but stepping back and giving context helps me more.
For example, 語 being composed of 言, 五, and 口 reduces it down to 3 things instead of 14 strokes. This is an easy one since the parts are distinct, but plenty aren't nearly as obvious, like the left side of 教
Only if your goals don’t include being able to speak or write.
True, not “just.” And Chinese is particularly tricky because the ideograms convey little to no phonetic information. Even so, almost any activity I can imagine seems superior to traditional flashcards. Photo flashcards (vs. translation), listening along to highlighted text or closed captions, deciphering street signs or memes, even the written drills you mentioned. (Or better, “write 5 phrases that all start with character X”). Our brains crave meaning, and flashcards offer very little of it.
No argument there, most everything is learned by repetition, but I’m interested in context. Native speakers already know the verbal form of most words they’re learning to write, even in Chinese. I’d argue the meaning is stronger.
True. The scale of their learning tasks are much bigger than ours. They have to learn that they exist, that their family exists, that they can vocalize, that language is a thing, that they want and need things, and that they can get them by communicating.
I think this is a good entry point to the core of the issue for me—-small children don’t “set aside time to learn,” they just learn. You and I do this also, though it’s less novel and flexible and therefore maybe less salient. I think we place too much value on structured or synthetic learning as “real” learning when in fact it’s often extremely inefficient compared to our natural learning tendencies.
There’s a spectrum of structure, starting with what we choose to pay attention to, to an open-ended “study time,” to guided classroom activities, to timed math drills. Flashcards are at the extreme reductivist end of that spectrum. I suspect we like them because they’re easy to understand, uniform, predictable, and convenient to create and use. Creating more effective learning opportunities and supports is substantially harder, but generally worthwhile IMO.
Vocabulary flashcards are not all that efficient way to start being able to read/listen/speak. They teach you translation rather then meaning directly, you don't get context or the "context" is super repetitive sentence and so on.
And plus, general recommendation is to learn words elsewhere and just put them into anki to not forget.
Some people like it, but it is not the only or the most recommended way to learn speak and write.
> A young child has basically nothing but figuring out what's going around him
Right—not simply memorizing what's happening around them. Those are fundamentally different activies. That is the gist of the parent comment's point.
They've also acknowledged expressly that rote memorization techniques are "valuable" and "have a place."
This isn't actually a settled matter. I did a literature dive a while back and found that drilling vocabulary flashcards shows the highest benefit on artificial recall tasks (like multiple choice tests), and over relatively short time scales (days to weeks). Studies that looked at longer time scales (months to years) and more organic tasks generally showed mixed results. Which I generally interpret as a sign that the literature in question is highly susceptible to the file drawer effect.
And that in turn suggests that the magnitude of flashcarding's value for this kind of thing has a lot to do with your goals. In a nutshell, are you more interested on the science on how to develop communicative proficiency over the long run, or are you more interested on the science on how to get a good grade in class?
I'm studying Chinese right now, and I do use flashcards, but it's not because I believe it's the best way, per se. It's because it's a convenient option for reviewing characters and words that don't appear often in the reading material I have. When they do appear often in my reading material, I find (anecdotally) that it takes a lot fewer organic repetitions to get the character or word to stick in my head than it does with flashcard repetitions.
It's also worth mentioning there's no particular reason to assume Chinese and Japanese schools are any less likely than schools elsewhere in the world to cling to inefficient pedagogical techniques out of a sense of tradition. So one can't necessarily assume that the way they are doing it is the way they ought to be doing it.
Memorize means "to retain in and quickly recall from memory". Weather that is by synthetic or natural process is irrelevant. From the point of understanding how memory and recall work, yes burning your hand is an act of memorization.
Sure there is a natural repetitive process that leads to base learning like L1 you mention.
On the other hand no one adds or multiples enough in daily life for natural memory formation. Humans consider the skill vital enough that we have developed methods to memorize them. Same for spelling, especially for infrequently used words.
Flashcards used with Spaced repetition isn't cargo cult, it is a well studied, and pretty good method of inducing memory formation.
I’d say that’s the definition of “remember” rather than “memorize.”
To most people I’d wager “memorize” has a strong connotation for the synthetic version only, with an emphasis on a stripping-out of context.
I recognize that stripping away context can be valuable—-drilling a tennis serve over and over outside the real-time context of a game is extremely helpful.
Flashcards are rarely valuable in the same way. For semantically oriented tasks, an impoverished context is usually not very helpful. Receptive skills like letter and character recognition might be an exception. But even then you’ve got to make the leap to reading at some point.
To the contrary, there’s a fascinating study of children in South America who had very fluent mental math skills for making change because they sold fruit on the side of the road. They couldn’t solve the exact same problem in story problem format in a classroom, though. Synthetic contexts usually don’t transfer well to real life.
Actually, my understanding is that contexts in general are hard to transfer.
Isn't that kind of the point for the other side?
Nobody memorizes the answer to 212+457. There are no flash cards for every possible addition up to infinity.
In my experience, the more people think that math is something to memorize, the worse they are at math.
Kumon students will be able to get 669 faster than the average non-Kumon student simply due to a large amount of practice though. Students don't memorizate of all the possible combinations, but imo that practice helps tune the mind to be sharp in that particular direction. very useful in some jobs.
it is to be noted that math isn't numeracy though. I have dyscalclia which hurt me with numbers but at the college level there are fewer numbers and more conceptual thinking. ended up with a math minor, though that's due to the CS degree requiring so many classes.
I think in common usage the word "memorize" very strongly implies that it's the lossless storage and retrieval of some highly specified sequence of information. No amount of studying American Civil War history would be referred to as "memorizing the Gettysburg Address" unless you could recite the speech word for word.
By far the best way to learn arithmetic facts is to ‘naturally’ use them in service of solving more interesting or relevant problems. Someone who spends the same amount of time doing nontrivial word problems, pattern-discovery projects, playing a game or solving a puzzle involving embedded arithmetic, or just talking about numbers in a group will come out vastly better prepared both for recalling or figuring out arithmetic solutions per se and for mathematical fluency in general than someone who does narrow practice drills. Arithmetic drills are not only a total motivation killer for most people, but also just suck at aiding retention. Time spent on arithmetic drills in school is somewhere between a waste of time and an actively harmful punishment.
If anyone wants some primary school appropriate word problems, let me recommend the collections by Lenchner, e.g. https://archive.org/details/mathematicalolym0000lenc
Also try Kordemsky’s Moscow Puzzles https://archive.org/details/boris-a.-kordemsky-the-moscow-pu...
They "stretch" it to its dictionary definition?
It still is a kind of memorization, just not a voluntary one. And such learning is still is a very important function of mental development and evolutionary fitness, that shouldn't just be shunned "because trauma".
Well, I see your cargo cult and I raise you tried-and-true.
"Absorbing the concept itself" might take more effort (including personal, for logistical reasons, not everything can be tailored to the individual learner, who might not even care enough for learning compared to all kinds of diversions, and have zero passion for the subjects, even if a clone with the teaching skills of Feynman with the presentation skills of Tonny Robbins, and the passionate conviction of Jean D' Arc was to present it to them.
But absorbing the concept is not enough, there needs to be instant recall, or at least fast enough recall) of all kinds of facts and factoids and tables, and also this "absorbing" also needs to encompass boring concepts, that are nonetheless crucial, if one is to be succesful in anything technical or scientific, or generally creative in any sort of organized way that combines concepts and information (not just Jackson Pollocking away).
To memorize means to commit to memory. It is an action. But memories are created by not just actions, but experiences. Experiences can create memories without you having committed them; without you having memorized anything.
Please teach me to this magical "commit to memory" skill. Up till now memorizing has always been a side effect of some other process like studying for me. I would love to be able to skip all of that.
You can't create a memory of something you don't already have in your head. Studying puts stuff into your head for you to remember. Memory usually comes naturally after that happens, but it usually cannot come before, unless you happen to have perfect recall and memorize the image of whatever you are reading.
A good example of committing something to memory on demand is making a mental note. I don't know if everyone has this ability, but it's a pretty commonly known concept. You don't have to study the subject of the note in order to remember it; it's often something simple like "do this tomorrow" that you already understand, so it's easy to memorize.
There is no action of "commiting to memory". It's not an action we do, it's a process that results in that.
The actual action we do (when we consciously try to remember something) is e.g. to study (read, repeat, and so on).
Mental notes are a pretty commonly known concept; not that I'm claiming everyone can make them easily, or at all, but they don't typically require focused studying. I'd consider them an example of committing something to memory intentionally. Sure, studying is another way of committing things to memory. You can read something repeatedly and completely ignore it just as much as you can read something repeatedly with the intention of remembering it. You can also make mental remarks without them becoming mental notes. But it is certainly possible to create a memory on purpose. It's just that studying an entire subject requires you to train your understanding quite a bit in order to build a good memory of it, as opposed to memorizing a single simple idea or lesson that you already intuitively understand.
You need the 'flashcards' before you can read, listen or talk. Go try reading a book where you don't know most of the words. Heck you need 'flashcards' before you needs 'flashcards for words'. You need to memorize the alphabet first. Try reading a text where you haven't learned the writing system.
Because they can't read.
Obviously you aren't a parent. You think a child magically decides one day to say mama? Or do you think it's the mother constantly saying 'mama' to the child until the child 'remembers it' and repeats it?
What? Complex statistical inferences about the world?
You should be aware that people are able to become fluent without ever using flashcards.
I've a toddler who can read 3 paragraphs of 3 sentences each, and then tell you the details of the story he read[1]. He is 4y6m, right now. He has never learned the alphabet or the names of the letters (A,B, C, D, etc). He has only learned the sounds a letter or sequence of letters make for certain patterns.
You most definitely do not need to memorise the alphabet in order to learn to read!
Teaching children the alphabet before teaching them reading makes it a lot harder for them to learn actual reading.
[1] I've seen kids as old as 7 get confused by a book with no pictures, and he sails right on through because I taught him to read (using the DISTAR alphabet), and made sure none of our daily lessons had even a single picture in it.
How are you defining a "flashcard"?
Kids say mama almost universally and regardless of their local language because it's an easy sound to make.
Or maybe we just don't want to coddle them. When has learning anything been easy, and why do you expect people to be able to acquire new knowledge and skills without putting in the effort? It shouldn't be grueling, not for its own sake, but yeah, you might have to stare at a compiler error for a few hours or even a few days before you figure out what's broken. Truly, how else are you supposed to learn if you don't, eventually, do it yourself?
I'm so sick of this anti-expert, anti-knowledge attitude. It's why we have bootcamp juniors being thrown into otherwise-senior roles, with laughably predictable consequences for the field.
Perhaps I worded it too emotionally. I mean that experts struggle to remember what it was like before they understood something. It’s very common for experts to ask novices to make leaps that they aren’t capable of making, because they seem natural or obvious from an expert POV.
I’m all for hard work; learning is usually very hard work. I also think we need expert guidance.
But let’s make the difficulty useful/effective rather than counterproductive.
This attitude seems unrelated to the topic at hand quite frankly. Experts suck at empathizing with learners not because of this spite, but often because it's actually quite difficult to switch gears in language and understanding. It's a completely different way of sharing knowledge, where you have to explicitly express things that are just assumed shared understanding among colleagues.
Also, to answer your questions in a very simple way: the entire reason you even became an expert is because another expert somewhere along the way gave you an easy in to the knowledge, they coddled you. This is why you can "stare at a compiler error for a few hours before figuring out what's broken". Without that expert, you wouldn't even understand what a compiler even is.
Parent is saying there's a big difference between being an expert in a field and being a good teacher.
Makes total sense. Kinda like how we can't train an LLM how to speak by just giving it a dictionary.
I am not commenting on or agreeing with the OP, but your response is false. LLMs aren't given just a dictionary, and they do not know how to speak. Speech implies grasp of semantics. There is zero semantics in a block of text, only, according to some interpretation, various textual correlations.
haha, no man, the "creativity" cargo cult should be entirely ignored. You shouldn't even consider what mechanistic formula they've invented. If you do you might buy into it and your creativity will be less your own.
Never listen to the grownups, everything they say is a lie.
You are changing the definition of memory we have had for like 25 centuries in the West. That is your choice but there is no stretching on the other side.
“To me” is not what defines what something is.
They actually are, thou. Small kids are repeated the same things over and over, hundreds of times. They watch the same Bluey episodes dozens of times, get them read the same books dozens of times, listen to the same songs dozens of times.
They drill in their own ways, but they drill.
Drilling vocabulary flashcards is very helpful in learning a language. As is reading, listening, or talking to someone. To learn a language well, you need to do both. Although children ultimately reach the level of being a native speaker, they do not do this very quickly considering that they say their first words when they are about 1 year old.