I'll never forget the day I made the most important discovery of my life. A discovery that would also prove important for thousands of language learners and students of various topics around the world.
Here's what happened:
I was on my porch down in Zehlendorf. (It's really too bad about Zehlendorf …)
I really miss that part of Berlin. I used to walk to the nearby lake and through a wooded area leading to the stores and the M48 bus I often took to Potsdamer Platz where I would watch movies for my work.
Yes, watch movies. I was a Film Studies professor back then. Greatest job in the world – if you can get it.
And If You Can Keep It!
Anyhow, I was on the porch studying German and nearly tearing out my hair with frustration. No matter what I did, the German vocabulary wouldn't stick in my mind.
Worse, the flashcard software I'd been using bored me to tears. I've never found anything more painful than banging foreign language vocabulary repetitively against my eyes in the vain hope that I would somehow magically remember the abstract and mysterious words.
In all fairness, some people can tolerate rote learning. In fact, there's research suggesting that polyglots get great value from hard repetition. This happens primarily because they've trained themselves to be really good at it.
But Let's Be Real
Most people do not want to be polyglots. Most people would be happy just to get halfway decent in one language, not several.
In fact, most people would be overjoyed just to get a couple of hundred words in their long term memory.
And most people would be ecstatic if they could turn those words into basic conversational fluency. All you need is about 800-1200 for that, plus a touch of understanding the grammar.
So there I was with a fat dictionary pumping words into the spaced-repetition software I loathed like the plague.
I sure loved that dictionary, though. What a glorious thing, all thick and yellow.
Heavy too, almost as heavy as a brick. But that didn't stop me from carrying it everywhere.
And That's When It Hit Me!
With a bit of summer wind on my face, I asked myself a fundamental question:
Why on earth wasn't I using memory techniques to help me learn German?
Seriously. They sometimes say that Ph.D. stands for "piled higher and deeper," but Mann O Mann (as the Germans say), was I ever mystified.
You see, following a terrible and nearly suicidal depression that almost forced me out of grad school, I discovered memory techniques almost by accident. I was avoiding the looming field exams and dissertation defense by learning magic tricks.
Of course, procrastinating on my studies only made my depression worse …
But it's at least a good thing that I was doing something constructive. I thought of my magic practice as developing a kind of "emergency paycheck," because I was certain at that time I was going to wind up on the streets with nothing more to do than entertain people and pass around my hat.
And I suppose that would have been fun for awhile. Studying card magic was certainly better than jumping off a bridge, which the mounting pressure and the teeth of my depression were forcing me to consider.
Worse, if you've ever experienced the horrors of manic-depression in full swing, you know the impulses involved. They are sick and sweet and jump out at you from nowhere. It's terrible too because once the urges pounce, they can keep trouncing on you for days and days on end.
The mos
Published on 9 years, 11 months ago
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