I don’t know about you, but I still get somewhat upset when I see a word that I know I’ve looked up before, but don’t remember its meaning. After having been in the US for 20 years, this doesn’t happen too often, but every now and then I would hear a term and think, I know I’ve heard it before but have no clue when and in what context. Although I don’t let that bug me as much as it used to, I still sometimes catch a negative thought trickling into my mind.
But the other day, I came across a YouTube video, which made me think more about that. In the video, the linguist and polyglot Steve Kaufmann discussed how the words we forget are still part of our memory and the act of recalling them makes our memory better. According to him, there are words that we know but don’t use (he calls this our “reserve”), and when we read a story, hear something, or try to recall some information, we often come across these words. Then we try to remember them again, and it is this very act of striving to recall the vocabulary that is so beneficial to our memory. Kaufmann’s claim piqued my curiosity and I decided to delve a little deeper into the topic. And that’s how I found out about the Generation Effect.
The Generation Effect is a memory phenomenon, according to which, people remember information more if they create it in their own mind, rather than passively reading it. In one study, participants were given a pair of words, where one of the words was fully shown and the other, its synonym, was shown as a fragment. They had to come up with the missing letters on their own. For example, if they saw GARBAGE – W␣ST␣, they were supposed to fill out the second word – WASTE. This study found that generating words as opposed to just reading them, notably improved later memory performance. This is because during the process of encoding, certain areas of the brain work together to fill out the missing parts.
In other words, when you see vocabulary that you’ve learned before but can’t recall right off the bat, don’t just look it up in the dictionary again. Try to recall the meaning from context and think of a few synonyms that you already know and use.
I think this method also works for grammar. When saying something, you can ask yourself how you could say it in a different way while keeping the same meaning. For example, if you want to say:
I WOULDN’T HAVE CALLED YOU IF I HAD KNOWN YOU WERE SLEEPING.
you can try to pair it with:
H␣D I ␣␣␣WN YOU WERE SLEEPING, I WOULDN’T HAVE CALLED YOU.
or another way to say:
I LIKE TO READ.
is:
I LIKE READ␣␣␣.
.
The point of this exercise is to make you actively recall what you already know, but maybe don’t use. Or, as Kaufmann puts it, this will stir up your reserve.
Remember that you will always find more words in your reserve (or your passive memory) than you use. This is normal and it’s nothing to beat yourself up over. Forgetting is helping you to build up your reserve, which is an essential part of learning.
Ok, now let’s practice. Try to fill out the missing letters of the words and phrases below. The second word or phrase is a synonym to the first one, so try to guess it. You can look it up only if you are absolutely sure that you’ve never seen it before.
SOMETIMES – O␣␣ASI␣N␣L␣Y
SEARCH – S␣␣K
IMPORTANT – S␣L␣␣NT
INTIMIDATING – D␣U␣␣ING
SURPRISED – AS␣␣N␣␣␣ED
You get the idea. Now you can make your own list and add to it every day. But don’t go over your entire reserve of words every day. Trying to remember too much too fast will leave you frustrated and discouraged. Pick up to five, or if you feel ambitious, ten words per day. Remember that everyone is different. Just because someone else can memorize 50 new words a day doesn’t mean that you have to do the same. The important thing is to keep moving forward.
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You have probably noticed that some of the phrases used in this post are highlighted in red. These are idioms that Americans often use. Now read the article again and if you don’t know some of these phrases, try to guess their meaning from context. Write each one of them and the meaning you think they have. Then google them and compare your answers.
How many of them did you get right? Which one of them have you never used? Let me know in the comments or shoot me an email. By commenting with the words you haven’t used before, you will be making a step towards putting them in your long term memory 😉
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