We're so afraid of making mistakes, that can really hinder our progress
because if we're not making those mistakes and we are kind of demanding
perfection from ourselves um we're just we're not going to learn.
You could probably relate to this, as far as one of the biggest challenges of
learning a language is not only finding other people to practice with,
but also remembering what we learn right?
And I think it's probably happened to all of us to where maybe we
watched a video maybe we just had a conversation or maybe we are just going
through flashcards or vocabulary lists and just two or three days later we
forget what we learned. And this is actually based backed up by
statistics, and so um, a book that I commonly refer to is
Unlimited Memory by Kevin Horsley, but one of the things that
he says in that book is on average, if you learn a
new piece of information today you'll only remember about 54% of that
information tomorrow, just in a single day.
And that becomes less and less really quick.
and so by the end of 8, or sorry, 28 days
you can only retain about 18% of that new information that you took in.
Today is basically going to be ways that we can really reduce that so we can
remember more what we learn and really make best use of our time
when it comes to learning a new language and in this case sign language.
And so we all have limited time and I think that's probably another big
challenge for many of us is making best use of our time so we can
kind of speed up the entire language learning process because we want to get
to that end result, to be fluent, to be comfortable,
to say what we want when we want. And so that's why we'll be
going over um ways that we can actually really
improve our memory, and that's one thing that we kind of tell ourselves is that
memory is a trait, "I either have a good memory or I have a
bad memory", but another thing that's really interesting is that a
memory isn't actually a trait, it's a skill.
And it is something that can be trained.
Kevin Horsley's like a really good example of that because he's somebody
that challenged himself and he wanted to
get the Guinness World Book of Records for
memorizing the most digits of Pi, and you know it's 3.14159256 ...
and it just goes on and on and on.
And so what he did is he ended up combining lots of different memory
tactics or techniques to be able to memorize up to 10,000
digits of that number and so somebody could you know snap
their fingers and say okay what was digit 5000 and he could pull out that
number and be accurate. And so it was something that he was able
to train himself to do and that's something
I think is the first step is knowing that we can actually
train our memory to become better. Overall theme again
is just trying to make best of use of our time and to be able to improve our
memory so we forget less remember more and so we can more quickly
be able to communicate. And so I'm going to break this up into
two segments: the first one is going to be going over
deliberate study, and this is probably the way that we're most
comfortable or we're most used to learning a language, vocabulary lists,
flash cards... ways of repeating words again
and again and again and it's just kind of that repetition.
And what we really want to get deep into is
you know how to make that more effective but also what's a better way of
approaching it, and where the set that second segment is
called interleaving learning, and might sound a
little odd and might be the first time you've heard of it but it's actually a
really, really effective way of learning a new language.
And so the first one we'll just dive right into is how do we
make deliberate study um more effective and more efficient?
We're going to do this in three ways.
So, that first one is a notebook and this is probably
something that you already have. So, many students I encourage to keep
track of the words that they've been learning
and so, it's important to have that list but also to make that
list more effective is to really attach as much information
to what you're learning as possible sometimes we have a tendency
of just making it a word list right and, you know,
a day or two goes by and we might look at our list and we'll
look at it and we forgot how to sign it what can help is
adding a little more information to it and you could do this a couple ways you
could use the HOLME parameters, the handshape,
orientation, location, movement, and expression.
You could go through the five parameters and you can explain what that sign looks
like the movements the expression the location
and the orientation and all of those things,
and that can be really helpful but actually what can be even more effective is if we
draw a little picture. and I'll just give you a quick example,
do we know what this sign is?
So it can have a few english words right it can mean connection
it can mean relationship it can mean unity
and so there's a lot of different ways or words that we could use to attach to
that one sign so for myself i ended up just drawing
two circles that made a chain link and so for me that was a quick way to
kind of write that if i'm glossing something out and instead of writing out
the word unity or relationship or chain link or
something like that i just draw those two little circles
that were connected and for me that was enough to remember that sign
and to almost kind of have that contextualization too to be able to
understand what that sign represented and you know there's many signs that we
could do that, like another one, this sign.
Match, machine, harmony, and that sign can mean a lot
of different things too, but sometimes I know some people that draw puzzle pieces.
Two puzzle pieces coming together and they match perfectly.
And that can be a really powerful way to create that mental image
of what that sign is how it's signed and and everything else and that could be
much more effective than just writing the word
match or connect or relationship and just little things here and there it
doesn't have to be this elaborate uh drawing um you know we can be terrible
artists but you know we can just draw two little circles connecting
or you know whatever it is that can kind of be that little
reminder of what that sign is and what it looks like
and so that can be different for many of us so that's just one way that we can
really utilize that notebook a little bit better
um and a little bit more on that visualization
um so this is an example that is from the book and he's talking about the
language of zulu and the zulu word for dog
is inja inja and he's for himself he's thinking of
like well what does that remind me of and he's thinking okay it sounds like
injured inja injud inja dog and he's like okay so now i
have this mental image of this injured dog maybe
hobbling down the road and now it's going to be really hard to
forget inja okay that's the zulu word for dog and it
can really help solidify that inner memory and
again this is uh studies back this up and
let me see if i can find this the statistic after three days
we will tend to only remember about 10 of information if we just write it down
no pictures nothing so 10 that's hardly anything we forgot the
whole thing three days from now and i think that's something that we've
all experienced um but if you were able to add some kind of
picture some kind of visualization you'll remember 65 that's huge
and you know i bet you three days from now you'll probably still remember ninja
you'll probably still remember connection maybe that puzzle piece of
match and just having some sort of way to
visualize the signs that you're using and you can combine that with the
notebook you already have and these really can start to become powerful
tools that can build off of one another now the third thing is based repetition
it's that deliberate approach of i'm going to learn you know maybe 10
signs and then i'm going to review it and then i'm going to review it
if we don't review it at all we're going to forget just about everything really
quick and like so this is another thing
side point like two years after high school's finished
we only retain about three weeks worth of lessons
only after two years and it's it's really crazy like
how much information that we put into our minds that gets
lost because we don't go back to it we don't review it
and so if we don't come back to it it can really
fade out of our memories really quickly and
so space repetition is there to kind of combat that and so basically what it is
is you learn a new piece of information
maybe it's five or ten signs that you learned today
and so what you're going to do is you're going to review that information
a lot and frequently and then over time you review it less and less
and we do this all the time like think of a phone number
you get a new cell phone number and you know
you if somebody tells it to you and you have those seven digits to remember you
can probably relay that information back right there on the spot but a few
minutes goes by and you don't recall that number it
fades into memory really quick but what happens we keep using that number
every day or at least we used to we used to dial that number
every day and you know i can remember phone numbers from when i was a kid
because i just dialed those numbers over and over and over again and it's that
repetition that can really embed things into our
memory um and so the way that we could use space
repetition for learning sign language is say we learned a sign today
let's let's say this was a new sign i learned match today
that goes in your notebook right maybe you draw a little picture
maybe you describe the hand shapes the orientations you know whatever works for
you and then you're going to review that
sign three times before the day is over it could be one after another it could
be breakfast lunch dinner but but try to review come back to that
sign at least three times before the day is over and then before the week
is over try to review it three more times
it could be you know i re i learned it today and then i'm going to review it
monday a couple days goes by and then i review
it again and then try to review it three times in that
first month and you can notice that frequency is getting
bigger and bigger and bigger so you know three times the first day three times
the first week three times the first month and then you
only have to review every once in a while
and you'll be able to recall that information
but if you don't review it at all it will it will fade away
and i think many of us maybe um you know think of math class you know i think
we all took algebra at some point and how many of us can remember like what
the equation was for a slope you know m
equals y x plus b anybody remember that maybe advanced
algebra and the quadratic equation x equals negative b plus or minus and
like those things are just fade into memory because we
don't use it and memory tricks can go a long ways and
i didn't have this in my notes but i like the quadratic equation it's
it's a mess like if you have to try to memorize that
but i had an algebra teacher in like i don't know 10th grade maybe so this is
20 something years ago and they turned that
equation into a song super silly song but it's like
x equals negative v plus or minus square root
4 ac minus 4b all over 2a and it's like it's a
silly little jingle but it's it it got it's branded in my brain
and like we can do that with little pieces of information and we can do that
with sign language too and whether it's in
the word inja in zulu for dog or if it's um like johnny uh
there's this uh japanese phrase her friends taught her is
it was uh don't touch tamashti and for her it sounded like uh
don't touch don't touch the mustache and um do you remember what was that
what did it mean again i'm hungry i'm hungry i forget the
meaning but you know it's those little things like
it it's something that can trigger what that sign was and we can do that with
all kinds of signs too uh relationship match um i had one
student that was having a hard time with the sign for
go and it kind of looks like it's just kind of going off your shoulder at a
diagonal and we must have practiced that for 5-10
minutes and then i was like well just you know picture the squid on the corner
of your shoulder and just kind of squirts away and that stuck and
like weeks later she's like okay squid goes away it goes oh and so like we can
do that with all kinds of signs some of them are pretty obvious so you
know they have a jellyfish but basically it's just being creative
and the more creative we can be the better right
and this is one thing that we can really do to help that deliberate study
be more effective but i mentioned deliberate study actually isn't the most
effective way of approaching language learning and
so that goes into interleaving learning and in order to
introduce that i'm going to show you a quick
clip and this is from one of my more favorite polyglots
steve kaufman i've used him before and i think i've
i've used a few clips from other videos and other workshops
but basically he goes over those two types of ways of kind of
memorizing vocabulary and one is the deliberate approach
you know vocabulary lists flash cards and writing them down in a notebook
and so those are very deliberate ways of trying to learn a language
like a classroom right um so this clip let me see if i can share it with you
and he's just talking really quickly about interleaving learning
and there's significant research which shows
that what they call block learning where you take some material and try to
force yourself to learn it and review it many many times and
go through your for example list of vocabulary or flash cards over and over
in the hope of nailing that mastering it that is
relatively inefficient and that interleaved learning
interleaving and i suggest you google the term in
other words where you come across some information then you forget it you go
and look at some other information you come back to that first information
so they're sort of interleaving layers of different things
forgetting and relearning actually enables you
to learn things better that there's very quickly this the sort of uh
law of diminishing returns sets in when we're
trying deliberately to learn something it's no longer fresh for our brain
and the brain basically pushes back whereas if you forget and come back to
it you learn better and this is the same person where i uh
where he talks about you know vocabulary over grammar
um and so this is this was a video that he recorded five years ago when he
only knew 15 languages now he's fluent in 20 languages
and so you know we can learn a lot from people that are really good at learning
languages because oftentimes that approach matters and that's
something that you know i i talk about in the past too is you know
we can really learning a new language can be really difficult and we can
hit those walls really fast and the way we typically learn
a language especially sign language is just going word after word after word
afterward and like he was saying it's that law of
diminishing returns and we can only push ourselves to learn so many words in
that fashion and basically he mentioned interleaving
learning and this is basically exposure and this is the way
languages are learned naturally as how we learn them as kids and those
that learn languages almost as a hobby do this
all the time it's when they use what they know it's when they
interact and try to expose themselves to lots of content in the language that
they're trying to learn and this is something that we've gone
over before too it's that comprehensible input
comprehensible output getting that feedback and
it's getting in in there and kind of rolling our
sleeves up and using what we know it's not the most comfortable but it's
actually much more effective and if we forget
and we come back and relearn it that can actually work in our favor if we make a
mistake we actually learn from that mistake better than if we got
it right the first time and the same is true if we're having a
conversation and we're using our the language that we have and maybe
we fumble way through it and maybe we're not perfect but that is
a good thing and the big challenge is just kind of
giving getting over our maybe nervousness um
apprehension um that fear of making mistakes or
maybe maybe afraid of saying something you know really bad which i think
just comes with the territory you know i've done it my wife has done it every
everyone that i've known has ever learned sign language has that one story
of like oh man i just i i totally said the wrong thing and i've done that in
spanish and vietnamese it's not just a sign language thing you learn a new
language you're gonna make a mistake and it's
gonna you're gonna embarrass yourself at some point but
that can be a good thing and we're so afraid of making mistakes
that can really hinder our progress because
if we're not making those mistakes and we are kind of demanding perfection from
ourselves we're just we're not going to learn and
if we only tackle it in a deliberate manner where we're just focusing on
vocabulary lists it's fun at first but not in the long
run and that's what he you know you just get
so much more mileage out of using that interleaving learning
approach and you know it could be called different things you
know you can call it comprehensible input you could call it just
using what you know but it's just getting in there using the language
and doing the best you can and so it's and it kind of goes back to that
memory and you know we much we remember
conversations much more vividly than we do vocabulary lists
and that's what we want to go for
you