Steve Kaufmann here again to talk about language learning.
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Today, I want to talk about something that comes up quite often.
And I was thinking about it this evening
and I'll tell you why I was thinking about it.
So here I am.
Normally at the beginning of the week, I get my new MP3 files from
this person in Tunisia who gets these MP3 files
from the Al Jazeera website, because I haven't figured out how to do it
myself, so I just pay her a little bit of money.
She does it. I get them.
I put on HappyScribe and I've got three new podcasts to study about some event
in the Middle East, I haven't got them yet, so I'm bored.
I can go over the old.
You know, lessons that I've gone over
before, but that's not very interesting, although it's good for me.
I don't really want to do that this
evening, so I start doing some flash cards.
Now, I'm not a big fan of doing flash cards.
Seems that it just takes longer.
I like lists, or at least that's what I've said.
But, you know,
what I find is I don't I don't want to read the old texts that I have.
Maybe I'm tired of going through my lists.
So I go and do some flash cards and it's new.
It's different and it's enjoyable.
So I'm connected to the language.
I'm doing something different.
It introduces variety.
And it sort of dawned on me that variety is so important to our language learning.
People ask me, how do you stay motivated?
Well, I have to have variety.
For a while I was doing Persian and Arabic.
There's some variety.
I occasionally go back to my Mini-Stories.
And then I go to my more interesting podcast there, there's some variety.
I don't really want to
plow through the old texts and maybe even when I get my new
podcast.
Maybe I want to do some more flash carding, because it's a different thing
to do, it's a different activity, keeps me connected with the language.
And we know, too, that the way the brain learns the brain likes variety.
I always quote Manfred Spitzer.
The brain likes repetition,
but the brain likes variety, variety, novelty, new things.
You know, I'll listen to a podcast.
You know, I'm subscribed to these
podcasts, but I don't know how to download the MP3 file.
But I listen to a new podcast in Arabic while doing the dishes,
even though I don't understand much of it because it's new.
Like new is good, variety is good.
Doing different things is good.
And we know the brain through the work of Robert Bjork of UCLA and others.
The brain doesn't learn very well when
it's constantly trying to learn and master the same thing.
The brain learns better when it can
meander and cover the same ground in different ways.
So you're coming across the vocabulary in context, but you're tired of reading.
So you've covered some of the vocabulary
in flashcards and there's even a variety of flashcards, you know,
can be reverse flashcard or dictation or a close test or a multiple choice.
So again, you're covering some of this same material in different ways.
So variety is good.
And I just it's a quickie video here.
I thought I would share that with you. I was enjoying it.
I often say, I mean, I'm not going to go through, you know,
flash cards for 50000 words that I have saved in Arabic because then that would be
sort of tedious, doing the same thing over and over and over again.
But as a break, here I am.
I've finished dinner.
I've, you know, done the dishes.
And I want to spend a little time with my Arabic.
I'm supposed to be doing this 90-Day-C
hallenge and I'm kind of tired of the other activities.
So I started a new activity, which I haven't been doing: flashcards.
Variety is good.
Variety maintains the motivation.
Variety keeps the brain fresh.
So that's the message here.
Make sure you maintain enough variety in your activities and in the subject
matter and the places you study and so forth.
It's good for the brain and it keeps you motivated.
OK, thank you. Bye.