It’s interesting – at least, I find it interesting – that the French word répétition can also be translated as rehearsal. How do musicians or public speakers or sportspeople or actors get good at what they do. Rehearsal, repetition. Constant repetition. But constant repetition is rarely a synonym of a fun time.
Of course, we could just sit on the floor in the lotus position and repeat the same sentence ten thousand times like a Buddhist monk. In a trance.
The sentence would undoubtedly stick in our brain. But there are more efficient routes to the same goal. One is called spaced repetition. Spaced, as in separated by intervals. Not as in sitting on the floor in a trance.
And the technique of spaced repetition is used by many language apps and teaching methods. Paul Pimsleur discovered that if learners were reminded of new words at gradually increasing intervals, each time they would remember longer than the time before.
We can use this technique to test our newly acquired grammar or vocabulary using spaced repetition so that these new words and structures move from our short-term into our long-term, or permanent, memory.
We can liken this process to a walk in the forest. If we walk through a woodland area where nobody has ever trodden before, the going will be hard, our progress hindered by unfamiliarity. Let’s re-walk the same path the next morning and the one after that. What will happen? A discernible track will now have been created, walking is consequently easier and more enjoyable. Instead of being explorers, we have become travellers.
This is what happens in the brain. The first time we learn new information, we are by definition in virgin territory, and it may be hard to retain what we have learned. If the same information is regularly repeated however, the synaptic connections become stronger and stronger, and a permanent cerebral path is created.
