Speak, Memory: How the science of recall is finally helping us to learn other languages
Speak, Memory
How the science of recall is finally helping us to learn other languages
A FEW YEARS AGO, Captain Emmanuel Joseph decided to learn Arabic before his deployment to Iraq. “At first it was easy,” he told me. At his base in the U.S., he explains, “we had native speakers teaching us basic things like greetings; imperatives like stop, go, walk; and some numbers and nouns. It was very much survival-level.” In Iraq, Joseph (not his real name) continued trying to learn Arabic with Al-Kitaab, the main textbook used by American universities and the military. But he struggled.
“I was forgetting more than I was learning,” he said. “With every chapter in the textbook came a hundred more vocabulary words. The language and the culture were accessible, but I also had a job to do. So I didn’t—and couldn’t—spend all my time studying.” Joseph cast about online for help and came across LinguaStep, an online Arabic-language program that quizzes a user in vocabulary and adapts to a user’s specific rate of learning.
LinguaStep was first developed in 2006 by Loren Siebert, an energetic computer-software entrepreneur with coppery hair crowning a triathlete’s build. Siebert has packed several lifetimes into his 40 years: computer coder at age 9, programmer for the Department of Defense at age 15, Marshall Scholar at age 21.
Siebert decided to learn Arabic on something of a lark: He took an aptitude test that told him he’d be good at languages. He thought Arabic was beautiful. So he signed up for a beginners’ class at the University of California, Berkeley. Like Joseph, Siebert struggled with the vocabulary. “Arabic is a language of memorization,” he said. “You just have to drill the words into your head, which unfortunately takes a lot of time.” He thought, “How can I maximize the number of words I learn in the minimum amount of time?”
Siebert started studying the science of memory and second-language acquisition and found two concepts that went hand in hand to make learning easier: selective learning and spaced repetition. With selective learning, you spend more time on the things you don’t know, rather than on the things you already do.