Memory and Learning

How does one accelerate one's learning capability?

I am learning a new language now .... Mandarin, and have been on it since July 2012. I'm sure I would not be the last to say that it is a challenging language to learn.

I have been doing some research to help me accelerate my learning process. And I come to discover this important basic fact:

There is no learning without memory.

Most psychologists now agree that there are at least two memories: short term memory and long term memory.

The short-term memory is, effectively, a temporary storage device. When you are reading a sentence, it is your short term memory that retains the words at the beginning of the sentence for long -enough to make sense of the whole sentence. Then it is the meaning, rather than the individual words, that is transferred into your long term memory. The long term memory is the permanent storage system from which recall can be made.

Unless an item is rehearsed, it is lost out of the short term memory, and does not enter the long term memory. Hence the importance of rehearsal and review in any learning.

There are actually three distinct aspects to memorising something.

The three 'R's' of memory, are Registration, Retention and Recall.

You have to:

(1) Become aware of new facts and make an active effort to transfer them to long term memory. That is Registration or as psychologists term it `encoding'.

(2) Store these facts in your long term memory and

(3) Be able to recall the facts when you need them.

It can be concluded that, without rehearsal of a new fact in the short term memory, it would not get transferred to the long term memory.

Model of Memory



Information which is not rehearsed in the short term memory is rapidly forgotten. This is because the short term memory is the part of the memory that does the encoding, or registration, and the better the encoding the stronger the ultimate memory.

Hence, to learn something well, there is no short cut ... you need to rehearse or review. The more you do that, the better the information will stay in your long term memory. And that applies to my learning of Mandarin. I carry my Mandarin flashcards with me wherever I go and review them as often as possible when there is any slack time. 

Happy learning !!