2025-03-27
10 分钟Repetition and language learning.
Today, I want to talk about a strategy for repetition,
which is so important in learning anything, and in particular, learning languages.
You may have heard the famous aphorism, call it, neurons that fire together, wire together.
This was first enunciated by Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, in 1949.
And the idea is that if neurons are close enough to each other to trigger a reaction...
they were firing together, they will eventually create a synapse,
a connection, which is how learning takes place.
This is neuroplasticity.
This is how memories are created.
So that's how learning takes place.
But how do we create these firing together of neurons?
A lot of it has to do with repetition.
It's the repeated exposure to similar concepts or phenomena.
that enable us to learn things.
But it's not, in my view, simply a matter of frequent exposure to very specific items.
For example, words, the same word over and over and over again.
That has been shown to be not very effective.
In other words, we need to decide what we want to repeat,
when we want to repeat it, and how we repeat it.