2025-10-31
5 分钟Hi.
Today I'm going to talk about cognitive load theory or cognitive overload,
which is a new theory on learning about how the sort of intrinsic or even extraneous difficulty of a learning task impacts our ability to learn,
to remember, to retrieve information, and so forth.
And I want to give you my perspective on this
because I think it's quite interesting and it kind of touches on something that I've talked about before.
In its essence,
I feel that cognitive load theory is about how do you make the task easier, essentially.
And the way you make a learning task easier
as it applies to languages is to activate prior knowledge.
In other words, if you can learn something that you kind of in a way already know,
it's going to be easier to learn that.
And if it's easier, you're going to be happier and more satisfied with the learning process,
and you'll probably stay with the task.
I've often said that language learning is sort of a re-iterative or an iterative process.
You learn it once, you forget, you go back again.
I've used the metaphor of my lawnmower where if the grass of my lawn is very high,
I will actually set the blades a little higher,
an inch or so higher so that my first pass through the grass will be easier and then my second pass will also be easier and I'll have the same.
grass,