In Praise of Memorization

I speak 7 languages (learning an 8th) and can relate to remembering things in context being more effective than rote memorization.

That said, some types of rote memorization do help accelerate learning. In language learning I often come across fundamental words that don’t occur frequently enough for me to internalize automatically but yet occur frequently enough to block comprehension when encountered (it’s little words like “put” or “place”). For these words, I just put them in Anki in sentence context and do a few rounds of spaced repetition to get them in my system.

In my opinion Anki shouldn’t be used for core vocabulary but it’s useful for reinforcing and “cleaning up” words on the fringes that one doesn’t encounter that often but that are very useful.

Your neurons in your brain made up the CPU.

your memory is the DDR and cache, we all know the more the better.

muscle memory is cache, it has the fastest access.

It wasn't a process so much as an accidental by-product of what I was studying. By the time I left high school, I was taking German, Latin, and French. In undergrad, I expanded that to include some Old English, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic. You can't get around memorization to learn languages.

The reason my memory ended up so nuts is that I was only interested in the nuts and bolts of the language, so I didn't continue on with French when it became about literature, I just picked up a new language instead. After a while, languages become more about things like context clues, but at the beginning and intermediate stages, you have to memorize a lot. Since I wanted to go for linguistic breadth (since I was interested in how languages were related/how features travel), I did the memorization stage of language learning a lot.

So I'd say it's down to consistency and longevity of practice. I used spaced-repetition as my main technique, but it's really down to spending 1+ hour a day for 8 years on memorizing.

You also have to keep up with it, or your memory degrades. It's been a good 10 years, and I don't have nearly the memory I used to.

Use method of loci. It's an almost trivially learned skill, and once you've got the technique down, you can expand it as needed, or riff on the basics with other mnemonics to amplify the speed and volume of memorization capacity.

Rote learning is difficult, and unnecessary. Your brain already automatically memorized places, faces, and novel things. If you can imagine Elvis in a wizard robe holding a block of cheese on your front porch, you have a one item memory palace. That's the level of difficulty a memory palace requires - it's a hack of built in automatic functions your brain is already performing.

Elite memory athletes who memorize the order of thousands of cards, or tens of thousands of digits of pi, or a travel dictionary, or any other assortment of things - these people are often average intelligence, otherwise normal folks who just practice a neat trick.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of "advanced" memory, mnemonics, or method of loci primers. Get one and develop a superpower.

I like "Memory Improvement" by Ron White - you can grok it in an afternoon, but it's structured into 30 daily exercises, and captures all the important features without fluff or filler. The audiobooks is great, 4 hours long. A motivated person could master the skill over a weekend with nothing but the audio.

Seriously. Method of loci is a basic human skill that gets attributed to genius characters like Sherlock or Tony Stark or Einstein level intellects, or to shamans and druids and mystics. It's a default feature that comes in every install - it's how your brain wants to work. Every single person can do it, and should.

I think people are confusing "memorization" with "practice". "Practice" is really important and "memorization" is both the prerequiste and result of "practice".

I often tell people "Calculus is just algebra. However, it's fast, repeated algebra. If you aren't excellent at algebra, calculus is going to be terrible for you. On the flip side, calculus forces you to use your algebra so much that you get much better at it."