Emma: Learning and teaching are also seperate parts of the brain. As is shown in many studies, if you activate more than one part of the brain while learning something that information is more bound to stay. In your case, in order to learn you didnt have to use your analytical skills, you just had to store information, but to teach you hade to break down the idiom in tasks, thus using different parts of your brain.

By saying it out loud, you use your speak-centra (or whatever the word is) and then you interact and you process the information you hear from your friends, thus using a much larger portion of your brain than in the first case of reviewing the idioms and writing them (two things).

In your first example you aldo had to translate them word by word – and translate the meaning of the idiom, which is yet another process.Interesting article! (ie MISS YOU 🙂

February 26th, 2012 at 10:38

Sara K.: It never occurred to me to use drawing to help me learn Chinese … but now that you mention it, that seems like a lot of fun. Next time I go after leeches, I will squash them with doodles.Speaking of doodles, I remember there were a couple classes in college where I drew doodles over all of the tests. Of course, I also answered the questions regularly, but I added the doodles because I felt like it, and I knew the teacher wouldn’t dock my score. Well, not only did the teacher not dock my score, the teacher said that the doodles actually improved my score because there were times when my written answer was unclear, but he could tell by the doodles that I understood the concept.There is one doodle I still remember years later. The question had something to do with par cans. I doodled Jimi Hendrix’s guitar and Jimi Hendrix’s par can. Whereas Jimi Hendrix’s guitar was broken, Jimi Hendrix’s par can was as good as new. A par can is type of bright light which was originally used by the army in WWII, but after the war, because the military did not need as many, they were quite cheap, as well as quite durable. They were particularly popular with rock bands because they were so inexpensive and difficult to break – which is why Jimi Hendrix’s par can was still in good shape. If I hadn’t made that doodle, I’m not sure I would have remembered that much detail about par cans.

February 26th, 2012 at 13:31

Hugh Grigg: Olle I love your posts! Yeah I agree so much that getting actively involved with what you’re learning makes such a difference. It’s actually worth spending quite a bit of time with individual characters, say, because then they’ll stick and you won’t waste time in future reviewing them repeatedly (John Pasden described this, actually: http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/06/30/ode-to-heisig-and-rtk.It)’s also a flaw with SRS, in a way. It’s tempting to think that you can just load stuff into the SRS and learn it, but actually it’s incredibly difficult to internalise stuff long-term without a deeper context and active engagement. Seems natural learning out in the field wins every time, no matter how much you’d like technology to make it simple.

February 27th, 2012 at 14:09

vermillon: A real coincidence! As part of my 2012 language programme, I bought some notebooks to rewrite the grammar I’m learning in Korean. I read some grammar books that explain some sentence structures, the use of some prepositions etc, but I make a point of rewriting it my own way in the notebook, with my own examples and understanding… and it works well. I didn’t do this consciously though, I just felt the need to do it.And of course, I completely agree with your post. A few examples:

-During my MSc degree, I’ve asked a teacher about a topic I didn’t quite get, and he told me “I only really understood this topic after I had taught it the second time to a class of students”.

-Also, during that year, what made me understand the concepts of the courses (and get a nice row of As) was that some of my classmates were not very good at those courses and I spent quite a lot of time explaining them the concepts of those courses in simpler way. It has had 2 very positive effects: 1) my understanding of the courses was much better later (sometimes it even went from “I don’t understand at all” to “I understand fully”) and 2) my classmates also had a better understanding… I guess that’s what you call a win-win situation.

-Finally, during my engineering studies, I’ve taught maths to quite a lot of high school students: this helped me keep a fresh knowledge of (high school) maths, and made my reasoning much clearer.Now I should try to find how to apply this to language learning… coming to think of it, when you teach maths, there’s a rather limited amount of “raw data” to know, and the rest is reasoning… but when learning languages, you do need “tons” of vocabulary… finding explanations for all of them seems rather difficult. I’m curious, how many hours did you spend learning those 1000 idioms in a week?

February 29th, 2012 at 12:50

Jonathan: This is very interesting to make the distinction between simply time spent and the quality of that time spent when learning something.I find that speaking Chinese with other Chinese learners below my level (who do not speak English) can be very helpful. I don’t mean actually teaching them explicitly. But I find when I speak to them and slow my speech and am more conscious of my language, pronouncing everything very clearly so to be understood – this exercise seems to solidify or consolidate my basics.Seems similar to teaching – though not explicitly so, my brain goes into a sort of teaching mode. I do find myself guiding the listener along in some fashion.

March 2nd, 2012 at 04:47

Sam Reeves: Traditionally in Asia teaching is considered the second part of the learning process. So yes Olle, you’ve definitely stumbled upon a truism. I’ve heard this more around the martial arts scene in my own country and China, more than most other subjects for some reason.I think there is also a saying about it, the exact form of which escapes me at the moment but goes something like: ‘to be competent study, to be a master teach’.Teaching reaches a depth of understanding of the subject matter that makes it your own and leads to further clarity. This is one of the reasons why teaching is a very respected profession in China, as I’m sure you know. They understand that each individual that teaches may reach a unique level of understanding that can aid students growth and skill (and the overall culture).

I guess you could liken it to ‘letting a thousand flowers blossom’ (although I dislike to quote Mao). A thousand creates two thousand, two creates four… and on and on… hopefully with ever deepening insights.

Liked your article by the way. Clarified some thoughts I’ve had.

March 2nd, 2012 at 09:30

Olle Linge: @Emma: I will definitely think/read more about this. Do you have any recommendations for what to read? I’ll probably write an article about this, focusing on why it’s good to learn something five times in different ways rather than five times the same way.@Sara: Cool! I wish I could magically learn to draw. I’m too self-conscious to draw very ugly doodles. :)@Vermillion: Excellent examples, thanks. Regarding the idioms, I spent quite a lot of time, perhaps a total of 30 hours. This was a deliberate “can it be done” experiment; otherwise I would never dream of spending that much time in a week. 🙂

@Jonathan: Yes, I agree. I’m usually trying to avoid that situation, not because I think you’re wrong, but because I really enjoy the challenge of attacking material which really is too hard. I think what you describe is an excellent approach and way of thinking about other students which should make people more tolerant (I hope). Also, this article might be of interest.

@Sam: In a sense, I think teaching has to be the second stage, because if you don’t learn something first, you can’t teach it. However, we don’t need to separate the two stages with time counted in years. It’s perfectly okay to teach something you know even if you’ve only known it for a short time. Of course, if you want someone to pay you for doing it, then you need more, but that’s another topic altogether. 🙂

March 2nd, 2012 at 13:57

Sara K.: I’m not good at drawing myself, but I am willing to doodle shamelessly (just as I’m willing to speak Mandarin shamelessly).

March 3rd, 2012 at 14:45