Western world has put a real emphasis on originality. However; I’ve always found funny how the Eastern world hasn’t. China, for example, has always been famous for copying and copying. Let’s find a balance between both worlds and see when originality or copies are worth doing during our learning. It doesn’t matter how, it’s just what you must do in order to succeed.
A traditional approach to education would normally state that repeating, repeating and repeating is worth doing. Nevertheless, if you repeat a sentence for a million times, you will probably remember it.
A modern approach on the same subject would state the opposite, that repeating is useless as even a parrot can do it, the importance is in the message. And that is also true, why would anyone want to repeat a message which is not fully understood?
Thinking Languages is a system that works, no matter the new or the old things are, so I am to tell you how to use repetition in order to learn when repetition is needed, and when it is totally useless.
How, where, when; how, where, when…
English collocation is one of the most difficult subjects to Spanish learning English as a second language. In order to make things easier for them, I’ve told them to memorize this simple sequence in order to remember where the adverbs in English are located. Then, they just follow the example when reproducing sentences by themselves.
Some staff is just particularly important and it has no sense at all, they’re just rules. That is what happens when we refer to pure grammar. A language has certain rules, and they are and that is. Don’t find logic, don’t find a reason and most importantly, do not compare them to your mother tongue. They seem arbitrary, and they sometimes are. The only thing you have to do is learn them. In that case, repeating is the most important thing you could do.
Memory is a bad feature in human brain. Yeah, believe, we are very bad remembering staff. An elephant has an immense memory, I’ll give you that, some people also, but for the vast majority of us, we’re just bad at remembering staff. We forget appointments easily, we rely on our agendas or smart phones to know what to do and especially when.
Intelligence is the human feature that is most remarkable. Let’s be smart them and use a repetitive system in which we can remember. Take a piece of paper and a pencil, and write all that you need to remember a few dozens of times. Then go humming along the corridor as well. You can invent a tune and sing along that content, you can repeat it and repeat until everyone around you becomes mad, but then you’ll remember it!
Be smart
You must be clever enough –and I know you are- to classify the content that can be repeated, and the one that can’t. When meaning is involved, when building up pieces of language by yourself, then is when you need to understand and to speak like a human.
But when you do this, the structure built by repetition will help you support the new content and the new ideas. If there’s nothing in which the new ideas can stand on, then there’s nothing and that’s all.
Some people rely on studying what they have to memorize as if they were studying something they should understand. That can only work for those very few with a photographic memory, if you are not one of them, you will fail. Don’t be lazy and get to repeat and repeat as if you were doing a certain sport, and you’ll succeed.
Basket players need coordination and intelligence to play, as well as being fast and at the same time, they must be aware of all the rest of the team, the coach, the time, the rivals… yeah, lots of things, but do you think they could do all that if they hadn’t practiced throwing the ball a few million times?
What do you repeat and how?
Lingua-Franca 