I don’t claim that learning is repeated memorization and forgetting though. Learning is when the brain updates its internal models in response to the information it has been chewing on. Forgetting the info after is mostly inevitable, but is not core to this model-update process. And though relearning has silver linings, this does not mean that it is ideal.
This seems like it would really suck if you’re trying to learn something that doesn’t have a simpler model than the thing itself. English spelling can be like this: you either know how to spell “through” and “separate” or you don’t. I’ve always found foreign language vocabulary to be the hardest thing for me to learn in school. It’s terribly incompressible. Knowing that “red” is “rojo” and that “blue” is “azul” doesn’t help you at all when trying to remember that “green” is “verde”. I wasn’t terrible at it, but my usual trick of “remembering things by actually understanding what’s going on, so I can compensate for imperfect memorization” was completely useless.
I don’t claim that learning is repeated memorization and forgetting though. Learning is when the brain updates its internal models in response to the information it has been chewing on. Forgetting the info after is mostly inevitable, but is not core to this model-update process. And though relearning has silver linings, this does not mean that it is ideal.
This seems like it would really suck if you’re trying to learn something that doesn’t have a simpler model than the thing itself. English spelling can be like this: you either know how to spell “through” and “separate” or you don’t. I’ve always found foreign language vocabulary to be the hardest thing for me to learn in school. It’s terribly incompressible. Knowing that “red” is “rojo” and that “blue” is “azul” doesn’t help you at all when trying to remember that “green” is “verde”. I wasn’t terrible at it, but my usual trick of “remembering things by actually understanding what’s going on, so I can compensate for imperfect memorization” was completely useless.