I think the view of learning as memorization (or, as you suggest, repeated memorization and forgetting) isn’t quite right. It’s better to think of it as strength training, slowly building up ability that can be lost through disuse.
Learning a language does feel like memorization, but that’s because your language ability is already trained. Math is harder, because most people’s minds are untrained for math and need lots of simple repetitive exercises first. Art, music or sports are somewhere in between: they also need a ton of repetition, but at least we’ve figured out over centuries which exercises to use. Beginner programming is even harder than beginner math, because we don’t even know which exercises we need.
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 think the view of learning as memorization (or, as you suggest, repeated memorization and forgetting) isn’t quite right. It’s better to think of it as strength training, slowly building up ability that can be lost through disuse.
Learning a language does feel like memorization, but that’s because your language ability is already trained. Math is harder, because most people’s minds are untrained for math and need lots of simple repetitive exercises first. Art, music or sports are somewhere in between: they also need a ton of repetition, but at least we’ve figured out over centuries which exercises to use. Beginner programming is even harder than beginner math, because we don’t even know which exercises we need.
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.