Learning English With Sensible Efforts
It's an interesting phenomenon: almost every English salon you go you will find many posts that devote themselves to lay out some methodologies to tell you how to conquer a monster pile of vocabulary in a relative short period of time. Great. You seem to have found a short cut to success. Yet, most of those methods promote a massive amount of time required to memorize newly learned English words while the low successful rate on those memorized words is casually expected. It's kind of ironic but very conspicuous at first sight.
Obviously, with those methodologies, the process of increasing your vocabulary demands spending many hours to memorize a few hundreds of new words per day, and at the end of a given period of time the best turn-out rate will be somewhere close to 20% or even lower. But that doesn't seem to be discouraging the approaches because the logic behind the massive amount of effort is to hold a bundle even you have dropped the majority of gain in vocabulary. Moreover, those approaches almost completely are empirically based, meaning that it might, through trial and error, fit well with one individual and is terribly unfitting to another. Therefore, taking the approaches recommended by these brave crusaders would mean you are heading to unknown territory blindly. It sounds like whoever follows the methodologies knowingly signs up on a time-wasting project.
Looking through those methodologies, essentially you spend 5 days in a week to make a noticeable progress, and you only expect one single day is not wasted. Yes, one out of five. It's surely very touching to see how much devotion people who practice that massive effort are ready to commit for increasing their vocabulary at such a prodigious scale of time and energy.
Now you have to ask yourself a few questions before getting yourself committed to such a heavy duty undertaking. If working hard doesn't really promise you a proportional return, you do want to question what in the world you are attempting to achieve here. Pay-off is important but the ratio of countable return of benefit is also something you'd like to pay attention to.
First of all, you need to identify exactly why you want to do that. If it is for a temporary rush for an upcoming test and you are desperately in need to pass the test, it may make some sense. Throwing many hours gains a possibility of reaching a goal you have to reach. It could be a worthwhile fight you have to pick on. You literally sign on a temporary trade for a desirable test score by throwing away enormous amount of time for an exchange.
In case you are not going after such a rush, it would become insensible for anyone to waste of time in this way. Assuming you could get a 20% solid result from your vocabulary hunting practice for the first week or the first month, what would you be doing for the next week or the next month after your memory begin to fade as everyone's memory will do? You have to spend some more time to sustain the 20% of gain in your last effort before they are evaporating into the air. In other words, the efforts and time you have put in is not even enough for you to maintain the 20% successful rate if what we are really interested in is to take down those newly learned words as part of your English proficiency for years to come.
Secondly, if we know there is something more scientifically creditable, such as Ebbinghause methodology, why do you want to try someone's empirically based approach to waste a massive amount of time? Depending on an excellent set of memory cells is really a blessing, and you could enjoy such a ride for quite some time. But the nature of memory behaviors will catch you up soon or later. They will be naturally decaying as the way it supposes to be or at least the way we have understood how it should work. You cannot always exploit your memory to the extreme for temporary accomplishment because they will betray you with your unreasonable forceful applications that repeatedly labor them in an unnatural way.
Moreover, if memory works the way as a computer does as far as getting new English words to stay in memory is concerned, it may sound a very straightforward process. Unfortunately it doesn't. As time goes by, the memory will deteriorate or fade away if there is no reinforcement on the seemingly being memorized words. That is how memory works. And Ebbinghause's curve shows its behavioral model comprehensively -- people must spend much of time to sustain the memory, not only constantly but also timely. If you are lucky to hold some very exceptional well-functional memory, you might be able to keep up with what you have gained in memory for a substantially long period of time. But still you cannot get away from putting efforts on reinforcing them once a while.
By reading some articles about Ebbinghouse's methodology, it seems making sense in that it is a statistics based methodology that reveals the probability of the best usages of your time with your memory. Theoretically, if the memory decay behaves as the exactly way Ebbinghous's curve has indicated, it would be a blessing for all of us to use our time wisely and effectively in the process of learning English. It will be very smart and time-effective way to use the given curve to boost your memory at the right moments of time. In other words, you don't need to spend an enormous amount of time to gain fairly reasonable amount of success by exercising a scheduling that manages the time of your intervention in the efforts of stopping memory decay.
Lastly, it is a simple fact that we all have to gather some degree of interest in the learning process. Because without interest, what you have remembered can easily turn to garbages and to be thrown out of your memory by your brain in no time. It is simply saying that it is way too boring for your brain to keep it any longer. So to keep a dry and massive vocabulary hunting for an unbearable long period of time is a good recipe to kill your last reserve of interests in learning English. You could end up with a siege of frustration to meet your adversities more often than you should have. It's certainly not a smart way to proceed with a learning process.
It's kind of a common sense that a language learning, in this case, English learning is a long term effort. You can memorize a lot of words but it won't make any sense if you couldn't use them in a precise or simply correct way. Also, because there are so many subtle differences in each of words you are learning in English, it takes time for anyone to master the usage of each word in their sentences. In essence, you just have to spend enough time to slowly but surely gain ground on the mastery of this language. Rushing to inflate some bubbling success is not only a silly way to waste time but also a sad way to deceive your own pride. Not worth it for sure.
The bottom line here is that to work smart is a lot better option than work-hard, especially when you deal with something that has a whole range of biochemical, none-linear, variations and differentials on the subject matter in the process of learning, such as our memory, our interest, our emotion and our sense of real accomplishments. Hard-working is an absolutely right attitude but not necessarily the right way in this learning centric subject matter, and often hard work alone could result in some reversed consequence if the efforts you put in are somehow driven to the misjudged direction. So taking a smart approach in your learning process is a good way to maintain the level of interest, momentum of willingness, and even passion of success you need to continue your English-learning crusade. By all means, we all need some luck to reach the successes we go after. So good luck.
