Repetition In Language Learning

Repetition Repetition Repetition

When encountering a word for the first time when reading a text, you look up its meaning, but you will forget it immediately as well, most of the time. You might be looking up the same word over and over in a dictionary until it finally starts sinking in. Picking up the dictionary can become quite annoying. Old fashioned vocabulary list learning often consists of going over the same words again and again until you memorised them. Not the most exciting part of High School. Both come down to repetition.

Repetition is the key to new vocabulary retention. Unless you are blessed with photographic memory you will have to repeat the words of a language until they become ingrained in your memory or you become sick of them, or both.

Word Learning Support

Fortunately technology and new methods of vocabulary have seen the light of day, and beginner's readers offer word indexes and flash card systems have replaced dumb word memorising. Repetition supported by software or smart spacing methods. Still indexes break immersion of reading, and flash card systems still are nothing more than an advanced form of vocabulary list learning.

The disadvantage of vocabulary list learning or flash card systems is the lack of fun in filling your brain with bare language components, and more important, the fact that words learned in such a manner are stored in the brain without language context.

Extensive Reading

Reading will make you repeat the high frequency words of a language, but for the lower frequency words you will have to reread the specific part of the text where you encountered them. It is a lot more fun than pure vocabulary learning, but also slower.

Enter here the Bermuda Word Method. Fun, Flexible, Fast. Fun because you are reading without having to look up a word, repeating words in a natural way (Repetition). Flexible, because it adapts to your learning and will repeat words you don't know enough times to you so you don't need to go back and reread anything (Repetition again). Fast, because the reading remains fast and immersive with the immediate translation, and because the software repeats new vocabulary only when necessary for retention (Repetition finale).