Why You Were Wrong About Rote Learning

If I could wave a magic wand and solve one language learning problem for people, do you know what it would be?

Memory.

Learning and memorising vocabulary in a foreign language makes some people tear their hair out.

It drives others to tears.

And, naturally, there's no one solution that works for everyone.

So today I'm pleased to feature a guest post from Philip Seifi, in which he discusses a memory technique that has a bit of a bad rep… rote learning.

In fact, the suggestions he makes in this post are similar to what I teach in my StoryLearning courses, which you can try free here.

Philip is part of the team at Fluent Panda, a language learning game with an impressive mission! Read to the end of the post for more on the exciting stuff that they're up to at the moment.

Over you you, Philip!

What is Rote Learning?

The rote learning method helps you remember things through the use of repetition. You probably experienced rote teaching at school when you repeated the alphabet until you knew it by heart.

How Is The Rote Method Useful For Language Learning?

For many language learners, repetition is the key to remembering something new.

There's a lot to be said for going over the same things until you can't forget them. Our natural tendency is to forget new information shortly after we learn it, so repetition can be a great way to reinforce the information and commit it to long-term memory.

While it's great to learn by rote for new vocabulary in your target language, it's important to remember you should also learn some context for your new words. It's all very well being able to recite verb tables by heart, but if you can't use them in a conversation, your efforts weren't worth it.

But not all methods of rote training are equal. Let's take a look at how you can use this old-school method to maximise your language learning gains.

Tips For Using Rote Memorisation Techniques

If you’re struggling to make progress learning a language, it could be because you’re overlooking my favourite language-learning hack: rote learning.

But I don’t mean the kind of learning by rote you do at school… rereading the same grammar points over and over again, burning midnight oil over seemingly endless columns of verb conjugations.

If anything, the approach I‘ll teach you is more reminiscent of reciting poems—something your parents probably still remember, but you’ve most likely never experienced given the backlash against both impractical knowledge and rote learning in our educational system.

Here are five steps that I use to memorise a passage of text in a foreign language.

It really doesn’t matter what kind of text it is, as long as it’s something that you think has some element of linguistic utility, be it the grammar used, vocabulary, or just that you really like it.

1. Choose The Right Content

Learning something that doesn't interest you is useless, you'll want to give up before you even started.

For success with rote language learning, you first need to find a good text that fits the following criteria:

• no longer than a few paragraphs
• comes with an audio recording
• on a subject you find fascinating
• challenging, but not too hard

Finding texts of this length really isn’t too difficult. I tend to go to news websites for radio stations, which tend to have a transcript of any audio that they put out.

Or, if you have a favourite passage from a book, or blog, or otherwise that doesn’t have audio, then why not submit it to Rhinospike, and let native speakers do the hard work?

2. Listen, Listen, Listen

Listen to the recording of your chosen text at least half a dozen times. Don’t try to remember any of it just yet or worry about new grammar and vocabulary too much.

Simply listen to it again, and again, and again—noticing changes in intonation and other small details that initially flew over your head. At this stage, it really isn’t about learning, but rather assimilating your ear to the tonality and pace of the recording.

You’ll be surprised by how much you’ll understand by the end of this exercise, even if you didn’t get any of the meaning on first play-through, let alone the 20th. I can’t stress this enough – you should not try to understand any of what you hear at this stage!

Use your brain energy to absorb and enjoy, and you’ll be surprised about how re-focusing your energies away from trying to understand what you hear means that different parts of your brain get to work to build a picture of what you’re listening to that you never thought possible!

3. Read And Clarify

Once you’ve listened to the recording of your chosen text a few times, now it’s time to refer to the original text. Go through it, and underline what you know already. Try saying this out loud a few times. Inevitably, there will be passages that you don’t quite understand.

At this stage, it’s a good idea to take the traditional approach and reach for the nearest dictionary, and try and get at least a basic understanding of the text.

Even if there are expressions that you still don’t understand, or there are grammatical nuances that are beyond you, it’s still absolutely fine to move onto the next stage.

Once you’ve gone through the text, try listening through the text again and really focus on mating what you’re listening to with what you see before you.

4. Commit Your Text To Memory

Now comes the time to learn the passage by heart. After listening to it so many times, you’ll probably already remember large chunks of the text, so it shouldn’t take you too long.

Even if you don’t have the individual words down, the pacing, cadences, and pronunciation should come much quicker than if you came to this recording cold.

You can try remembering individual sentences, then move onto full paragraphs, until you memorise the whole passage.

When memorising, I like to go for the ‘overshooting’ approach. That is to say that if you want to remember the expression ‘the quick brown fox’, try instead memorising ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’.

By expending more energy on the longer sentence, you’ll likely by default commit the smaller section to memory without thinking about it so much.

5. Go For Perfection

You’ll notice that up to now I’ve not asked you to pay much attention to the little details. This approach can only work when your mind is not focused on achieving just one goal.

That said, when you get to the stage where the majority of the text is committed to memory, it’s important to make sure that you don’t fall into bad habits.

Break the text down (sometimes going from the end, backwards can help to do this), and concentrate on every single nuance of the language, making sure that what you’ve memorised is the real thing, and not some fuzzy approximation.

Make sure to speak loud and clear, mimicking the pronunciation and intonation of the native narrator as closely as you can at this final stage. This will help you lots with perfecting your accent in your chosen language. Mimicking native speakers will mean the correct pronunciation will come second nature when you practice speaking in real life.

Why the Rote Learning Method Works Wonders

The key to learn foreign languages fast is two-fold. First, you must combine different activities to save time & remain motivated. Second, you must maintain the right balance between different aspects of the language.

Concentrate too much on output, and you’ll soon find yourself using the same expressions and vocabulary in every conversation. Listen to too much music, and you’ll risk falling behind in spelling and grammar.

Even if your goal is to learn only conversational language, it is a good idea to maintain a reasonable balance across the board.

The method described above forces you to work on your listening, reading and speaking, teaches you vocabulary, grammar, style and pronunciation, all as part of one single project. A lot like the StoryLearning® method! 

Another huge benefit of this approach is that each of these projects make for natural mini-goals on your way to fluency, and understanding the texts in the end serves as a natural reward.

Of course, if you feel like it, you’re welcome to reward yourself with an additional cookie at the end of each stretch!

Give rote learning ago, even if just once. See how it works for you, and let us know in the comments!

Thanks Philip!

If you liked this post, please check out Philip's new app, Fluent Panda.

What is it exactly? I asked him…

“I've built the app based on all of my thinking about a methodology that focuses on numerous aspects of a language in one holistic approach, rather than separately.”

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.