this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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Tip: Avoid recitation! (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 weeks ago by schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works to c/languagelearning@sopuli.xyz
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I failed out of Latin because I thought all I had to was be able to recite all the declensions and conjugations from memory--easy enough to accomplish, but not very helpful.

What happens is you learn the table as a sequential blob, you know this follows that, and you have to go through the whole table until you find what you're looking for. Not very efficient and extremely distracting.

What you REALLY want to do is be able to pick the form you need from it's USE, not from it's position out of the table.

The way to do that is to drill on picking out the exact form you need. Your magic tool for this is: flash cards (anki or physical), or a website like Conjuguemos or Linguno.

My experiment this week is to learn portuguese conjugations just from drilling the individual forms, without ever learning the table. Being able to recite the table should be the result of learning the conjugation.

Sorry if this is all horribly obvious to you, but it took me fucking forever to figure this out.

Any little tips you've learned?

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[–] dragontamer@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've actually learned a lot from books, exercises, and raw memorization.

I'm pretty bad at raw memorization compared to my peers (it always took me more time than my classmates or other people I knew). But it's a good crowbar, a way to convert raw effort into plausible results.

No, raw / rote memorization will never lead to ultimate learning. But I use it as a stepping stone before the real learning happens. With more stuff in my rote memory banks, I'm able to more quickly look up or get a rough idea of what a paragraph or page says when reading.

I do think my overall speaking skills are weak for my level, but I've also been told that I'm learning at a rate faster than many others and to be kinder to my self-expectations.

Obviously it's not the way of learning for everyone. I played a lot of fighting games like this. I sat down and memorized all the frame data and then played games with the frame data memorized. Then I could use my memory of frame data to learn which moves had priority (and how) over other moves.

Did anyone else learn like this? Yeah, one or two. But most just learn from the video game directly. And that's also fine. We all learn differently and knowing that we are all different is part of the process.

In any case, I am a book learner. So that's how I'll stay learning.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

Oh, don't misread me. There's a huge role for memorization. That's the biggest part of my formal "learning"--going through Anki decks every day.

What I'm saying is that rote memorization of tables is a bad way to memorize tables specifically; because the tendency is to just remember is a blob that you speed read. Secondly, the time you spend reciting a table is mostly wasted because the real challenge a lot of the time is recalling an irregular form. Once you recall one, you've done the most significant recall task for that conjugation and the reciting the rest of the forms is just wasting time. Better to stack single-form recalls of different verbs on top of each other so you practice recalling the form and the construction. Instead of knowing we wanted is the fourth record in the list quise quisiste quiso quisimos quisieron, you drill building the recall to the preterite form quis- and the building the recall to the "we" form -imos, and I find that a much practical exercise.

Not completely against it, though, it has its uses. There's a few irregular forms that are not completely irregular and I keep forgetting which are which--probably should just memorize them as a table to keep it straight!

And, yeah, the thing that drives me nuts about language learning is when people think there is one BEST way, especially when they spend more time thinking about how to learn a language than learning a language! But the key is knowing yourself. For instance, there might be ways that are "faster" but would completely kill your motivation; and there may be ways that are slower but keep you engaged over a period of years. Just gotta find that magic sauce.

My speaking skills are trash, largely because I'm asocial. Its a wonder I learned to speak even this language.