A Toughie (Memorizng)

I guess most of us would agree thay independence is great. Having a total control over what you are doing is definitely something to strive for. However, independence also brings about responsibility for your actions. In order to be fully accountable for the process, you’ll be confronted with tough choices and sometimes you’ll find yourself deciding to do stuff you were not quite willing to do in the first place. In my case it is one of the learning techniques I employ. It’s quite painful and demanding but, it really does work. And this is learning Spanish texts off by heart. It definitely is a medieval way of learning but it’s extremely rewarding.

Why? Independent learning doesn’t involve a teacher, who is a good model of the language. The aim of memorizing is to create a supercorrect language model inside our heads. A text to learn off by heart usually will have some fixed phrases and expressions which by memorizing will get burned off in our brains. Let us consider this example:

(…) Todas estas características describen a Eduardo Díscoli, un argentino de 56 años que salió de Buenos Aires el 28 de julio de 2001 (…)

Take a look at prepositions in this text. If the text is somewhere in your head and has been repeated ample times, you’ll subconsciously feel that we use de when giving one’s age or a year date. This boosts your language intuition in Spanish which is one of the fundamentals in feeling confident in any productive skill (writing or speaking).

Usually the project you invested most time and energy in gives you most satisfaction. Hopefully we’ll find it in ourselves to defeat our natural willingness to reject such a menial task as learning of by heart just to be more fluent and correct in Spanish. Good luck, Guys!