Memorization gives you the building blocks of skills.

It has a really bad name amongst certain education commentators. It's certainly true that you shouldn't try to memorize in a vacuum, or that you shouldn't test "higher order" skills (like complex questions, which require a real understanding of the basic blocks), but memorization of connected facts or processess is essential.

The point is, for many of us, the best way to “memorize” things is to explicitly avoid trying to memorize them, and focus instead on understanding context and connections between things – after you’ve had to call up the same idea 5 or 10 times because it was related to something else you were learning about, recall just comes along.

Examples I’ve often seen used by proponents of rote learning include multiplication tables and spelling lists. I’m better at mental arithmetic than almost everyone I know, and I almost never misspell words, not because I spent any effort memorizing lists of them (indeed, I completely refused to do this as a 9-year-old, because it bored the crap out of me), but because I’ve spent more time in exploratory play with the relationships between numbers than they have, and have spent lots of time reading, doing close textual analyses for my own edification, trying to write tight fluid prose, and playing with various kinds of poetry, etc.

I’m convinced that rote memorization is promoted as a pedagogical tool because it is cheap and easy and requires little effort from teachers and schools, more than because it’s particularly effective. Then again, everyone learns differently, and I know some people who are incredible at chewing through lists of facts once quickly and dredging them back up effortlessly months later. YMMV.

This sort of thing seems to me to be just you stumbling on the spaced repetition effect by accident: you look up the same thing several times, at varying intervals as you learn it more.

I personally think multiplication is actually a great thing for spaced repetition if you can get the software to pick random numbers each time. I also find that things that I don't review regularly just fall out of my head, spaced repetition software is good for just stopping that relatively easily.

Speaking only for myself, learning things rote, via software-driven spaced repetition or otherwise, is deadly dull. On the other hand, finding new patterns, reading relevant books and deconstructing their arguments, holding discussions with other people passionate about a subject, trying to construct new ideas and relate them to past knowledge, etc. is exciting and invigorating. Living life as a human rather than a robot may be less than perfectly efficient relative to some platonic ideal, but really, so what? Similarly, I’d much rather go on a hike than run on a treadmill, I’d much rather cook and eat a delicious meal than compute the perfect mixture of nutrients and blend them into a shake–slurry, and I’d rather make one deep friend than fill a rolodex with business cards. My personal impression from having dabbled with spaced repetition software after a friend bugged me about it for months was that I personally learn better when learning things doesn’t feel like a visit to the dentist. Call it a character flaw. Again, YMMV.

My point about the multiplication tables and spelling lists though was that explicitly learning e.g. multiplication tables is pretty much unnecessary, because multiplying small numbers comes up again and again in doing more exciting and challenging problems, and by the 20th time you’ve had to multiply 6*8 through some explicit manual method, you’ll just start to remember that oh yeah, that’s 48 again.

While I agree that rote learning is very dull, it can be fundamental in situations where you know next to nothing of the subject at hand.

Consider for example two native English speakers, one learning German and the other learning Chinese. German grammar is way more complex than Chinese's, but because of the etymological closeness between German and English, the German student will quickly get to the point where they can easily pick up new words from the context (obviating the need for vocabulary lists), while the Chinese student will pretty much never reach that. In this type of situation an SRS is invaluable.

Regarding multiplication tables, you shouldn't forget that knowing them by heart is sometimes necessary for understanding the exciting problems. This comes up all the time in mathematics: to understand the important problems in a field, you sometimes have to get to know well a lot of seemingly boring concepts.

Knowing multiplication tables by heart is never necessary for understanding exciting problems; the exciting problems are not dependent on your arbitrary culturally-contingent choice of numeric base! I had discovered the commutative and associative properties of multiplication long before memorizing multiplication tables in fourth grade, and historically speaking, they were known long before the adoption of place-value numerical systems.

It might be essential, but it's also overrated as a primary measure of mastery. The more difficult the subject matter, the less useful rote memorization is in the end; there were plenty of people with near-photographic memories that I saw failing upper level math courses at university. And I knew plenty of people that excelled at that level but had to look up specific formulas all the time (as best as I could figure, they tended to remember quite well what transformations the formulas allowed, just not the exact form that they allowed them in).

That said, it's certainly not going to hurt anyone to increase their rote memorization abilities, in fact it's probably extremely useful in general, no matter what field you're in.

Yes, I've had similar thoughts. I think when successfully "understanding", people see something in multiple different ways, ask Why? a lot, then finally relax once they're sufficiently convinced. This may use different kinds of cognition, like visual, kinesthetic, etc. And it may feel like diverse parts of their mind are at various states of being convinced/unsatisfied.

Whereas, when trying to "memorize" something, many people just kinda... hope the thing stays in memory through some unknown process. But you can "cheat" by consciously leveraging various cognitive abilities. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci#Contemporary_usa...) (Along with various little tips, like use lurid imagery, it's probably better to visualize large spaces you can walk through rather than tiny ones, etc.)

That's my experience too. It's something of an ordeal. Perhaps each time we look from a different angle, while done for the purpose of convincing oneself, also forms a new connection (which is known to aid memory)?

This is part of the reason I've always found harder sciences/engineering classes way easier than say languages. Physics, math, etc. classes have very little "laws" that need to be memorized; everything else is linked. Languages though have thousands of words that need to be individually memorized.

One of the most effective ways to learn a new language(I've found) is to actively tie new vocabulary & grammatical structures to existing knowledge and etymological backgrounds. This makes it much easier to recall and use in familiar ways.

The corollary is my personal hypothesis that learning Latin actively helps you learn other European languages. In fact, learning French probably makes it easier to learn German, and knowing both gives you more background on which to build the English language. Eventually the limiting factor is memory and ability to differentiate language in context.

I'm not sure if this is the point you were making, but I'm really skeptical of the value of learning Latin as a route to learning modern Latin languages. It seems to me that if you want to learn, for example, Spanish, then you are considerably better off learning Spanish straight away and not Latin then Spanish.

And if you're getting carried away and want to learn a second or a third one, then Spanish will give you most of the value of Latin in terms of transferable knowledge.

I was the same way. Foreign language was extremely difficult. Then I realized that memorization itself is a process that can be learned, improved, and mastered.

Once I began studying and learning the process of effective memorization, then foreign language became fun. It was a way to prove to myself that memorization techniques worked.

Granted, learning a language is more than just memorization of vocabulary. But elimination of that huge hurdle makes the rest more interesting and tractable.

I was tipped off to this by the best seller "The Memory Book" (which I highly recommend), but now there are plenty of web resources that may be as effective.

Here are some relevant links: http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Book-Classic-Improving-School/d... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorization (and click on all the links on this page)

Spacing of facts or study does help understanding and generalization, though, in those studies which specifically looked at that: http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition#abstraction