It is one of the most common frustrations: you understand the explanation, you use the new word that day and, a week later, it has vanished. It is not a bad memory. It is a lack of review. Robin Callan, the creator of the Callan Method, summed up the secret of learning a language in three words: repeat, repeat and repeat.
A language is learned step by step, like maths
Callan compared learning languages to learning mathematics. In history you can understand the Napoleonic Wars without knowing about Alexander the Great. In maths and in languages you can’t: step two rests on step one. And it is not enough to have understood step one; you must be able to recall it at speed for the rest of your studies.
How many times do you need to review?
From Callan’s observations, the average student needs to hear the same questions in about five consecutive lessons before answering without hesitation. Some need three; others need a whole extra week. That is why each Callan lesson returns to earlier material before moving on.
Overlearning
Memory research describes an effect called overlearning: continuing to study something after you already know it. In a classic experiment cited by Callan, learners who read a list of words twice more after memorising it remembered far more of it months later than those who stopped as soon as they knew it. A few extra minutes produced a lot more memory. In a language this matters even more, because words must not only be remembered but remembered fast, in the middle of a conversation.
Review isn’t boring when it is fast
Many students fear that review is tedious. Callan admitted that repeating lists of words would be. But repeating sentences, answering questions at a brisk pace, is not. He used to say that the more a student reviews, the faster he learns; the less he reviews, the more bored he gets, because he feels no progress.
Everything you learn keeps coming back
In the Callan Method, the vocabulary and structures of the early stages reappear inside the questions of later stages, so what you learned at the start is still being used at the end. There is also a full review after every two stages.
And between lessons?
The gap between lessons is when forgetting happens. The longer the gap, the more you forget, and the more time the next lesson spends recovering it. That is why frequency matters so much: with a lesson a day the material never cools down; with one or two lessons a week, much of each lesson goes on recovering what was lost.
Practical tips
- Go over the lesson material again the same day, while it is fresh.
- Don’t skip steps: if the beginning isn’t solid, go back, even if it feels like a waste of time.
- Study often, even for less time, rather than all in one day of the week.
This article was inspired by Mr Q’s study of the handbooks written by Robin K. T. Callan and by the dozens of hours of conversation he had with Mr Robin Callan at his home, conversations that were recorded and that Mr Q considers a treasure trove of knowledge.