[turboponyy]

I've never regarded memorization highly. Whenever we had to learn the times tables or the squares at school, I would just work them out in my head instead of memorizing them.

Of course, I still ended up learning the squares and the times tables by heart, but not because I actively memorized them, but because I just used them so much that I couldn't help but remember them eventually.

I'm of the opinion that this leads to a good rule of thumb: never memorize anything - if you use the thing often enough, you can't help but memorize it anyway.

Of course, you could argue that how often you use something isn't necessarily equivalent to how much utility you might get out of memorizing said thing, and I don't disagree with that.

All that being said, I do agree with the article's premise that an expansive knowledge base aids reasoning, which does seem to be in conflict with my principle. I definitely do possess a basic knowledge of geography, and it does definitely aid my reasoning, but I don't ever remember actively memorizing that - not at school, nor elsewhere.

[omnicognate]

I had a similar view as a kid, driven mostly by the fact that I wasn't very good at memorisation. I found that I could get by in maths without it, eg. deriving the quadratic formula by completing the square rather than memorising it. I didn't value memory much as a tool in maths.

After having studied maths and physics at university and worked as a programmer in a mathematical field for 20 years (and studied much more maths in my spare time), I now see my poor recall as the limiting factor in my abilities in maths. The main reason I don't think I could ever have been a professional mathematician is that I would have reached (and have reached in my own learning as an amateur) a ceiling.

I have maths books that are beloved to me, that I have read multiple times (actively, working with pen and paper as one should) and which I will enjoy again in future. But the concepts in those books do not remain in my mind. I don't reach a point where the structure of basic linear algebra, say, is baked in.

I am good at the problem solving, but maths is an edifice, one people have been building onto for millenia. I explore that edifice, and keep returning to my favourite bits of it, but the portion of that structure that is resident in my mind is, and I think always will be, small. It's a window, and as more comes into it, more slides out. Everybody must have such a window, but I know others have much larger windows than me. And that's fine - I'm a programmer, not a mathematician. But I think it's something I would have benefitted from understanding earlier in my life. Perhaps I would have set about "learning to learn" differently. Rote memorisation and active curation of memories already formed could have benefitted me greatly.

[Hayarotle]

> I had a similar view as a kid, driven mostly by the fact that I wasn't very good at memorisation. I found that I could get by in maths without it, eg. deriving the quadratic formula by completing the square rather than memorising it. I didn't value memory much as a tool in maths.

Isn't the structure of the school curriculum also at fault here? If concepts like the quadratic formula being presented without context on why you will need to memorize them, and you're able to succeed without doing it, it's clear why you might choose not to memorize it. That wouldn't be the case if they presented you with challenging, applied problems where having the quadratic formula memorized really is actually necessary.

The curriculum seems to be structured under the assumption that the students will memorize the facts for the sake of memorizing (as most students do) in order to get good grades, and only later apply them on more advanced classes. If you're able to derive the results fast enough, and as such you see no point in memorizing them, then that assumption is broken, and the curriculum won't work the way it is expected to. Those students would need to take initiative themselves to adapt their learning style to the way books and classes are structured, as it's not obvious for them that such memorization is necessary.

[BeFlatXIII]

From my personal experience, I find that schools often fail to prepare their top students because the exercises meant to teach you how to work hard for real this time are still passable with a last-minute cram session by the fastest students. By the time the assignments are actually too long to be crammed, it's often well past the safety of K–12 education.

[tartoran]

I’ve had a similar intuition and approach as a kid though in school I had to memorize definitions and formulae, I never fully commited them to memory, instead choosing to derive them on the spot thinking I was practicing a different muscle, understanding. The bad part was building a bad habit of avoiding rote memorization at all costs whict lead to similar limitations later on. Only later on did I understand that it’s all about building good habits that yield great returns over time.

[BeetleB]

> After having studied maths and physics at university and worked as a programmer in a mathematical field for 20 years (and studied much more maths in my spare time), I now see my poor recall as the limiting factor in my abilities in maths.

Same story here. Undergrad engineering math curriculum came easy to me, and it stuck as it was our bread and butter (calculus + diff eq). Once I got to grad level courses, the frequency with which we would utilize the material elsewhere dropped dramatically, and the net effect of that was I could never recall the topics until I needed them.

The next problem was even more significant: If I took even higher level courses, they relied on knowledge of the material I took in one of those prior courses that had not been burnt into memory, and may have taken 2+ years prior. The only reason I did poorly was because I had not memorized enough of the prior material.

On my own, I studied/reviewed the undergrad statistics course 3 times over many years and it never stuck. Finally, in 2018 I used spaced repetition to memorize much of the material, and over 3 years later I can still read material that utilizes those statistics and understand what I'm reading.

Memorizing is useful for things you don't use often.

[historia_novae]

>I'm of the opinion that this leads to a good rule of thumb: never memorize anything

Did you ever learn another language? It's impossible without memorizing a massive amount of things, especially when the writing system is different than the one one is familiar with. In fact the most famous researcher in vocabulary learning (Paul Nation) states in one of his book that rote learning is one of the most efficient use of time.

I'm of the reverse opinion that memorizing things is a "secret trick" particularly effective, that is put aside by a lot of people because it takes effort.

[Yoric]

I can't speak for the GP, but my personal experience is also that I really dislike memorization. That being said, I speak 5 languages, have written books in two of them, have given public presentation in three and can introduce myself and go and buy bread in a few more.

That's in addition to computer languages, of course :)

I suspect that the parts of the brain involving in learning by rote and learning a new language are somewhat different. When I learn a new language, I'm desperately trying to connect anything I see to something I already know. When I learn a multiplication table or a list of unrelated dates, it doesn't work nearly as well.

[wenc]

I speak 7 languages (learning an 8th) and can relate to remembering things in context being more effective than rote memorization.

That said, some types of rote memorization do help accelerate learning. In language learning I often come across fundamental words that don’t occur frequently enough for me to internalize automatically but yet occur frequently enough to block comprehension when encountered (it’s little words like “put” or “place”). For these words, I just put them in Anki in sentence context and do a few rounds of spaced repetition to get them in my system.

In my opinion Anki shouldn’t be used for core vocabulary but it’s useful for reinforcing and “cleaning up” words on the fringes that one doesn’t encounter that often but that are very useful.

[Qem]

I also dislike it. As a small child, I remember hating the boredom of needing to learn by rote the times tables at school. That left my appreciation of mathematics scarred for many years. Only when I was approaching my teens I started to like math again, when presented geometry at school. That makes me think, does this traumatic experience with arithmetic tables right at the beginning is what gives math a bad reputation among lots of students, setting them in a course to hate the subject for life? Sometimes I think it would have been better for society to settle in a number system with a smaller base, say 8 or 6, instead of 10, so the tables got a lot smaller (64 or 36 entries, respectively, instead of 100), giving young students a better experience with aritmethics from the outset.

[turboponyy]

I speak two languages, one of which is English. I learned them in my early formational years, so I wouldn't consider myself to have learned them using "active" memorization. I was also conversational in Finnish as a child, though I've since completely forgotten the language.

Learning new languages no doubt involves a lot of memorization no matter which way you look at it, but I think you'd agree that the "active" kind is much more mentally taxing than the passive "immersion" kind, the latter of which I take no issue with. I also don't contend that learning a new language as an adult necessarily involves active rote learning.

I have had to learn other languages at school, including ones with non-Latin writing systems. It did involve a lot of rote learning, which I did to pass the classes, shortly after which I forgot everything. I personally don't value learning new languages, an opinion which I realize might come across as a bit uncultured.

[marginalia_nu]

Curious, I've learned English to a nearly native level without memorizing a single word.

[mikkergp]

I’m curious about your definition of the word memorization here, surely you’re not looking up every word in a multi-lingual dictionary?

[danielbln]

How does one learn a language without committing it to memory (the meaning of memorizing).

[marginalia_nu]

One doesn't, but there is a clear distinction between attempting to learn a language by memorizing its words and grammar, and learning it through context.

To actually understand a language in the same way we understand our native language, we cannot learn the language by memorizing the meanings of words and treating each sentence like a logic puzzle to be solved.

Practical knowledge of language is largely tacit.

A native speaker does not need to know what tense a word is in to use them, they do not even need to understand what a verb is. Explicit grammatical understanding can help us reason about a language, but it is not necessary to learn it.

[hikarudo]

conscious vs unconscious memorization

[mikkergp]

This seems to focus on the wrong part of the benefit of memorization, I don’t think the method of putting the information in or ‘active’ memorization is what provides the benefit so much so as it is that the information is available for active recall.

[isolli]

I draw a distinction between active learning (which takes place when you practice a language) and rote learning. I speak quite a few languages (with varying success) and learned most of my vocabulary from practice (which includes reading). I never thought of learning words as exercising my memory, it's just practice.

[zozbot234]

Active recall is a key component of successful memorization, which is why the popular system of spaced-repetition flashcards is very much based on it. Actually, even pre-flashcard systems of organized rote learning tend to feature it, e.g. via being asked to recite some short text (the "lesson") word-for-word until it is learned by sheer habit.

[AnonCoward4]

For me a language is easier to learn if I can actually use it. For me his rule of thumb is less a rule and more like how my mind works (and to agree all I guess). I can memorize unused facts, but it gets lost in big life changes usually which is really frustrating.

edit: add side note

[samatman]

> I've never regarded memorization highly

You were probably taught that memorization means "memorization, plus you will be examined and punished and rewarded accordingly, in many cases against any natural inclination to memorize the object of conditioning".

I doesn't, but you're right to not regard this highly.

> never memorize anything - if you use the thing often enough

You'll memorize it, yes.

[II2II]

> Whenever we had to learn the times tables or the squares at school, I would just work them out in my head instead of memorizing them.

I took a slightly different approach: memorize what is important.

For some reason, they wanted us to memorize the times table up to 12 when I was a kid. I quickly recognized that it was only important to memorize it up to 9, and even then there were patterns. Why is 9 more important than 12? Because it is incredibly inefficient to figure out a product each time you need it, but the rules for multi-digit multiplication were generals whereas the rules for single-digit multiplication only worked for single digit (and were necessary for multi-digit multiplication anyway). The trick is to figure out when the efficiency outweighs inefficiency.

[XorNot]

I never learned times tables in schools. Just struggled on through until they stopped asking me to memorize them.

Then way later in my 20s, when it was handy to know how to remember some multiples quickly, I realized that obviously there's a lot of patterns in there, and of course the magic of looking for an easier problem to do mentally to solve a more complex one.

No amount of effort at memorization ever succeeded in even trying to give me those tools, and they're so general - you can apply them to everything.

My entire 90s educational experience is a memory of teachers saying "you need to know your times tables" and no one actually trying to teach even basic reasoning about how numbers worked (which I suspect is why programming lept out at me - it's all number manipulation but it's all about the algorithms and patterns and finally things started to make sense).

[hackerfromthefu]

If you don't memorize anything, what is your name, and where do you live?

[isolli]

My brain works the same. When it comes geography, I tend to learn and remember a lot about the countries I visit. But empty learning just doesn't work for me.

[webspaceadam]

i highly recommend reading "make it stick". i thought the same way as you until i read the book