Memory: The Forgetting Curve

MosaLingua’s Forgetting Curve

As you can see from the graph below, information fed to the brain tends to be rapidly forgotten. This can happen in as little as a few hours after learning!

In as little as 8 hours, much of what you’ve learned is already slipping away. By Day 1, most people will only be able to recall about 60% of what was learned. By Day 8, retention is down to just 20%. Yikes!

To address our tendency to forget, all MosaLingua apps include timed repetition that you can track! That way you know what you’ve learned that day but also what has made it into your longer-term memory as well.

Along with our approach, there are other steps you can take to increase your likelihood of remembering as well. We’ll go over some of those below and give you some tips on what works best.

Memory Strength

Of course, not everything you learn or experience is treated the same way. Some memories are stronger than others. You’ve no doubt experienced this yourself—some information just seems to stick in your head. There are a few different reasons why this might happen. One of the most common reasons is because memory is associated with a particularly strong emotion.

That doesn’t mean you need to be in a heightened emotional state to learn languages effectively though! Associating what you’re learning with an emotion is a good place to start. For example, to remember the word for Dog in French (chien), you could try to picture your childhood dog anytime you think of the word chien.

But there are plenty of other ways to memorize and learn information if you’d prefer something else.

Another useful approach is to use a technique called the “Memory Palace.” This technique, used by ancient Greek philosophers, enables you to associate new information with a well-known space, like your home or school. It’s a great way to improve the strength of your memory .

The last approach we’ll share is related to body chemistry, which can have a big effect on how strong your memories are. That’s why certain lifestyle and food choices can help make the difference between strong and weak memories starting out. Maintaining low stress levels, getting a good amount of sleep, and eating right are just a few ways to build stronger memories.

Memory & Time

The Forgetting Curve above demonstrated the important role that time plays in learning and forgetting.

Without intervention or an appropriate learning strategy, most learners forget 90% of what they’ve learned within the first month.

In fact, it’s not unusual to have forgotten up to 30% after a few hours of studying a language.

But don’t despair! With the right approach, you can ensure that the information you learn is added to your long-term memory. Once it’s there, it’s far less likely to be forgotten.

We’ve already mentioned the importance of building strong memories, but there’s something else that you can do to make sure you make rapid progress in your target language, and retain 100% of what you learn.

Repetition is Key

You may have noticed that the first graph mentions repetitions — and each time a repetition is marked on the graph, the level of retention (memorization) goes back up to 100%.

Repetition really is the ultimate key to success. The more frequently you repeat a word or phrase that you’ve learned, the better able you’ll be to remember it later on. Research has shown that when you review vocabulary at regular intervals, it increases your retention over time. As time goes on, you don’t need to review words as often. In fact, this is the real meaning of the graph above: you’ll notice that the repetitions get more and more spaced out. That’s because after each repetition, the time it takes for you to forget a word gets longer and longer. Eventually, it tapers off to a flat line, and the memory is secured in your brain.

Even though we’ve known about the forgetting curve for centuries, few learning methods take it into account, including traditional language courses at school. This is one of the reasons why most language-learning methods fail to help students retain everything they’ve learned. This is a frustrating experience and can make it difficult to stay properly motivated.

It might sound like a lot of hard work to figure out the right repetition schedule for all the new words and phrases you’re learning. To help make that process easy, the Spaced Repetition System is an integral part of the MosaLingua approach!

This is one of the things that makes our approach so successful—along with an emphasis on language immersion, prioritizing fun activities, and focusing on vocabulary and speech before rules of grammar.

How to Not Forget a Foreign Language: 3 Golden Rules [Video]

This is such an important element of learning a language that we decided to make a video of the three golden rules for not forgeting a foreign language.

The video is in English, but you can watch it with subtitles in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or German by clicking on the gear in the bottom-right corner. You can also slow down the video from the same menu.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more useful videos about language learning!