Why Your Brain Can’t Remember Everything (and How to Learn a Language Anyway)

Why Your Brain Can’t Remember Everything (and How to Learn a Language Anyway)

Think about how much information your brain processes every day. You’re constantly using your sight, hearing, touch, scent, taste, and even your own emotions. On top of that, you’re handling daily responsibilities like work, school, conversations, and everything else life throws your way.

That’s a huge amount of information. If your brain tried to store all of that, it would quickly become overwhelmed. So instead, your brain filters things. It focuses on the information that seems important, useful, or interesting.

And even when something does grab your attention, there’s still a limit on how much you’ll be able to keep in your long-term memory. Your brain sorts out what is most important to keep based on what you focus on.

In other words, the things you remember aren’t random. Things that are interesting or important to us are typically what our brain latches onto. They’re usually the things you decided to pay attention to. So how does this apply to learning a language?

How to Use Your Limited Memory to Learn a Language

Knowing how your brain works is one thing. But using that information to your advantage is another. And using that information for something like learning a language is what we need to know. So let’s see how you can use all this to your advantage!

Your Brain Remembers Things that Are Important or Interesting

Like we said, you need to leverage the fact that your brain remembers things it thinks is interesting or important. To use this to your advantage, make sure you’re learning a language that’s interesting and that the vocabulary you’re starting with is on a topic you’re interested in.

If learning a language is already important to you, then you have one step ahead on remembering that language successfully. The more you remind yourself of why it felt important to start in the first place, the more success you’ll have since your brain will try to hold onto that information for longer.

Since You Can’t Remember Everything At Once, Learn Gradually

You can’t remember hundreds of words at once.

Your brain has a limit on how much it can move to your memory at any time. A much better strategy for your limited brain is focusing on a small number of words every day.

Learning just 5-10 words or phrases a day is enough to learn over time and make sure that those items will stay in your memory. It’s also great for motivation, since you won’t be overwhelmed by a mountain of things to do. And while those numbers sound small, if you learn just 5 words a day for a whole month (30ish days), then at the end of that month you’ll have memorized 150 words.

That’s a huge amount of progress for just a few minutes a day! And it’s much more likely to stick with you than if you sat down one day and tried to force yourself to memorize those same 150 words.

Learning vs Remembering Long-Term

Learning something once isn’t enough for speaking a language. The larger challenge is figuring out how to remember things in the long-term!

Our brains have a natural limit on how much information we can remember in our day-to-day life. It’s frustrating, but our brains do this naturally to stay more efficient with the information we need.

What’s important to remembering long-term and building your language skills is review!

Learn your 5-10 words today, and make sure that you review it throughout the week. As time goes on, you can review less frequently since it has moved into your long-term memory. And then you can use that time to learn more words.

You’ve probably heard someone say, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”

That’s because it’s true!

If you only see something once and never hear it or repeat it, then your brain marks it as not important and will get rid of it to make space for something else. Every time you review something you learned, you nudge it towards long-term memory, and the amount of attention it requires next time will decrease over time.

The best type of review for learning languages leverages this exact process and is called the Spaced Repetition System, which helps you review words before you forget them! Make sure to add this approach to your language learning.

What Tools Help You Remember Languages

Vocabulary

First thing you’ll need to trick your brain into learning languages is a bank of words to get started. Keep in mind you should only learn 5-10 words a day, but after 30 days you could be up to 300 words, so plan ahead.

You could try something like a frequency list, which are the most common words in your target language. The MosaLingua team has compiled frequency list recommendations you can find for your target language here.

Review

Like we said before, remembering a language isn’t just looking at vocabulary once. You need to review so that your brains know to make and maintain its connection to your new vocabulary.

The most effective way to review is the Spaced Repetition System. Building this into your review process will help the new things you learn stick in your head.

Pronunciation

And lastly, to get languages to stick in your brain more easily.

You not only need to see it, but you also need to know how to pronounce it properly. Without proper pronunciation, you may not be understood when it comes time to talk. So to make sure you learn it right the first time and don’t waste useful space in your brain, make sure to listen to native speakers pronunciation.

The All-in-One Language Solution

Gathering all of these tools together can be very difficult.

So if you’re looking for a system that already has these built-in features, try out MosaLingua. MosaLingua offers all of these features and more to help you learn a language fast! We offer up to 11 different languages with all of these features built in.

For just 10 minutes a day you could learn vocabulary that people actually use, review it as often as you need it, and hear how it’s actually supposed to sound.

All together, this will save you time gathering resources and time learning what is most important.

Closing Thoughts

If you’re feeling frustrated about learning or forgetting when studying a language, just know you’re not alone and that your brain isn’t broken. It’s actually doing what it’s designed to do.

The key to learning anything is to work with your brain, not against it.

So learn a small amount of words a day, learn in a way that captures your attention, and review that vocabulary from time to time so it sticks! With this approach, you’ll have all the words you need to speak in no time.

So get out there and work with your brain to work towards your language dreams!

FAQs

Are there more things I should learn about my brain to help me learn another language?

Yes! Knowing how your brain works helps you be able to learn and also help you track your learning process. For more details on how learning a language can impact your brain, check out this article.

Doesn’t memory change with age? Does that effect learning a language?

Yes and no. Memory does change with age, which means someone’s approach might change as well. But it doesn’t stop someone from learning a language as long as you’re using the right strategies. You can actually learn a language at any age. If you’d like an explanation broken down by different ages, our team wrote up an article here to explain more.

What happens in my brain while I’m switching between languages?

As you get farther along in your learning process (using the strategies we said above), you’ll actually start switching naturally between your languages. That switching also has an impact on your brain that can make your memory stronger or even impact the way you see yourself. You can read more in this article and see either how many you have or what may be in store for you in the future.