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Comment by SamBam | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that "learning memorization" is really the process of learning to do the work to memorize, through explicit strategies like spaced repetition.

I don't think people become better at "effortless" memorization. Instead they learn what it is they need to do if they want to remember something.

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It's possible to get to the point where you can become better at effortless memorization, but that takes a LOT of work. I studied 6 languages in high school and undergrad, and by the time I was in my senior year (taking Arabic + Chinese concurrently + over a decade of cumulative language classes) I remembered pretty much everything and reviewing for things like formulae/terms in other classes wasn't necessary.

It's just really hard to get there.

Hi I'm interested in this, can you talk more about the process and stages you went through?

It wasn't a process so much as an accidental by-product of what I was studying. By the time I left high school, I was taking German, Latin, and French. In undergrad, I expanded that to include some Old English, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic. You can't get around memorization to learn languages.

The reason my memory ended up so nuts is that I was only interested in the nuts and bolts of the language, so I didn't continue on with French when it became about literature, I just picked up a new language instead. After a while, languages become more about things like context clues, but at the beginning and intermediate stages, you have to memorize a lot. Since I wanted to go for linguistic breadth (since I was interested in how languages were related/how features travel), I did the memorization stage of language learning a lot.

So I'd say it's down to consistency and longevity of practice. I used spaced-repetition as my main technique, but it's really down to spending 1+ hour a day for 8 years on memorizing.

You also have to keep up with it, or your memory degrades. It's been a good 10 years, and I don't have nearly the memory I used to.

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