Back in secondary school I extensively used the Leitner flashcard system to learn vocabularies and declensions and conjugations for the Latin language. Despite the effectiveness at the time, the lack of practical use or combination with other techniques and the abandoning of the flashcard box years ago has led most of that to be buried under new boxes in my memory "storage warehouse".
One distinct lesson from the book "So lernt man lernen" by Sebastion Leitner that I did not apply at the time is the importance of putting things into motion. When learning a language, various options exist to bring static vocabularies to life, allowing us to tap into more powerful memory structures. The most powerful is performing the meaning - his example is going to the window as you say the phrase "I go to the window" in the target language. Researching this I found that James Asher formalized this method as "Total physical response", inspired by the way children learn from parents. If the learning environment or material does not allow for that, looking to the related object (letting your eyes wander to the window) or at least letting your eyes flicker back and forth between the vocabulary and its translation will already bring positive effects.
The book also mentioned the universal application of the half second: From average reaction time to Pavlov's conditioning, half a second is the unit of time we live in and make associations within. Leitner concluded that a teacher writing the vocabularies on the blackboard, or making a theatrical pause before providing the translation, actually hinders learning as the gap between the elements to be associated is too large. That is why he proposes to set the material in motion yourself as mentioned above.
The Interview with Benny Lewis by Barbara Oakley (https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/lecture/L4yKh/optional-interview-with-benny-the-irish-polyglot-about-learning-languages) provided further valuable insights:
- learn the language basics before visiting the country so you can accommodate to the culture
- nonetheless, find a way to practice speaking the language early on, so you can make mistakes and get corrected
- using mnemonics to train vocabularies - he brought the example of imagining a table made up of tissues for the German translation of table "Tisch", creating a memory aid that will naturally make itself redundant upon developing language literacy - just as I do not think about the German word anymore before coming up with the English one, but once used to
Though learning human languages is not a main focus of my journey this semester, some of these techniques may be applied to other things I am learning, and I do want to learn additional languages in the future.