Twenty years ago, I was an American living in Spain. The most useful habit I established was one of carrying around one or two tiny flip notebooks in my shirt pocket. Whenever I left a situation where I hadn’t known the right Spanish word to express myself, I would write down the English equivalent in the left column.
At least once a day, I would consult the premium badass bilingual dictionary I kept on my kitchen table, writing the words or phrases I hadn’t known on their corresponding lines in the right column.
During spare moments, I would pull out my notebooks and quiz myself. Over a two-year period, I had filled four or five of these notebooks—thousands of words—and rotated them in or out of my pocket as needed to keep every word fresh in my head. It was spaced repetition for an age before we carried computers in our pockets, and it steadily ratcheted up my language mastery in a very satisfying way.
Living now in the age of Anki, I find myself re-embracing this systemized approach for whatever I’m trying to learn. But the weakest cog in the machine is my inconsistency in making a timely note at the moment of insight or confusion. I’m tempted to go buy another mini-notebook… but since I have a phone with a stylus, I’ll first try to train a habit to actually use it.
Twenty years ago, I was an American living in Spain. The most useful habit I established was one of carrying around one or two tiny flip notebooks in my shirt pocket. Whenever I left a situation where I hadn’t known the right Spanish word to express myself, I would write down the English equivalent in the left column.
At least once a day, I would consult the premium badass bilingual dictionary I kept on my kitchen table, writing the words or phrases I hadn’t known on their corresponding lines in the right column.
During spare moments, I would pull out my notebooks and quiz myself. Over a two-year period, I had filled four or five of these notebooks—thousands of words—and rotated them in or out of my pocket as needed to keep every word fresh in my head. It was spaced repetition for an age before we carried computers in our pockets, and it steadily ratcheted up my language mastery in a very satisfying way.
Living now in the age of Anki, I find myself re-embracing this systemized approach for whatever I’m trying to learn. But the weakest cog in the machine is my inconsistency in making a timely note at the moment of insight or confusion. I’m tempted to go buy another mini-notebook… but since I have a phone with a stylus, I’ll first try to train a habit to actually use it.