Deep Processing

皆さん、こんにちは！

Actually, 今ごご十時ぐらいです。But, I just got back home from my night class on learning second language vocabulary. We had an interesting discussion about the Depth of Processing Hypothesis, mentioned in our reading Craik & Tulving (1975). The hypothesis can be summarized into the concept of: the more you think about a word, the more you will retain about the word. We tested the hypothesis in class. Results were not stellar, but they did lean towards agreement with the hypothesis.

Often, we simply think about our vocabulary in terms of translation and position--which I often like to play with on this blog and in my general learning.

For example:
川（かわ）[kawa]  river
川がです。[kawaga desu.] It is a river.

But, as we all truly know, this is the tip of the iceberg. Playing slightly further with words will aid in retention. For example, when we look at this word 川, we can ask:

Do any lines in the word cross each other?
Does it rhyme with "nawa"? (By the way, 縄 means "rope".)
Does it have something to do with water?
Can I use it in the sentence "I had a ________ for dinner."?

While some of these may sound silly or irrelevant, at a subconcious level, according to this hypothesis, the time that you spend answering these questions will aid in you retaining more information about the word. In essence, you have simply increase the amount of meaningful time that you have spent with the word.

Now...to prepare for tomorrow's kanji quiz!

さよなら！