Ignore, forget

It's normal to forget things, and with language-learning it's necessary to forget. That's what I believe. I'll call it 'active forgetting'.

This is an idea that I got from William Blake in his Doors of Perception. He writes that it's the brain's job to act as a filter, to filter out most of what beams in from outside.

We are exposed to so much information, yet consciously we can only attend to a small part of it. When reading, you only 'see' certain words, not all of them, and you guess as to how they relate, you largely make up the meaning, and then check to see whether you are correct.

When I scan a text in a language that I only partially know, I ignore most of it. Slowly, though, I see words repeat. I come to know them. My brain gets the message that these words are useful or important, so it lets them in. It doesn't filter them out.

This leads to your accumulating a vocabulary bank, and a set of grammatical skills in a natural order. It would be foolish to try and force yourself to memorize things in a different order. You can't alter or rush the order and the rate of learning, not if you want to learn naturally and smoothly.

By the same token, you - or I, since I'm not advocating for others - I skip the hard bits, the bits I'm not ready for, the bits I'm not interested in.

If I'm reading a book in another language, I try not to read everything. I encourage myself to skip ahead to the next bit that I find easy to assimilate for my current level. I'll skip books entirely if they are too hard, or if their content isn't interesting. There are always better books to read!

Jack Reacher books, for example. They are a great read. However, they do contain long passages of description of firearms, road blocks, and scenery that aren't really necessary. The dialogues work best for me. Active passages. You don't waste time on the rest.