The most sinister part of the situation was that I couldn’t concentrate or read. It’s terrible too because once the urges pounce, they can keep trouncing on you for days and days on end. They are sick and sweet and jump out at you from nowhere. Worse, if you’ve ever experienced the horrors of manic-depression in full swing, you know the impulses involved. Studying card magic was certainly better than jumping off a bridge, which the mounting pressure and the teeth of my depression were forcing me to consider. ![]() I thought of my magic practice as developing a kind of “emergency paycheck,” because I was certain at that time I was going to wind up on the streets with nothing more to do than entertain people and pass around my hat.Īnd I suppose that would have been fun for awhile. Of course, procrastinating on my studies only made my depression worse …īut it’s at least a good thing that I was doing something constructive. I was avoiding the looming field exams and dissertation defense by learning magic tricks. You see, following a terrible and nearly suicidal depression that almost forced me out of grad school, I discovered memory techniques almost by accident. stands for “piled higher and deeper,” but Mann O Mann (as the Germans say), was I ever mystified. Why on earth wasn’t I using memory techniques to help me learn German? With a bit of summer wind on my face, I asked myself a fundamental question: But that didn’t stop me from carrying it everywhere. What a glorious thing, all thick and yellow. So there I was with a fat dictionary pumping words into the spaced-repetition software I loathed like the plague. All you need is about 800-1200 for that, plus a touch of understanding the grammar. In fact, most people would be overjoyed just to get a couple of hundred words in their long term memory.Īnd most people would be ecstatic if they could turn those words into basic conversational fluency. Most people would be happy just to get halfway decent in one language, not several. This happens primarily because they’ve trained themselves to be really good at it. In fact, there’s research suggesting that polyglots get great value from hard repetition. ![]() In all fairness, some people can tolerate rote learning. I’ve never found anything more painful than banging foreign language vocabulary repetitively against my eyes in the vain hope that I would somehow magically remember the abstract and mysterious words. Worse, the flashcard software I’d been using bored me to tears. ![]() No matter what I did, the German vocabulary wouldn’t stick in my mind. Greatest job in the world – if you can get it.Īnyhow, I was on the porch studying German and nearly tearing out my hair with frustration. I was a Film Studies professor back then. I used to walk to the nearby lake and through a wooded area leading to the stores and the M48 bus I often took to Potsdamer Platz where I would watch movies for my work. A discovery that would also prove important for thousands of language learners and students of various topics around the world. I’ll never forget the day I made the most important discovery of my life.
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