How to do free recall (AKA active recall) - Language learning demonstration

free recall is one of the most powerful and basic study strategies there is and all it requires is some paper a pencil and a brain now in this video i'm going to demonstrate this free recall technique using language learning but you can apply it to almost any subject that you care about anytime that you want to remember a lot of information for a long time so let's take a look at the technique first and then i'll explain a little bit about what's going on later on in the video this is my chinese textbook and i'm

trying to learn these vocabulary words now the first thing i do is to study the material to familiarize myself with the words this particular book is nice because it has these little example sentences that illustrate how the word is used now there are a lot of words here like 60 or 70 words and some lessons i'm not going to remember all of them right away i'm going to stop after 20 or 30 words or so after i study the words i do something else for maybe 15 minutes or so anything to get my mind off

of what i was originally learning then i come back to my desk but i don't open my textbook that's very important i take my paper and pencil and i try to remember all the words that i can for chinese there's three things to remember about each word there's the character the pronunciation and the meaning of the word so here i'm trying to write down everything i can remember now remembering one part of the word sometimes can help you remember a different part of the word or a different word entirely so you want to sit there

and give yourself a few minutes to remember everything you can that said this whole part shouldn't take more than 10 minutes or so at this point you're not going to remember everything right i usually start out remembering maybe a quarter or a third of what i originally was studying that's okay after you've remembered everything you can now you open the textbook and look for what you missed you make any corrections note any details this part should not take more than five minutes that's it you've done one round of free recall but this technique gets better

the more that you do it so at this point i take a couple of hours off to do something completely different [Music] then i come back with a clean sheet of paper and a closed textbook and do the same thing i did earlier now i'm not looking at the first round's results i don't care about those anymore i'm focused on pulling out everything i can remember fresh again as you do this a second or third time you might start remembering the information in clusters as i do the free recall exercise i'm trying to put things

that are related together close together or sometimes i'll draw little lines connecting things if the paper gets too messy it's not really important to keep the paper neat at this point because you're just going to throw it away and do it again later you're not going to get everything right the second time or even the third time but you should be improving in each round and at the same time you should be expanding the time that you spend between rounds initially i do something like a 10 minute or 15 minute interval then i'll do something

like two to three hours then i'll do something like a day then maybe a couple of days then maybe a week if you still want to keep going and you can use the same basic technique in other subjects like i said before so history or medicine any time that you want to remember a lot of information in the long run now hopefully you're using the information that you are trying to remember in the long run as well so it's not just that you do this exercise for you know three or four days or something like

that and then bam you're gonna forget everything no hopefully this is information that is important for you to know you know three months from now six months from now a year from now why does this technique work i'm going to give you three reasons well the first reason is that you're actively organizing the information inside of your brain in a way that uh rereading certainly doesn't do and even flash cards can't match so when you are forced to remember something just looking at a blank sheet of paper it ends up reducing the interference that various

memories have with each other so you might get confused between two characters if you're learning chinese but the process of recalling that information helps you get less confused about them there's a lot of studies on the effectiveness of this for memory i put a bunch of those in the description the second reason is that you're getting the kind of practice that you'd like to get when you reread something like let's say you open the book again and you look at the vocabulary words again and that's your study time or study period it's very easy to

convince yourself that you know something just because you recognize something but recognizing something is not the same as being actually able to recall it and or even being able to apply it properly free recall is closer to the kind of practice the kind of skill that you're trying to develop the third important aspect of this is the intervals the intervals are really important for strengthening the memory in an efficient way the ideal time for you to remember something is just when you're about to forget it but you haven't forgotten it completely if you find yourself

doing this technique and you remember everything that you were studying well you probably didn't let enough time elapse for you to start forgetting things again now on the other hand if you find yourself forgetting everything like you can't remember anything at all even though you sit there for 10 minutes trying to come up with something then you may have waited too long of an interval so now it's so much harder for you to remember that you're not really getting anything out or you could also reduce the amount of stuff that you have to remember if

you give this technique a shot please let me know in the comments how it's going for you and kind of any problems that you run into and uh yeah have fun i love doing this i find it more enjoyable than almost any other study technique because it's just me and a blank sheet of paper and i'm trying to really understand what i know that's it for this video thanks everyone see you next time