taken from William G. Moulton

DIVIDE THE MATERIAL INTO SMALL UNITS

As children, we were all good at memorizing; as adults, we have had most of this memorizing ability educated out of us. Hence a few comments on the technique of memorizing may be helpful. First of all, don't try to memorize a large body of material at once. Break it up into small units, memorize each of these units separately, and then string them all together.

DIVIDE YOUR STUDY TIME INTO SMALL UNITS

If you spend two uninterrupted hours trying to memorize the material of a new lesson, you will do a poor job of memorizing and will probably go stark raving mad in the process. Use a sane study technique. Start off with twenty minutes to half an hour at the most; then turn to some other work; then come back for another twenty minutes; and so on. Two hours divided into small bits like this will produce far better results than 120 straight minutes of agonizing study.

STUDY VOCABULARY

A good idea is to write out your vocabulary on cards, German, French, Spanish, or Japanese on one side and English on the other. Whenever you have a bit of time you may play "snap" with friends or patience on your own, and your review will be moderately painless.

GO FROM THE EASY TO THE HARD

Start off by reading the foreign language aloud right out of the book; generally you will have little trouble remembering how the new words sounded or what they meant. As soon as you have read a sentence in this way, look away from the book and say it again. Only after you have practised a section of material like this several times should you go on to the really hard part: looking at the English and then trying to say the foreign language without peeking. If you have trouble saying a whole sentence in this way, try breaking it into smaller pieces, say each of them individually, and then string the pieces together.

MAKE FULL USE OF CLASS HOURS

Language teachers classify students into the dumb and the smart not on the basis of now well they learn a language, but by the way they make use of class hours. The dumb ones sit back and dream until they happen to be called on; even if they know the answer, they are still dumb, because they have wasted valuable time. The smart ones pack fifty minutes of practice into each class hour. When somebody else is reciting, they are mentally reciting right along with him, and hence have new material half memorized even before they go home to study it. Of course, if you want to waste the class time you are paying for, that is quite all right with your teacher. But it is still pretty dumb.

DON'T FALL BEHIND

Even though steady, day by day work is the best way to learn any subject, it is true that in many courses you can get yourself out of a jam by some high pressure, last minute cramming. Not so with a language. Cramming for a language exam would be about as sensible as cramming for a swimming contest; you just can't learn habits that way. Furthermore, language learning is a highly cumulative process. It is like making a tower out of blocks: you keep building on top of what you did the day before. If you don't keep at the job steadily, pretty soon you are trying to put new blocks on top of empty space. So don't fall behind. Once in a while, of course, you won't have time to prepare an assignment. It happens - occassionally - in the best of families. But when it does happen, for heaven's sake don't be so bashful as to stay away from class. If you do, making up the work will be twice as hare. Come to class, tell the teacher you are unprepared, and learn as much as you possibly can from the classroom work.

DO YOU EVER NEED TO "THINK"?

Yes; but in a very special way. Memorizing new material can hardly be called "thinking". But you will help yourself enormously if, as you memorize, you think about the grammatical explanations that go with each set of new material. The grammatical section of a new lesson may tell you, for example, about verb endings. After you have read this section, and have said the examples out loud, start memorizing the new material; and every time you say a verb form, fit it mentally into the scheme that has just been explained to you. This ability to think about the structure of the language is the one big advantage you have over a child; make use of it.