Maybe a Bad Memory is Exactly What You Need
Of all the tricks memory masters utilize to fight the fleeting nature of human memory, “the memory palace technique” is probably the most prominant one. It works by associate information with familiar spatial environment (such as your home or your bedroom). People who are specially good at this can sometimes memorize things that are simply unimaginable for us uninitiated.
On the face of it, The process of a second language acquisition is, for the most part, a game of memorization. There is no doubt that a good memory will help you tremendously in this department. But we don’t have a lot of memory masters who speak a lot of languages, do we? So surely there is more to language learning than meets the eye?
If you have had the opportunity to observe a memory master perform his memory tricks first hand, you will understand why even having an excelent memory won’t get you far or eleviate any pain you may come across when learning a new language.
Let’s say you can memorise the whole oxford english dictionary in one go with the afformentioned memory palace technique, but when you try to use it in your daily practice, you start to realise that retrieving the correct words is becoming your bottleneck. To retrieve even one new word you need to walk through your whole palace，by the time you get the word you want, nobody is left to listen to your story.
Grammar is another area where a good memory is of no avail. It is true that you have memorized all the gramatical rules in the language, but that knowledge brings nothing to the table when you try to have a real-time conversation.
Based on this simple observation, I come to realise any rote memorization based language learning routine is probably not the most optimal one, for the simple reason that language learning is a subconcious process.
So maybe we are all going the wrong way about it in terms of language learning. Instead of painstakingly trying to memorize vocabularies, what we should be doing is just immerse yourself in the materials without trying too hard, and let your brain navigate through the vast sea of a foreign language.
True, you might forget a few words and pharses here and there and maybe the information retained from a piece of material isn’t that much, but in the end it is the total amount of time you spent “living” in your target language that ultimately built the fluency, all other metrics are mere illusions.
Remember: As long as you are having fun, you (probably) are doing it correctly.