Somewhere, I read about an American study of language learners who didn’t practise for a certain amount of time, against a control group who practised normally, with the intriguing result that the group who didn’t practise appeared to end up processing the language more like a native speaker (some kind of (f)MRI work was involved in this, but I can’t remember exactly what the criteria were).
I haven’t managed to find it in the first couple of books I’ve checked, so I thought I’d cross my fingers that there might have been some discussion about it on here at some point, and that someone might remember something!..
I’ve spent most of the last 19 hours convincing myself that I was never going to find this again, and boy have I been trying - so I was staring down the barrel of throwing away an entire piece of ‘why not practice less?!’ writing because the only non-SSi evidence I had was gone.
And you’ve found it for me. Grateful doesn’t begin to describe it. I only wish this had happened before Bootcamp so that I could have distressed Iestyn by demanding that we refuse to accept any money from you!
Amy, is there anything else SSi can offer as a thank you? Ask and it’s yours. I’m sure Iestyn would be up for packing the kids off to Australia for a year or so… or if you want a holiday in Wales again at any point, just say, and we’ll sort it out (that sounds generous, but almost certainly means a sofa bed or top-and-tailing with a five year old )… seriously, I owe you, big time.
[Incidentally, that second article you link to namechecks one of my favourite thinkers, a guy called Tony Schwartz, who wrote ‘The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working’, which is responsible for a lot of the odd tests that Ifan’s having to jump through as an SSi employee… More here: http://theenergyproject.com/ ]
lol, no biggie - just a google sleight of hand but Cat and Iestyn’s kids are welcome any time!
Edited to add: I love the idea of the energy project, I’ll have to read more about it when I get home. But as I’ve recently wrangled my own work contract to include a day off every fortnight, I can confirm it is The Best Thing Ever.
No biggie? You have no idea how much I had to tone down my initial, bouncing-off-the-walls response, before I could manage to sound even partially sane. Offering you the whole of Wales, with free shipping, might have got me into trouble.
I had Googled until my fingers were raw. What terms did you use?!
But as I’ve recently wrangled my own work contract to include a day off every fortnight, I can confirm it is The Best Thing Ever.
Good work! Ifan, poor soul, is currently road-testing a new approach called ‘Work when you feel like it’, because it dawned on me that our initial test of 5/4/3 (5 hours a day, 4 days a week, 3 weeks a month) was actually just a different kind of prescription.
I’m loving this conversation Say something in Welsh is so much more than a language learning website. I’m looking forward to reading these articles too especially the one about downtime - I’m always giving myself a bit of a hard time for the fact that I need so much downtime to be able to function. Now I no longer need to justify it to myself and can just accept that it’s necessary to be creative.
Thanks for that
it dawned on me that our initial test of 5/4/3 (5 hours a day, 4 days a week, 3 weeks a month) was actually just a different kind of prescription.
Some people need someone to prescribe /not/ working to them
Is there more to the Energy Project than a high level ‘treat employees better, slow down’? I’m moderately interested in reading stuff like this, but most of what I managed to extract from the site was marketing literature, rather than more generally interesting stuff.
Good call, Kate! One of the things I dislike a lot about modern Anglo-American culture is the way in which it makes people believe that not being busy is a moral failing. The Italians are right on the money with ‘Dolce fa niente’ - the sweetness of doing nothing…
@Kev - yup, the 5/4/3 was basically about ‘Take Some Time Off!’ - but then I realised that sometimes I was actually standing in the way of good work when Ifan was on a roll and wanted to keep going. I’m not sure about ‘work when you feel like it’ yet, because I suspect Ifan may do too much - but maybe some combination of ‘work when you feel like it’ plus ‘How about a break?’ alerts might do the trick…
I haven’t looked in depth at the Energy Project site itself, but ‘The Way We Work Isn’t Working’ is one of my real favourites - I’ve actually bought copies for other people, so can’t recommend it much more highly than that. In fact, I see that I’ve lost my own copy, so I’m apparently going to have to buy another…
That’s interesting, thanks Mike. I’m very much not a fan of homework myself. I think I’d rather my kids didn’t go to school at all than got landed with as much homework as I used to see kids getting…
My favourite “learning tactics” blog is this one: http://calnewport.com/blog which is big on “time is important but not as important as really deep focus whn you ARE doing the time”
Soooooo interesting! I’ve just been reading about running slower to get fitter (having nearly killed myself on my morning run trying to get my time down), and now there’s this advice to take more time out. This is messing with my work ethic, but I think that can only be a good thing
Running slower to get fitter? Now that sounds interesting (although only theoretically so to someone whose knees are mostly wrecked). I’m interested in high intensity short interval stuff, but ‘slower’ sounds different again…
So this idea of the benefit of periods of not studying… does that suggest that if I wanted to learn multiple new languages it would be better to study each language individually for, say, a month, on a kind of rotation - so that each language gets intensivity (is that a word??) plus a period of passive recovery? Because that would suit my impatience waaaay more than sticking with one language for like two years before I can move on… ??
)… seriously, I owe you, big time.
but Cat and Iestyn’s kids are welcome any time!