I’m running into a specific problem trying to reach a higher level with my Spanish and thought maybe some people here would have insight. I just spent two weeks doing very intensive (all day) practice by playing RPG games in Spanish. There are games now with extremely good Spanish voice acting with matching subtitles.
I created a ton of Anki cards while doing this as there were words or phrases I wasn’t familiar with. What I’ve noticed though is that at a certain point my reviewing gets a lot less efficient. It helps that I can associate these words with characters, events, and locations in the games but I still see diminishing returns. I can overcome it somewhat just by spending much more time reviewing, but I’d like to be more efficient than this.
First, I’m interested in learning more about what causes this “diminishing returns” effect, from both psychological and neurophysiological perspectives. I know memories just kind of blur more together and consolidate when there’s more of them in similar contexts. Are there also constraints more from the brain’s horsepower, synapse formation, or energy demands that cause it.
Then I’m wondering what are effective ways to overcome it, or at least increase the threshold where it starts or the severity of it.
Language learning has taught me that there’s actually way more “vocabulary” that has to be memorized than we realize if we include phrases. I’m estimating that I need to memorize at least 50,000 items to really be decent at Spanish where I wouldn’t feel severely handicapped compared to English. So the efficiency in achieving that seems really important.