Reading some info in Wikipedia about some psychological disorders - Capgras delusion, Cotard delusion, etc - I found something pretty interesting that relates to something that is common practice for traditional language learning, but that according to a study would be actually counterproductive...

Jamais vu is the opposite of deja vu. In jamais vu, you face something you feel you have never experienced before, even if you acually know you've had the same experience before.

According to a study by Dr. Chris Moulin of the University of Leeds, you can induce jamais vu through semantic satiation, which means bassically fatiguing someone's brain by overexposing him to a word.

Quote:He asked 92 subjects to write common words such as "door" 30 times in 60 seconds.

When they were later asked to describe their experiences, 68% showed signs of jamais vu.

For example, after writing "door" over and over again some participants reported that "it looked like I was spelling something else", it "sounded like a made-up word" and "I began to doubt that I was writing the correct word for the meaning".

Some thought they had been tricked into thinking it was the right word for a door.

"If you look at something for long enough the mind gets tired and it loses it's meaning," Moulin says.

A linguistic explanation of this phenomenom according to Wikipedia indicates that this might be due to the nature of words, which have 3 characteristics: form -the characters used when writing it or the sounds that form the word when speaking-, function -how the word operates within meaningful sentences- and meaning. When you are overexposed to a word -like in the experiment- you are actually overexposed only to its form, not to its function or meaning, so your mind focus on the form of the word, and its function and meaning are left out, and you start not recognizing the word as something else than a random chain of characters or sounds.

Which made me remaind of the old times, when I used to "study" kanji by writing words once and again. Unfortunately, that kind of "study" is what lots of people think as "the way" for learning kanji and vocabulary.

After reading the aforementioned info, I wonder whether there could be some implicances for language learning on the short and long term. For example, this kind of reaction of the brain to word "overdose" would partly explain -at a neurological level- why writing things once and again leads to burn out. If you want to learn something by writing it dozens -or hundreds- of times in a row, you might actually be working against your own brain. Specially in languages like Japanese, could it be that semantic satiation due to suboptimal language methods leads to "unlearning" the kanji and words and creates a handicap for long term learning?

I know that most -or all- of us have "crammed" this way more than once, and it has worked -at least up to certain level-, but do you think that this "semantic satiation" could be something that you should care about, or isn't it as negative or important as to worry about it?

Have you experienced jamais vu about something related to the Japanese language?

Now that I think about it, probably jamais vu would be the explanation for that strange sensation that pursues you when you just finish a test or exam, and suddenly most answers you couldn't think of before become apparent - those "Oh f*ck how could I miss THAT one" moments...

Sources:
Jamais vu - Wikipedia
Is it really you or jamais vu? - ABC Science Online

I've experienced this as a kid, when repeating certain words over and over .. Singing a made up song with a single word in it.. It didn't take long to notice how bizarre the word suddenly felt to me.

Other times I've typed a word, then suddenly felt that I may have spelled it incorrectly. It was as if I was observing it as an unfamiliar word because I suppose I was focusing on the letters, as opposed to the look of the whole word which I had come to learn by simply seeing it time and time again.

It's called ゲシュタルト崩壊 in Japanese. Everyone experiences that, and it's nothing you have to worry about. Some kanji are more vulnerable to this while others are less jamais vu-prone. Actually you don't need to write characters to experience it. Just stare at a character, and you'll start to doubt if it's a Japanese character. 仏, 公, 化 are canonical examples of jamais vu-prone kanji. You can also experience it by staring at kana. I don't think it has anything to do with your language learning.

Here's a nico vid of the interesting phenomenon. You're sure to experience jamais vu. Enjoy!

I think putting a term on it and all of this is sort of making something quite simple quite complex. It's just an effect of over-analyzing something. You don't realize how generic words and letters are because you're so used to use them, you use them without thinking. But write a word a TON of times, repeat it in your head or just look at it long enough and you realize just how generic it is.

I don't think it affects memory in any way, it's just a deeper analysis than you usually deal with.

EDIT: I'm not getting it at all in magamo's video. I think it might be because of RtK... As soon as I start analyzing a kanji, I just split it up into the primitives and it makes perfect sense according to my story. It doesn't start to feel wierd... it actually start to feel more and more logical the longer I look.

cerulean Wrote:Other times I've typed a word, then suddenly felt that I may have spelled it incorrectly. It was as if I was observing it as an unfamiliar word because I suppose I was focusing on the letters, as opposed to the look of the whole word which I had come to learn by simply seeing it time and time again.

In general for me, it's always been that if I think for more than 20 seconds about the spelling of a word I become completely unable to spell it. It's pretty silly.

Lol similar story here, if anyone here has ever programmed they'll know what I'm talking about.

This has happened to me countless times over and over with different words.

If i use a variable called

Rectangle say,

int Rectanglex, Rectangley;
bool IsRectangle;
char RectangleArray[N];

int Rectangles(void)

after a while, you look at the word rectangle and question yourself "is that actually the correct spelling?" *writes rectangle*, "hmm, still looks wrong, let me check the dictionary... 'rectangle' wth, it *still* looks wrong"

I think it only applies when you are focusing on one or two words only. I wouldn't be too worried. This has only happened to me when I'm programming which involved typing the same stuff over and over. I have crammed in many situations before ad this Jamais vu has never occurred.

'Unlearn' is a poor choice of words, since jamais vu has nothing to do with that. It's a temporary condition.