Interesting article..

"Basically, what we say is, yes you do have to do the task, just not for the whole time. The main result is that if you practice for 20 minutes, and then you are passively exposed to stimuli for 20 minutes, you learn as if you have been practicing for 40 minutes. You can cut the effort in half, and still yield the same benefit."

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/0...z10qe2aI3W
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/0...t=My+Yahoo

That's an interesting study. It has formed some ideas for studying for me. Like, do my daily practice and then have a way to have the audio play back again afterwards, while I'm doing something else.

On the other hand, maybe it only works for highly repetitive things, like this mysterious 'auditory discrimination task' that they did hundreds or thousands of times.

socrat Wrote:Interesting article..

+1

So a possible application of this would be that after each session of active study you could reward yourself with a passive session of watching dorama, anime or listening to music or podcasts that you like?

Interesting. Since the task in the experiment was to discriminate between audio frequencies, I can see where it could apply to listening (word discrimination) and speaking (i.e., pronunciation) skills.

Seems fairly obvious to me. I mean, how long did it take you to learn the primary reading for 私 compared to, say, 魚? Both one kanji, both three morae, but you'd probably been passively exposed to the former dozens of times over semi-regular intervals.

It is an interesting article.

But today I only learned my 750th frame. Its going to be a while before I'm listening to Japanese with any real comprehension beyond catching my sparse vocabulary and a few choice phrases.

Maybe in few months I'll give the 20 minutes reading, 20 minutes listening thing a try.