A new study confirms that studying right before sleeping helps retention.

The study looks at two types of memory - related and unrelated word pairs. If I understand correctly, the pairs were designed to test the difference between remembering things with already established connections in the brain and those that required establishing new connections to retain word pairs.

Some points to be gleaned from the study in the light of RTK:

* You get the most benefit if you learn new kanji right before going to sleep. This will boost your short-term recall and decrease 31 day memory decay.
* You benefit less from immediate sleep if the kanji is not new. The study shows that sleep makes less difference for already established brain connections. You still get a small boost apparently. It may be optimal to do kanji in boxes 1-2 right before sleeping and boxes 3+ whenever you can.

Via Lifehacker via Scientific American

Last edited by shinsen (2012 March 26, 6:59 pm)