In English: Repetition is the mother of memory.
After yesterday's proverb about the mors memoriae,
the "death of memory," I thought it would be good to do a
memory-boosting proverb today, offering a piece of advice that every
language-learner needs to take to heart.
I had never heard this saying in English, but I clearly remember on the
very first day of my Russian class, our teacher taught us the Russian
version of this saying, which has a wonderful ring to it: повторение
матъ учения, "poftoreniye mat' ucheniya." If we still used the word
"tuition" in English to mean "learning" (instead of the money paid for
learning!), we could say "repetition is the mother of tuition" to get
the same kind of sound play in English.
It was a propitious proverb to begin the Russian class. Learning a
Slavic language involves a lot of memorization. In Latin, you get
hundreds, even thousands of words "for free," so to speak, because you
can guess the meaning of so many Latin words based on their English
derivatives. In Russian, you get hardly any words at all for free. As
students begin to read and write in Russian, they spend a lot of time
with the dictionary. My Russian and Polish dictionaries are far more
grimy and thumbed-through than my Latin or even Greek dictionaries - a
sign of many late nights spent looking up word after word after word.
But please note: I am referring to a Russian dictionary here, not a
Russian-English dictionary. In the third year and later of Russian
studies in college, students start using Russian dictionaries, not
Russian-English dictionaries. Despite the fact that Russian is
demonstrably more difficult than Latin (even more cases, more difficult
phonology, an aspect-based verb system), students of Russian regularly
speak Russian, read Russian newspapers and stories and plays, watch
Russian films in Russian, etc. Ideally, they go to Russia, leave their
English behind, and gain real fluency in the language, "living" in
Russian, an activity entirely different from translation.
There has been a very passionate discussion on the LatinTeach listserve
over the weekend about fluency in Latin. My own personal experience is
that we have a lot to learn from the teachers of Slavic languages,
because they are the folks who have had to learn how to teach living
languages with a highly complex inflectional system. Although there is
an enormous amount of memorization involved in studying a Slavic
language, and an intense need to understand the grammar, I do not
remember ever writing out a paradigm on an exam. This is not to say
that the word endings were neglected: not at all! Instead, by
constantly seeing and hearing inflected words (repeat repeat repeat),
by constantly producing and reproducing inflected words, you learned
the words and endings - in the context of actual language use.