Why You Forget English (And How to Hack Your Memory)
You study a new vocabulary list. You memorize it perfectly. Two weeks later, you try to use one of those words in conversation, and… it’s gone.
It’s frustrating. It feels like you just aren’t “good at languages.”
But I have good news: You aren’t bad at languages. You are just fighting against your own biology.
The Villain: The Forgetting Curve
In the late 1800s, a psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered a depressing truth about the human brain. It’s called the Forgetting Curve.
He found that within 20 minutes of learning something, you forget about 40% of it. Within one day, you forget nearly 70%.
Your brain is designed to forget. It’s a survival mechanism. If you remembered every face you saw on the train or every license plate you passed, you would go crazy. Your brain aggressively deletes information it thinks is useless.
The problem? Your brain thinks “English Vocabulary” is useless because you aren’t using it for survival right now.
The Hero: Spaced Repetition (SRS)
So, how do we convince your brain that English is important?
We have to “hack” the system using a method called Spaced Repetition Systems (SRS).
Imagine you plant a seed. If you water it every hour, it drowns. If you water it once a month, it dies. You have to water it just as the soil gets dry.
Memory is the same. You need to review a word right before you are about to forget it.
- Review 1: 1 day after learning.
- Review 2: 3 days later.
- Review 3: 1 week later.
- Review 4: 1 month later.
If you do this, the memory becomes permanent. It moves from “Short Term Memory” to “Long Term Memory.”
Why Traditional Classes Fail
Most English schools don’t account for this. You learn “Travel English” in Week 1. Then you move to “Restaurant English” in Week 2. You never review Week 1 again until the test.
By Week 4, Week 1 is gone.
How We Do It Differently
At Starfish English, we don’t just teach you words; we build a system to keep them.
In our new 1-Day Domestic Immersion Course, we dedicate specific time blocks to “Deep Consolidation.” We don’t just chat for 10 hours. We identify your mistakes, create personalized flashcards (using the SRS method), and set up a system so you cannot forget them.
We turn the “Forgetting Curve” into a “Learning Curve.”
Ready to stop forgetting and start speaking?