Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of my favorite bloggers. He is listed as the “senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine.” He writes about race better than anybody I have ever read. Plus we have some other areas of overlapping interest.

Today he dug into his personal experience learning a second language, French.  He’s reflected on the difficulty of this process before, but today reports the discovery of learning vocabulary by rote repetition:

Memorizing various verb forms has required simply writing them over and over again. I think in the past I’ve given the impression that rote repetition is somehow unconnected to “real” learning.  But I don’t really know how else you get good at something without practicing. I was once told that if you want to develop a jump-shot, you need to learn form, and basically shoot a thousand  jump-shots a day until the form becomes you. I’ve found that in French, I’m trying to recreate a similar trick–turning a overtly conscious act into muscle memory.

I’ve come to love the repetition, the constant rhythm of the jump-shot. I like the slow progress. It’s a kind of revelation. I find myself taken by fantasy. I imagine that I am breaking some ancient code. I imagine I am learning the rudiments of plane-walking. I imagine SETI in reverse–like all the teeming life of the Francoverse broadcasts itself to me, and someday I shall hear it all.

He is a good writer and captures something interesting about what we study here.

http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2012/07/the-book-of-human-language/260016/