Introduction
What a time to live in! We are experiencing any kinds of breakthroughs in technology. And we seem to have reached some peaks where the air is more refreshing than before (Depending on where you live ejeje!). We can almost do and learn everything as long as we dare to commit to it. Currently, I am trying my best to learn Spanish, and I wondered what the process I am going through. My native language is French (Bonjour!). It has been easier than ever to learn English, and now here I am learning Spanish. But there was a problem I did not notice.
How did I come up with an understanding of English? I remembered being in high school and realizing I was able now to understand with good familiarity the language and felt surprised. How did this happen? Now that I am trying to be 'familiar' with Spanish, I am lucky to have this introspection thought on how we really learn a new language. What are the inner processes of it?
As a passionate about learning and intelligence, I believe language itself is a great matter to consider when dealing with them. From the bottom level of Nature to the highest. We observe that language complexity plays a crucial role in measuring intelligence. We will observe bees and ants with their complex communications and organizations and will state, They are smart!
We will observe how a tree communicates with others in the forest, and there will be something common to language, something similar to intelligence. It might be for some reason limited to instincts, but yet, It has its level of complexity and logic.Those are some parts of why I want so much to study intelligence through the lens of language and simulate the endless process (learning) via computers.
Why writing this article? Because I would like to share some views about different learning approaches that exist, and one of them that must be discussed is so-called Rote Learning. What is Rote learning? What is its relationship to learning a new language? Are we Rote learners? Or is this learning paradigm computers follow?
Discussions
If one has never encountered the term Rote learning, this topic could appear a bit strange. But we are sure everyone has been using this learning approach consciously or unconsciously. Rote learning, by definition, is trying to 'learn' something by accentuating the number of times we come across it. For example, I might be able to learn fast the speech given to me before a conference if I repeat it 100 times. The more I repeat it, the better my performance!
Rote learning is by itself a powerful learning paradigm, even with that definition, given that it is still an interesting learning approach. Have you ever heard the saying that "repetition is the mother of learning," or father (who knows), or something like "repetition is the key to mastery"?
It is clear that learning finally cannot happen without the use of repetition. And Rote learning is all about it. I do not remember how I acquired my native language, but I can sense that seeing and hearing the same things all day long contributed to it.
However, I went a bit fast on talking about Rote learning without attempting to define learning. What is it to 'learn'? Stories have been said about learning. But let us keep it simple and say that learning is the process by which we get to 'understand' something. Now the next problem is to define 'understanding'. Understanding is a state in which we can explain to some degree of precision anything or a specific thing. For better support, Nicolas Boileau said in his terms: What is well understood is clearly stated, and the words to say it come easily.
That is why so many people, for them to learn and understand, choose to explain it. Because during this process, there is hell... But in the end, we can savor the apple in peace.
Now that we have an idea of what is learning and what is Rote learning, we can infer that by repetition and memorization, one can end up understanding things. Well, this is where the problem starts.
I will stay in language because this is where I could give good examples. For people who have decided to learn a new language, they have gone through several techniques, but one of those is surely to repeat and memorize certain words (we call it vocabulary acquisition). The linguist David Wilkins said: "Without grammar, very little can be conveyed, but without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed.". So definitely the most important aspect of learning a language is to acquire its vocabulary first.
In computer Science, for example, while building a compiler, we have to make sure the algorithm recognizes the words or 'tokens' otherwise, there is nothing to be done, and this is the first step. The same is true in artificial intelligence models; the first step is to come out with the correct split 'tokens'. For them to be correctly split, the algorithm needs to know them or at least recognize them.
How does vocabulary acquisition relate to Rote learning? At the beginning of learning a language, we will not have a full understanding of any words at all. Because human language is complex, it reflects its intelligence. So one way for us to start somewhere is by "Rotting" every word, memorizing them, and making sure we can interact with them as much as we can so that the memory becomes stronger and stronger.
What is happening here then is that by repeating the experience more and more, we get to retrieve the words and recognize them faster even if we don't understand them that much. For example, I am talking with a random cool Mexican guy eating some barbacoa tacos, and "blah blah, Todo, blah blah...". Well, I got to recognize the word "todo," even if it does not bring me the full understanding of the discussion at least the first step of recognizing the word from my memories is a huge step in language learning. Real understanding can never happen without first recognizing the items and words in language learning.
So from this perspective, which is definitely shared by the Eastern view, Rote learning is an extremely powerful tool for learning, and with some adjustments to its definitions, Rote learning can be seen even as one of the strongest tools for learning, or, in other words, to reach deep understanding. This idea is not shared with the Western side of the globe we live in, as it is seen as something prejudicial in the sense that this learning can not bring understanding but rather an appearance of it (when one cannot give deeper explanations for example).
From the Western side, memorizing without any understanding does not help in productivity and creativity. The Eastern side supports the fact that real productivity and creativity can happen only when we can recall something even if the understanding is not yet there (the idea is something has to be there in order to build understanding and reasoning, etc.).
Conclusion
As you can see, there is an interesting debate about Rote learning, mostly because of how it is defined rather than how things tend to happen. Because who really knows what happens inside the brain?
From my side, I believe, Rote learning needs to be redefined and reconsidered in artificial intelligence in a way that it helps bring us closer to machine understanding and reasoning of not only language, but it has to go through language understanding first. Up to now, I have not yet seen a smart person or any animals without the ability to use a language.
In the next article in Learning theories, we will go through another learning paradigms. They are so many and full of anecdotes. However only those which are related to Artificial intelligence will be discussed. This one was an Introduction to learning theories.
Now Am I applying Rote learning in my learning of Spanish? it mostly happens not consciously. But this is a first article about and we will come back to it with deeper insights.
Small anecdote about learning. In my country, we refer Rote learning as "Boilo". Each time a student has to go through tons of things for an exam and is not focusing on understanding rather on memorizing, we usually say: "Je pars faire mon Boilo". It is common for subjects like History or literature. :-).