# Do you consider memorization to be learning?



## Handsome Dyke (Oct 4, 2012)

What counts as learning?


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## VoicesofSpring (Mar 31, 2019)

Learning means you understand the knowledge/skill studied and can use it by yourself in various different contexts it is needed. It lead to autonomy with the knowledge/skill.

Memorizing don't necessarily means you understood the knowledge/skill process you memorized, just that you can restitute a certain piece of knowledge in the same context you memorised it.

Memorising is a part of learning, but not the whole process.


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## APBReloaded (Mar 8, 2019)

It depends what you are memorizing, I suppose.


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## The Veteran (Oct 24, 2018)

Well yes. Some would argue that memorizing isn't enough.


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## Sidhe Draoi (Nov 25, 2016)

No.. -shivers-
If memorization was learning, I'd be fucked because I have a bad memory.

You can learn something, and then forget it.. You still learned something. like learning a language, and then later forgetting it. You knew the language, maybe its even buried in your psyche somewhere, waiting to be reawakened, but its your awareness of the material that represents learning, not remembering it.

You can remember a lie, it doesn't mean you learned anything.


Attention, awareness, connections, memory, recall, learning is a complex process.

Synapses fire, making connections between two different things, because you need a foundation to build on. Its like building a house. but instead you're building a paradigm that you call knowledge.
Some things work, some don't. Making mistakes is part of the process to connect the dots, just like achieving something is.

I suppose you COULD twist knowledge into being the same as memory..like if there was such a thing as genetic/astral memory and people pull from it and add to it based on other peoples' genetic/astral memory. but there are different ways for people to adapt information into their minds and that process would be learning, not the memorization.

Its like the difference between reading something and understanding what you read.
English language is a system constructed by humans, and designed to understand certain things, but not everyone has the same reading ability. There are those that don't know any English at all, those who know a few words, those who can write a little, those who can speak a little, those who can speak and/or write it well, and those who speak and/or write it fluently. Now consider this for each language out there that has ever existed.

There are languages no English speaker has ever heard of.

Memorization is the first thing you do when you're learning a new language. Next comes comprehension. but you can also comprehend without storing something to memory.

Once you memorize the basic parts of the language, you can start putting the language together in new ways, and those new ways count as learning as well.

Do you remember your dreams every night?
They still happened.

Have you ever gotten drunk and forgot entire conversations?
They still happened.

Have you ever zoned out?
Things are still happening around you.

Then someone can tell you later what happened and you would know but you might not have any memory of those things.

I would say memory is the seed, or the tip of the iceberg, or something like that.


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## crazitaco (Apr 9, 2010)

Memorization is only learning if it makes it to long-term memory.

There's no point in memorizing something and then forgetting it.


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## Tijaax (Dec 14, 2017)

That is the education system how to. Don't learning to think or comprehend the system.
It is like programming a robot.

We invented writing for something.


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## Hypaspist (Feb 11, 2012)

Personally, I consider truly learning something to be when you can repeat something you fully understand on a functional level, or can teach it to someone else in detail. Regurgitating facts isn't learning, until you can implement them into a larger picture. For some things, that's as far as you can take it, but more intellectual topics require _reasoning_. For example, I could say the first world war was caused by an assassination. However, I _learned_ that the real causes go much deeper than an assassination, and I can go back and show the trail of events that finally sparked war. Therefore, I can say I learned the cause of WWI, not just regurgitate what's already the sparknotes version of history.


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## Zidane (Sep 9, 2015)

What counts as learning? Well, practice. One doesn't just read about sex and be good at it. It has to be practiced. Then obviously it's in your muscle memory which means you have memorized it.


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## Rascal01 (May 22, 2016)

Not necessarily.

If a grade school classroom assignment required memorization of the pledge of allegiance, you may well accomplish that task. But would you truly grasp the meaning and significance of what you have memorized? Perhaps not.

If you do understand with reasonable depth, the pledge of allegiance takes on greater meaning.

Memorization has its place, but it is only a tool to attaining a greater end.

The child’s song about the alphabet comes to mind. With music nearly everyone learned their ABCs. When not put to music some children - and even adults - struggled with recalling where a specific letter of the alphabet is located.


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## IDontThinkSo (Aug 24, 2011)

The solution might be to return to the true root, to cognate, then to learn is to acquire new mental habits in general. But a difference must be made between learning datas (evolution of the datas being reacted to) and skills (evolution of the reaction to datas).


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## Forest Nymph (Aug 25, 2018)

It depends on what you're learning. I know about 100 native California plant species in Latin and the only way to learn them was with rote memorization.

My sister is an ESFJ and she has a Biology degree, and I think with the Biology and Botany people this is a THING. I think they have to have a love of rote memorization, l think you'll find a ton of passionate SJ biologists and botanists, which is probably why they're also such strict, hard-ass, awful teachers and professors...they believe in the system, authority, and memorizing every single species on the planet as well as its rightful place in the phylogenetic tree.

There is something kind of ...relaxing ...about it. There's a weird sense of relaxation I get from short bursts of memorization, I genuinely enjoyed the Latin, and I felt pretty smug about making an A on my final when I took Advanced Biology II or whatever the fuck I had to take to get my degree. 

But I don't like the overall approach of rote teaching and testing. I find it pretty obnoxious. People who are good at those things definitely SERVE A PURPOSE. A VERY IMPORTANT LIFE PURPOSE.

But they may have trouble with systems thinking or big picture thinking (whether that's Se connect-the-dots big picture or Ne "what if? But only then..." big picture). It's really hard to convince them their style of testing is basically ...unimportant...in the real world.

I honestly feel like Ne/Si and Si/Ne types are most disconnected from "the real world" for different reasons. For Ne/Si it's something like only liking to read books about elves and sorcerers, or always expecting someone to let them in when they forgot their housekey for the 50th time, and for Si/Ne it's more like "no one gives a fuck about your regimented, detailed shit."

Except that people do....when they do accounting or botany.

Everyone serves their purpose. That's the whole purpose of MBTI, ostensibly, to stop the hate. To stop thinking people are generally stupid or useless if they're different from we are. 

But no, it's not my preferred form of learning. I got to take a lot of earth science, a lot of systems, big picture stuff. I still had to remember facts, but it was cool, and in a schema. If I had been a bio major like my sister I would have ran away screaming. In fact I abandoned my original Literature major (which became my Minor on my degree) because of grammar mavens. Like so totally fuck grammar, it's all about content, amirite or amirite?


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## Super Luigi (Dec 1, 2015)

No. I made myself remember stuff for school tests, but I don't remember it now. So I didn't actually learn.


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## Morpheus83 (Oct 17, 2008)

Memorisation is a solid foundation for developing 'critical thinking' skills. You can't think critically about something--spot inconsistencies, wrong assumptions and new possibilities--if you don't have 'real world' knowledge to begin with. Memorisation is an important part of acquiring knowledge leading to wisdom (what you 'do' with the knowledge), but that's only one part of the 'learning' process.


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## Bunniculla (Jul 17, 2017)

Yes and no. It doesn't automatically mean you understand what you memorized, but on the other hand, if you forgot what you learned and can't bring it to consciousness - what is the point? It's as if you never learned it.


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