For Proust, remembering was linked to the taste of a certain type of French cookie. It would be nice if we could recall our second language with the help of cookery and meals remembered. Would it were so simple, and pleasant.

Students often complain that they have bad memories. In the past, I have always commented that students, no matter what their age, do not have bad memories. What they have are bad habits. They do not have regular study habits. They do not use the language whenever they have the opportunity. They do not make a continuous effort to think in the language. They fail to repeat earlier material at planned intervals. A lot of this is true, but the reasons for poor memory in language learning may be much more complex. It is not always the fault of the student.

A lot of the time, the reason for poor recall may lie in teaching methods which from the very beginning give too much emphasis to translation and reading. The criticism I would make here is that translation and reading are applications of language. They require conscious effort. But we are not conscious of our own language, of the mental process of using it. We use it effortlessly. So why should we operate in the conscious mind when we first approach a second language? Surely, that will be slow and laborious. It asks too much of our working memory which, because it is so limited, will fail us. At that point, the student complains of a bad memory. But he is wrong. He is in fact suffering from bad teaching and/or learning methods.

If you ask a student to translate a sentence, he must operate a lot of the time in his own language. If he does not understand a word, he will go to his dictionary and look it up. This is a useful thing to do if you are translating, but a completely useless process for learning a second language, for the simple reason that his strong first language will interfere with and suppress the weaker second. In actuality, hardly anything of the weaker language is ever remembered from the process of translation. The same criticism applies to word lists which contain both first and second languages, and to books which interleave the two languages. Again, the student complains he can recall hardly anything. Again, the problem lies not in himself, but in inappropriate "conscious" learning methods.

[This is not to say that the student should not read, should not study the patterns of a language in a systematic way, especially such closely structured languages as German. Of course, he must. However, priority should not be given to such conscious exercise.]

Language use is mostly unconscious. For this reason, it is very difficult to understand the process of recall as it operates in the brain. I spent several days, on and off, trying to remember the scientist who was in charge of the Manhattan Project which developed the atom bomb. I couldn't remember. Suddenly, out of a deep sleep, at four o'clock in the morning, I sat up straight and said the name out loud. I then immediately went back to sleep. Two hours later, when I woke up, I had forgotten again. It took me until lunch time to bring the name back to mind: Oppenheimer.

Everyone has this sort of experience: "It's on the tip of my tongue, but it just won't come."  What exactly is it that enables us to remember? If we knew, or at least had the right hypothesis, would it help us deal with our problems of recall when we are learning a second language? One thing is for sure, it is unlikely to be the sense of taste or smell, which is a pity.