“L’esprit humain fait progrès toujours, mais c’est progrès en spirale.

The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals.”

Madame de Staël

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Life is finally returning to a (somewhat) normal pace pour moi, and I’m able to continue to my French studies, hooray! It’s perfect timing really, as French is Beautiful Level 2 has just begun. I’ve actually been doing some research lately about learning/teaching methods (more on that soon) and discovered “the spiral curriculum“. In a spiral curriculum, learning is spread out over time rather than being concentrated in shorter periods – material is revisited repeatedly. This method describes exactly how I’ve learned French (since childhood), and it has benefitted me greatly. While I never intentionally set out to learn this way, the organic nature of the process has indeed helped me retain much more information. In my opinion, I think it also has a lot to do with the success of my tutor Carrie Anne James’ teachings. Studies show that far more information is retained by the brain with repetition of content over time, making for more successful long-term learning. I’ll spare you anything more technical and get to my point – I’m learning…slowly, but steadily.

* french is beautiful is a regular series – browse the archives here *