Holidays! We spend months waiting for the opportunity to bury our toes in a few inches of sand, while listening in the distance to the crashing waves, with the proper safety distance of course.
But being on holiday does not mean stopping learning. The brain is an already lazy creature that needs to be constantly stimulated in order not to forget things. When it doesn't forget, it constantly shuffles and mixes it with other memories.
Have you ever wondered, as I have, why you go back to confirm that the door is really closed and that the key has turned enough times to lock it? I do it all the time, because mundane, repetitive tasks have little or no importance to our memory. Occasionally we see the same effect in mainstream education, where the key word is study and infrequently practice.
Studying puts us in the moment. It is the activity we practise before that important exam to put everything into short-term memory. It is this phenomenon that makes us have a vague idea of certain subjects and concepts that we have left behind during our training.
Practice, on the other hand, helps to keep the knowledge active. The more we practice, the better we retain it. Like a wardrobe, the clothes we use the most are always at hand, while those we no longer use as much, because they are faded or because visits to the fridge have increased with the pandemic, are lost at the back of the cupboard. With all this, I think the summer period is great for learning something new or working on a new skill, in a more informal (and tanned) way and always with the due value that knowledge requires.
Audiobooks and podcasts
Let's start with the journeys of several hours, heading north or south, alone or in the company of family, with the promise of a few days' rest. In three hours on the road we listen to the same single four times, until we decide to silence the radio. These three hours could be used in a much more productive way.
One of my favourite activities involves listening to a good podcast on a longer journey. Even if your preference may be something more visual, podcasts are thematic and have a lot of information that is possible to fix with some ease, mainly because of the "coffee chat" tone they imprint. In them, we feel part of the conversation and not mere listeners. We identify with the experiences described by the speaker and often respond with a resounding "me too".
The offer of podcasts tends to be free, always with the aim of disseminating experiences or knowledge.
Platforms such as Google Podcasts or Spotify are powerful engines for searching and indexing this type of content and, given their availability, why not give them a try?
Audiobooks , on the other hand, are something much more specific. Who hasn't had the experience of reading a book on the beach and ending up with a bookmark made of sand and sun cream? Not wanting to make this into a television advertisement, the kind that sells some magical product that solves a minor problem, I admit my personal taste for the flexibility I get from an audiobook.
If we grow up listening to adults telling us bedtime stories, why not listen to a professional narrating a work of fiction or a passage from someone's bibliography by whom we feel inspired? A good book, even if it is fiction, brings with it the acquisition of new vocabulary to our grammatical compendium. A good audiobook adds to it the correct diction and understanding of the meaning of certain words in a sentence.
If this explanation has aroused your interest, there is nothing like visiting the Audible platform and trying one of the works available. You can also visit the English language site and access thousands of other works in English to start practising for your international holidays.
Games and flashcards
Learning becomes much more interesting when mixed with fun. Games are, in themselves, relaxing activities, when you're not an e-sport athlete!
We play games to release the pressure of everyday life and the problems that surround us. We use them as platforms for abstraction and experimentation. That's where they shine.
Much has been said about the association between games and learning. Some argue that they are great motivators to continue learning and that their mechanics can easily be applied to other areas (gamification). I, like many other game lovers, agree with these ideas.
Proof that games are great for learning can be found in apps like Duolingo. In this app, available on virtually all mobile devices, we are compelled to learn a new language in a practical, game-like structure. Each time we complete a milestone, we receive a reward, which makes us want to play again and go to the next level.
Games also allow us to learn through error, building the experimentation spaces for this to happen. An example of this is what we find in the aforementioned Duolingo, which lets the student make mistakes as many times as necessary, without blocking their progress completely or forcing them to start again from scratch.
Another activity I leave you with is flashcards, cards that help memorise concepts and words through repetition. It's funny that many of us as adults no longer hear about these cards or simply forget that they were part of our childhood, when we were acquiring basic vocabulary.
Flashcards are now available in digital form in applications such as DuoCards and are great memorisation aids. We can use them with the last words we have learnt in a certain language or with the concepts that we don't want to forget about a certain subject. On one side we write the word and on the other side its meaning. After that, like any good recipe, 5 minutes a day of memorisation and your brain "six pack" will certainly come out stronger.
Take a short course
I admit that using the summer holidays to do training is not something usual, but for me it makes perfect sense. Maybe because I'm on holiday, because I'm not anxious about a deadline that's fast approaching or because I know I can learn something completely out of the box to apply to a job back home. The interesting thing about the concept of learning is that we never have a minimum number of hours to do it. Each one of us can do it autonomously.
In this context, massive and open courses (also known as MOOC) allow access to high quality content created by various specialised entities such as universities and polytechnics. NAU is a platform dedicated to Lusophone and Portuguese language contents, where it is possible to take a free course any day and at any time. Why not take advantage of that cloudy day to learn more about the RGPD, learn about the fundamentals of Digital Accessibility and its importance or make an initiation to wine tasting, preferably with a practical part.
There is no ideal time to learn, that's for sure, but learning doesn't have to be formal, boring or involve long periods of time. In recent years I have taken advantage of the various means available to me to acquire new knowledge in subjects ranging from engineering to cooking. I will continue to take advantage of these tools, leaving my suggestions here so that you can do so too.
