Recently I had a conversation in Beijing with an adult Chinese friend who was complaining how difficult it was to study English. No surprises there. It is a difficult language to master, just like Chinese. I made a few suggestions based on my experience. One involved a very valuable fact which I learned from my high school Latin and Greek teacher, Dr. Smith.He is a gifted linguist  ,and has an amazing ability to remember things, like poetry, essays, speeches, etc.His advice to us students is that for memorization purposes, there is forty minutes each day in which our memory is more acceptable than it is during the other 23 hours and 20 minutes. This 40-minute "super memory" period is divided into two parts: the 20 minutes before we sleep, and the 20 minutes after we first awake. The theory supporting this is pretty simple. First, the last information we input into our brain before bed has a better chance of taking root than information gained during the noisy daytime; and second, our mind is free of disturbance  when we first awake in the morningso more receptive to inputs, like a blank slate . I took the advice to heart and it served me well in my school years. In my university days, our Chinese teacher would assign us 200 new vocabulary words each day, on which we would be quizzed the following day. Without the "magic" 40-minute technique, there's no way I would have passed those daily quizzes. As far as language study goes, it's not only useful for memorizing vocabulary. It's also a very useful window of time to listen to the language we're studying even with background noise, and even if it's at a level we find difficult to understand. It might be audio language study, aids, or just radio, TV or whatever. Beyond our years of formal  education, memory skills are hugely important in any career. How many times have we heard a speaker read their speech from a prepared text, or read the word-by-word content of a PowerPoint presentation as they present each slide ? These are annoying, boring, and less effective ways of communicating. They are almost guaranteed  to lose the audience's close attention and interest, let alone persuade or inspire anyone to do anything. And yet lots of people still make this mistake. If we use the 40-minute technique, we may not succeed in memorizing our presentation content on a 100% word-by-word basis, but we'll be familiar enough so that we can spend much more time making eye contact with our audience. We will get them in the process, while looking at our text instead of staring at it. This will also free up our hands and arms to convey some extra messages through gesture. As you see, the technique really works, but like many things, it takes practice to perfect it. Therefore, we'd better find ways to use the language outside of the classroom, as regularly and frequently as possible. One basic rule of language learning is, "Use it, or lose it*" Seize the forty-minute learning window and we'll bring in a rich harvest of language learning. The author's teacher suggested the 40-minute"super memory" period partly because  _  .
it is less noisy in the forty minutes than in the daytime we are always more peaceful when we awake in the morning our brain is more active in the forty minutes than the other time the last information gained before bed is more likely to remain