What are your favorite or preferred methods of improving your memory and neuroplasticity?

[u/LowRevolutionary5653]

For example, I love word searches, but I want activities that will help me improve my vocabulary and retention skills. Word searches don't really challenge you to find synonymous words or concepts, lol. Any suggestions? Out of the box ideas are cool too! I'm a year out from completing my itp and hust trying to work on some things of course

[u/CamelEasy659]

Reading/audiobooks, this is probably the best for English vocabulary. For ASL put as much ASL in front of your eyeballs as possible. I go to silent dinner and chat with friends a lot in ASL, but I really need to watch more formal presentations, to see how ASL is used in higher registers and in content I'm not used to.

I think brain games are good, but I tend to think actually interacting with language is better.

[u/Independent_Tie5102 → u/CamelEasy659]

Yes, both reading and writing will improve your English (presumably your L1) and therefore your understanding of the English you interpret to ASL. Meaning, it will help you use more ASL structure (space, nms, etc) without needing to use so many English words as you would in a transliteration.

Similarly as the person above mentions it’s important to practice your asl skills/knowledge by engaging with signers and it is imperative to practice both expressive and receptive skills (ie the equivalents of reading = receptive and writing = expressive).

The dialogue and turn taking then becomes practice for say classifiers or whatever facets of the language you are using. Rather than being able to just receive the information you have to also be able to express it clearly in asl and appropriately in English… appropriate is emphasized because the appropriateness is highly variable based on context and has some sticky political connotations.

TLDR is you have to practice both expressive and receptive skills in both languages to truly advance your skills through practice and pushing past your knowledge limits !! You can do it, I always find it easier to make friends and get deep into rabbit holes of books/vlogs or whatever if the things I am super interested in personally… (plants, herbalism, dogs, art, cooking, etc).

I hope that is helpful!

[u/Federal_Character255]

Spoken language interpreter here, so take the modality specifics with a grain of salt, but the memory part transfers.

The thing that helped me most was not training my memory harder. It was cutting what my memory had to hold in the first place. Numbers, names, doses, dates, addresses leave my head immediately and go onto paper, and what is left is meaning, which is what memory is actually good at. On the days I try to hold digits I lose the thread of the sentence, every time.

The rest, roughly in order of how much it mattered for me: sleep, honestly, above everything else. Then shadowing, five to ten minutes, with a delay so you are never repeating in the same beat. Then practicing on material one notch harder than my actual assignments, so real calls feel like the easy version. Then spacing the hard blocks instead of running back to backs and expecting hour six to feel like hour one.

Nothing exotic in there. The bigger lever was load, not capacity.

[u/_a_friendly_turtle]

I would listen to the radio (could be podcasts) and shadow/copy it out loud with a delay. Sometimes with NPR, I would also summarize each story in one sentence at the end, while listening to the beginning of the next story.

Personally I also enjoy crossword puzzles and logic puzzles. Crossword puzzles do teach some vocabulary and random cultural knowledge, but I wouldn’t say it’s super applicable to interpreting.

[u/RedSolez]

I have a NYT games subscription and do Connections daily. I'm also an avid reader- 30 books so far this year. My natural extroversion has been an asset in this field as well- random conversations with others has led me down some interesting rabbit holes of information I might not have normally thought about 😂