How important is rote memory?

When it comes to language, there are many distinct levels of proficiency, ranging from being able to identify a language you overhear to being able to speak it fluently. Having these distinctions is important because it lets us collect data that we can use to get a general sense of a what languages people speak in a sample and see how they gauge their proficiency and if it falls under the same category as ours. However, it is often difficult to see where a person falls on the spectrum. For example, listening to a song in a language unknown to you may prompt you to memorize the lyrics and allow you to sing the song through, but that doesn’t go to say that you can easily speak and understand it. This leads into the question of should being able to recite or sing a hymn in a foreign language be categorized a “rote memory” (a new level of proficiency). When one recounts a chant by memory, it is their highest extent of knowledge of that language, a person does not have the ability to read it or speak it as well. With ones highest capability being only able to recant these songs, it is my belief that their should be categorized as rote memory. Rote memory is solely based on repetition and having the ability to quickly recall something but having no ability further than that causes reciting a hymn fall into this category. Having these distinctions and being flexible with adding new ones is seminal as it allows for a deeper and more specific comprehension of language proficiency.

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