I d never learn the language. Everyone would talk at me, and I d hear noise. I d have to translate from the French into English and back again. Finally, after awhile, it just clicked. I discovered that I wasn t translating from the French anymore but was understanding it directly.
Instructors are like the fluent French speaker who can t get back to English.
However, there are tools to help us understand how we got here. In the early 1970s, cognitive psychologists H.A. Simon and W.G. Chase studied how chess novices and experts remembered pieces on a chessboard. Pictures of chessboards with peices in various positions briefly were shown to the experts and novices. Chase and Simon discovered that the experts remembered the pictures much more accurately than the novices did when the chess peices were arranged to depict actual chess plays. However, if the pictures contained random arrangements of chess pieces, the experts memory of the pieces was poorer than the novices was.