Desirable Difficulties and How To Use Them For Hifz

What are Desirable Difficulties

Robert Bjork is a Professor of Psychology with impressive work on human learning and memory, especially related to instruction and training. His ideas about desirable difficulties came as an A-Ha moment for me.

In online instruction, we sometimes take quizzes that are simply too easy. They are obvious, we quickly go through the questions. A given lesson has the theory but there is no effort towards applying that theory. There is no difficulty. We get a false sense of progress, but there is no long-term connection forming in our brain.

Bjork instead posits that the difficulty of the question follows a Bell Curve. Too little difficulty and there is no effort which will ultimately mean your brain does not create strong enough connections for long-term recall. Too much difficulty and the problem is so impervious that the student might give up, will be unable to proceed, or become hostile, or a host of other negative options.

But there is a sweet spot of difficulty, the Goldilocks zone, where the difficulty is just enough that you have to put effort in, force your brain to work, and make new connections. When you struggle and figure something out, it triggers the release of neurochemicals associated with success that further cement that knowledge in your brains.

How to Apply Desirable Difficulties to your Hifz Journey

In your Hifz journey, usually the problem is that the difficulty in memorizing a new ayah is too much. We need to bring down the difficulty to the Goldilocks zone without making it too easy. Here are my two cents on this.

1. How to Break Ayahs into Chunks

Your ultimate goal is to memorize an Ayah as a whole. In order to do so, it is natural to divide a larger ayah into chunks. But how large a chunk should be. I believe that a chunk should be meaningful. It should be a clause or a sentence with a clear flow instead of 3-5 words to make into a phrase. Some chunks will be small because that is all their meaning. Such as,

Take this ayah into consideration. How would you divide it? I would divide it into the following chunks:

• وَإِذْ قَالَ مُوسَىٰ لِقَوْمِهِۦ
• يَـٰقَوْمِ إِنَّكُمْ ظَلَمْتُمْ أَنفُسَكُم بِٱتِّخَاذِكُمُ ٱلْعِجْلَ فَتُوبُوٓا۟ إِلَىٰ بَارِئِكُمْ فَٱقْتُلُوٓا۟ أَنفُسَكُمْ ذَٰلِكُمْ خَيْرٌۭ لَّكُمْ عِندَ بَارِئِكُمْ
• فَتَابَ عَلَيْكُمْ ۚ إِنَّهُۥ هُوَ ٱلتَّوَّابُ ٱلرَّحِيمُ ٥٤

Notice how larger the second chunk is. Breaking chunks for the sake of breaking chunks — or if a chunk looks too difficult — is not the right approach. The desirable difficulty should be that each chunk conveys a complete meaning that you memorize and revise as one unit before combining the different chunks of an ayah.

Notice how we did not break the chunk at the tajweed sign of فَتَابَ عَلَيْكُمْ ۚ and instead broke it earlier where the quote ended at بَارِئِكُمْ.

Why Meaningful Chunks Work Better

The added difficulty of larger sentence-sized chunks instead of randomly making small phrases has three benefits:

• Stronger Connection to Meaning
  You better associate the translation of an ayah with its Arabic. In the previous chunks, it has three parts. The first part where Allah sets the scene, the second part is the quote of what Musa said to his people, and the third part is Allah reminding the people of His mercy.

• Error Correction Becomes Powerful
  Making a mistake forces you to start from the start of the larger chunk, further solidifying the memory of the whole chunk.

• Handles Repetitive Phrases Better
  The Quran has a lot of repetition in terms of phrases and words, often occurring close by and often with slight variations. For example, Ayah 85 of Al-Baqarah has إِلَّا خِزْىٌۭ فِى ٱلْحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنْيَا ۖ. While the next ayah has ٱشْتَرَوُا۟ ٱلْحَيَوٰةَ ٱلدُّنْيَا. Note, ٱلْحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنْيَا vs ٱلْحَيَوٰةَ ٱلدُّنْيَا.

  This subtle difference is magnified with smaller chunks where you genuinely get confused if the next chunk is ٱلْحَيَوٰةَ or ٱلْحَيَوٰةِ. What I have found is that larger chunks help here because the added difficulty of repeating the whole chunk and fixing these smaller phrases as a part of the larger chunk helps cement their place.

A Simple Method to Apply This

In the Hifz Tracker App, you see both the word by word translations and the whole translation as well. I would suggest that in Ayahs where you have some trouble, first go over the complete translation a few times until the entire concept of the Ayah is well in your mind. Then, use the word by word translation to figure out the various end points of the chunks. And then revise the chunks individually.

2. How many Ayahs to Revise in a Session

There is one part of Hifz memorization that can be made easy which is too difficulty for self-learners. That is how much to memorize and revise at a given time. Here, the usual difficulty of trying to set a long timer or a long goal such as "I would memorize a full page or for 30 minutes" is daunting. Oftentimes, this added difficulty and hesitation prevents you from starting in the first place.

One Ayah at a Time --- Really

Instead, use the feature of the Hifz Tracker App to only memorize or revise one ayah at a time. This is an accidental feature. When designing this app, what I wanted was to prevent the student from peeking into the next ayah when checking if the previous ayah's recall was correct. This means that any one point, you are only seeing the current ayah and the previous ayah for reference.

As such, the desirable difficulty is that you only have to do this one ayah at a time. A short 1 minute revision goes an incredibly long way. The app remembers which ayah you have to revise or memorize. You do not need the added difficulty of the cognitive load to find which ayah to revise and go to that specific page to revise it.

Instead, you click on the category of ayahs you want to memorize. With one click, it will prompt you with the context and ask you to recite it. With the second click, you can reveal the ayah to see whether you got it right or wrong. And finally, you use the third click to update the app with whether you had the correct recall or not which updates the system.

Then, if you feel like it, you can continue on to the next ayah, or you can take a break and come back later. This is the desirable level of difficulty where each Ayah involves its own effort but the overall social factors are minimal.

3. Delay Recall the Correct Amount of Time

How long after memorizing an item should you recall it? Recalling it instantly afterwards is too easy. But recalling it the next day often means you've forgotten parts of it. Humans have this tendency to go from sunset to sunset — memorize an ayah one day and then try and revise it the next day. This is inefficient. I often find that I have lost a large part of an Ayah if I delay recall by 24 hours, especially if I had memorized multiple Ayahs on the previous day.

This is not desirable difficulty. This is extra difficulty. Memorizing it instantly, however, doesn’t have the same effort. It’s too easy. The goal is to find that time where it takes some effort, but you can still recall the ayah correctly. Not so soon that it’s too easy and the recall is perfect. Not too late that the effort is overwhelming and the recall is broken.

This is where Hifz Tracker’s stages come into play.

How the Timing Works

When you memorize a new ayah for the first time, it is automatically scheduled to be due one hour later. If you come to the app after that time, that ayah will show up in the Wobbly Section. It’s far enough from being instantaneous recall, but close enough that the effort is reasonable. Successfully recalling it after a slight effort signals your brain of the importance if this ayah and starts storing it in the long run.

The next due time for that ayah is progressively longer and longer, two more hours and then three more hours. Meaning, you can memorize an ayah at 1 PM. Then it will be up for review at 2 PM. After that it will be up for review at 4 PM, and then finally at 7 PM.

Then it moves to the Stable Section where the intervals get wider — 8 hours, then 16 hours, then 24 hours, and then finally it graduates to the Mastered Stage where revisions are spaced out in days.

Two Key Benefits

• You do not have to add the cognitive load of thinking whether an ayah is due for revision or not. The app does that for you.

• The due times are spaced in such a way that a new ayah gets reviewed multiple times in a day, which helps solidify it before it slips into forgetting. Also, sleeping after revising an ayah multiple times is a hidden bonus where sleep strengthens your memory connections. By allowing yourself to memorize an ayah multiple times a day, you will naturally force your unconscious night time brain to help you in your journey.

Can You Review Early?

There’s an extra hidden feature. You can technically review any ayah at any time by going to that surah and selecting the ayah. You will be prompted with the context and asked to recite the ayah. You can reveal the ayah and then inform the system whether you got it right or not.

However — and this is intentional — if the ayah was not due for revision, it will not move forward to the next stage. Progression is time-bound. You cannot cheat the system by spamming revise on the same ayah over and over again.

You have to delay the revision to allow for the right amount of difficulty. And as the time between revisions increases, the difficulty increases as well. This difficulty is dynamically calculated based on your retention level for that ayah — meaning how many times you have successfully recalled it before.

Why This Matters

This is a desirable difficulty. The gap between memorization and review creates just enough effort to force your brain to work. Not so easy that it doesn’t matter. Not so hard that it feels impossible.

The added constraint of time-bound progression ensures that your learning is honest. You can test yourself as much as you want, but the real progression happens only when you allow the spacing effect to do its work.

Final Thoughts

All growth comes through struggle and effort. But too often do we see people pushed down broken beneath their troubles. Sometimes we are not able to adjust the difficulty settings of life and that is unfortunate. But sometimes, we do have access to this difficulty dial. The easiest thing would be to not do Hifz and remove the difficulty entirely. The harder thing would be to force extra weight on yourself by not utilizing the tools and senses available to you.

The desirable difficulty for Hifz is to use any tools that you can to help with retention and recall and it is to take small and consistent steps instead of sporadic heroic efforts. Both are helped by the Hifz Tracker App. Good luck!