Contrary to popular belief, not all learning leads to enlightenment and self-development. Oftentimes, lousy learning practices can lead to the contrary. Instead of acquiring in-depth and meaningful knowledge, you end up learning random and superficial pieces of information of questionable credibility.
In other words, stupid learning can turn out to be a waste of time, whereas smart learning will, unsurprisingly, make you smart. As such, it should be a priority for any self-respecting student or professional.
Unfortunately, most people learn by feel. Partly because of the undisciplined approach to knowledge acquisition and somewhat because smart learning has become a bit of a trite slogan in recent years. We all know we should do it, but hardly anyone knows what it is.
Let's tackle this topic step by step.
What is smart learning?
There are 5 key traits that characterize smart learning.
1. Optimizing your reviews
If you still haven't got the news. We have known for over 140 years that optimizing reviews allows us to slow down memory decay. About that time, a brilliant German psychologistHermann Ebbinghaus proved that we could significantly slow down memory decay by revising the learning material at the right moment.
The famous Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve depicts this phenomenon.
You would think that 140 years is plenty of time, but I assure you it's not. The concept of optimizing your reviews is still relatively unknown.Spaced Repetition Software, which allows you to revise learning material at the optimal intervals automatically, is nowhere to be found in public schools or at universities. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are few and far between.
Keep in mind that using programs like ANKI is not the ultimate solution. Yes, using it will certainly make you a better learner than about 70% of the population.
However, what makes it really effective is using it correctly, i.e., applying the right learning methods while reviewing information in ANKI. Spaced repetition algorithms are your white canvass, but you also have to know how to paint to get the best effects.
Primary sources refer to previously established scientific facts (e.g., math, physics, and chemistry textbooks) or firsthand, fundamental research that is based upon observations or experiments (e.g., research articles in journals).
(2) Secondary sources
Secondary sources or secondhand sources refer to any learning resource which loosely relates to the primary resources and/or interprets them in a certain way (e.g., interviews, YT videos, etc.).
Roles of both sources of information
Both types of sources can be very useful in learning. The first one provides you with the certainty that the information you acquire is true.
Secondary sources, on the other hand, can help you make sense out of that information.
Sometimes hearing somebody's opinion on some matter can help you connect the dots and arrive at the right conclusion.
Always prioritize primary sources
As long as you focus on relentlessly acquiring knowledge from the primary sources, you can rest assured that your expertise will keep on growing and will be of the highest quality.
The problem arises when you try to derive a big chunk of your knowledge from secondhand sources. It always means one thing — you suspend your right to have any meaningful opinion.
You scarf down any crap which people dish out. And make no mistake. There are very few people who put in time and effort to really learn something.
Most simply regurgitate different anecdotes and old wives' tales to boost their ego.
Unless you prioritize learning from the primary sources, you will never be able to tell what's true and what's not.
Trust the facts, not the experts. Way too many people have their own agenda and have no problem with profiting from the naivety and ignorance of the others.
If you want to see for yourself how wide-spread that behavior is, go ahead and look up some popular language-learning websites. You will be lucky to find even one quotation on most of them.
As Dr. Johnson so wisely observed, truth is hard to assimilate in any mind when opposed by interest. Moreover, strong feelings about issues do not usually emerge from deep understanding and knowledge.
However, it doesn't mean that you literally have to suck in everything. With all due respect to the hard-working scientific community, when I read medical or memory studies, I rarely care who has written them. I won't waste any brainpower to remember it.
Why? Because ANKI is also a browseable database! If I need to look up the authors of a certain study, I can get this information within seconds.
You should always try to separate the worthwhile from the wooly.
It won't always be obvious to establish what's relevant and what's not. Sometimes only time will tell. There were times when I started memorizing random stuff only to realize after some time that I don't need to know it by heart.
In other words, figuring out what's worth memorizing requires some trial and error, and it's heavily dependent on the depth of knowledge you want to acquire and on the conditions you will retrieve it in.
Definitely, one important criterion which can help you guide this decision process is choosing whether you want to master a certain discipline or be decent/good at it.
Personally, I wouldn't decide to learn a lot of scripts or commands by heart if I was just programming for fun. However, if you want to learn a programming language to the "native" level of familiarity, you can't be too picky. In return, that will allow you to sketch out personal utility software, scripts, and hacks rapidly.
4. Choosing the right learning strategies
Choosing the right learning strategies depends on a lot of factors. However, there are two crucial elements that you need to incorporate if you want to become a successful learner.
This is the basis of any learning success. Skipping this part makes as much sense as trying to build your house from the second floor.
Stop learning passively
The idea that we can acquire information effectively by reading or listening is as rife as antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. Yes, you can learn this way, but this process is excruciatingly slow.
It doesn't matter how many relevant scientific studies get produced every year that show that passive learning is useless. The illusion of learning always seems to have the upper hand.
Students who engage in active learninglearn more -- but feel like they learn less -- than peers in more lecture-oriented classrooms.
When memory researcher Jennifer McCabe posed a similar question to college students, she found an overwhelming preference for the second strategy, restudying, even though this approach is known to be inferior to the recall method in this situation.
Why did the students get it wrong?
Most likely, they based their answers on their own experience. They knew that when they finished reading material over and over, they felt confident in their memory. The facts seemed clear and fresh. They popped into mind quickly and easily as the students reviewed them. This is not always so when recalling facts in a self-test—more effort is often required to bring the facts to mind, so they don’t seem as solid. From a student’s point of view, it can seem obvious which method—restudying—produces better learning. Robert Bjork refers to this as an “illusion of competence” after restudying.
The student concludes that she knows the material well based on the confident mastery she feels at that moment. And she expects that the same mastery will be there several days later when the exam takes place. But this is unlikely. The same illusion of competence is at work during cramming when the facts feel secure and firmly grasped. While that is indeed true at the time, it’s a mistake to assume that long-lasting memory strength has been created.
Illusions of competence are seductive. They can easily mislead people into misjudging the strength of their memory, and they can encourage students to adopt study methods that undermine long-term retention. The best defense is to use proven memory techniques and to be leery of making predictions about future memory strength based on how solid the memory seems right now
Here are other articles concerning passive learning:
One of the best ways of amassing impressive knowledge within a relatively short period is concentrating on what's evergreen. Even though it's not possible in every single case, I believe that this is something we all should strive for. Political leaders will change, programming languages will evolve, but physics, math, and even psychology will remain almost unchanged at their core.
Focusing on those subjects will allow you to build evergreen knowledge that can be applied almost everywhere regardless of circumstances. What's more, the more you learn, the easier it will be for you to expand your knowledge. Every discipline contains nuggets of wisdom that can be transplanted into other areas.
Most of relevant theories of learning to acknowledge that learners’ knowledge bases are the most important moderating factor influencing our ability to acquire information (e.g., Chi, De Leeuw, Chiu, & LaVancher, 1994; Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994).
In other words, the more of such knowledge you gather, the quicker you will be able to learn!
Does it mean that you should try to master all the big disciplines? Of course not (unless you want to). Be picky and adjust your choices to your needs.
Whatever you do, remember this. Acquiring evergreen knowledge is an investment that will keep on giving and will never go to waste.
WHAT ARE EXAMPLES OF EVERGREEN KNOWLEDGE?
1
The exact sciences (math, physics, etc.)
2
The art of persuasion
3
The science of memory and productivity
4
Popular languages
5
The basic nutritional and medical information
6
The basic financial knowledge
7
Creativity
Summary — What is smart learning and how to apply it to become a better learner?
Smart learning is a fantastic learning philosophy. I am not only its big fan, but I also practice it every single day myself.
It can be seen as the best of the worlds, i.e., productivity and the science of memory.
At its core, smart learning involves 5 key elements which, if applied correctly, can help you to learn faster and become a better learner:
1
Optimizing your reviews
2
Choosing the right learning materials
3
Knowing what you can forget
4
Choosing the right learning strategies
5
Concentrating On What’s Evergreen!
Done reading? Time to learn!
Reading articles online is a great way to expand your knowledge. However, the sad thing is that after barely 1 day, we tend to forget most of the things we have read.
I am on the mission to change it. I have created over 23flashcards that you can download to truly learn information from this article. It’s enough to download ANKI, and you’re good to go. This way, you will be able to speed up your learning in a more impactful way.
Being a polyglot sounds like such an amazing thing, doesn’t it? Admiration, fame, money, women throwing themselves at your feet.
All these things are not only great but also completely imaginary.
Ok, just a bad joke. It is pretty great.
But plenty of people notoriously underestimates how much time it takes to maintain and learn languages. I am sure you know the type.
They love to assume that the only prerequisite to master many languages is some unspecified talent.
I get it. If you say, “I envy you, I wish I could speak so many languages but I just don’t have a knack for it”, you don’t have to feel guilty.
That’s why they keep sucking the rationalization’s tit until they get all warm and blissful.
And who knows? Maybe they are right to some degree. We are all born different. Wiring in our little brains differs from one another.
Some people might actually have some head-start. But one thing is sure – no magical combinations of neural networks will ever make you a polyglot if you don’t put in the long hours.
How many?
It’s time to unveil the mystery.
For the past four weeks, I have been trying to track down how much time I devote to learning and maintaining my languages each week.
But before we get to that, let’s start with the baseline,
My Current Language Levels
Here are my current levels:
English: C2+ (C2 level + a couple of specializations)
Swedish: C1/C2
German: C1/C2
Russian: C1
Esperanto: C1
Czech: B2/C1
Spanish: B2
French: A2/B1
As a side note, I can’t understand why some people say that they know a language when they can barely string a sentence together. Your language is not dormant – it is mostly forgotten. Deal with it,
No one would go to an interview claiming that they know JavaScript but “not right now”.
Somehow, this practice seems to be quite widespread in the language learning world.
C1 level
You might notice that I learn my languages to at least C1 level. There is a very good reason for that – language attrition happens muuuch slower on this level than on the lower ones.
Once you get there, you can start taking breaks from that language to entertain yourself with other projects.
Time Breakdown
WORK
Let’s start with my unfair advantage – I teach / train people for a living. It allows me to spend considerable amounts of time while being surrounded by many languages.
Currently, I teach/coach 30+ people per week.
Main languages I teach are:
Swedish – 8-10 hours
German – 8-10 hours
English – 8-10 hours
These are not your usual conversations. I work almost exclusively with professionals. Each hour I spent with them is designed to jog their memory and bring them to the point of exhaustion.
That requires from me quite a considerable vocabulary which is awesome.
If we add to this mix a couple hours of consultations each week, we get a pretty decent number.
Total time: 24-35 hours
SPARE TIME – LEARNING PART
I am not sure whether it’s sad or not but I spend most of my waking hours learning and/or experimenting with memory systems. None of these activities are carried out in my mother tongue.
I figured out that since I know it pretty well it would be a waste of time.
Basically, it means, as absurd as it sounds, that Polish (my native tongue) and French are the least frequently used languages by me.
It leads to some bizarre and funny situations. Sometimes my brain plays with me and prompts me to conjugate Polish verbs in a really weird way – I have created monsters like “wypróbowywałem” instead of “wypróbowałem” more times than I would like to admit.
Quite a side-effect, huh?
Another interesting side-effect is dreaming in foreign languages. I have actually had dreams where people were speaking one foreign language and my brain was displaying subtitles in another.
Yep. Who needs drugs when you have languages.
Anyway, reading, talking, noting, writing are all done in various languages.
The rough breakdown looks more less like this. Mind you that these numbers reflect only a couple of last weeks and they are bound to change. They have to adjust to my needs, after all.
English– 15-hours. As much as I would like to suppress the use of this language throughout the week, it is impossible.
About 80% of e-mails I get are in English. 98% of all scientific papers I read are in English, no other language comes even close when it comes to their quality. I would say that I read at least 300+ pages per week in that language.
And let’s not forget about writing articles. Once again English prevails.
Czech – 5 hours per week. Mostly reading (10-15 articles per week) and learning/revising vocabulary.
Russian– 3-7 hours per week. Mostly revising and learning vocabulary. I read maybe 1-2 articles per week. Oh, and let’s throw about 2-4 episodes of TV series to this mix!
Esperanto– 1-2 hours per week Mostly revising and learning vocabulary. Unfortunately, there are not many websites in Esperanto which overlap with my interests. It means that I read maybe 0-2 pages in Esperanto per week.
Swedish– 4-6 hours. I need to maintain my Swedish skills at a high level because of my job. I tend to read 10-20 articles per week and tend to watch a fair share of YT in Swedish (I highly recommend I Just Want To Be Coolchannel, if you are learning Swedish).
French– 0-1 hours per week. Currently, I am busy with many projects and the sole victim of this state of affairs is French. As a not so surprising result, my French is deteriorating rather fast.
German– 3-5 hours per week. Besides learning new words and revising old ones, I read about 5-10 articles per week and watch a bit of YT.
Spanish– 3-4 hours per week. Mostly revising and learning vocabulary with some articles here and there.
And just for the clarity’s sake – I learn and revise my vocabulary by talking in order to keep it active.
Total time: 34-40 hours per week.
SPARE TIME – ENTERTAINMENT
Now it really gets weird!
I tend to watch a lot of TV series with my girlfriend – about 15 hours per week. It’s great fun. However, it has bothered me for a long time that everything we watch is in English.
That’s a wrinkle I couldn’t iron out.
And then it dawned on me – why not turn this ordinary activity into another language learning exercise?
Why not translate everything actors say into one of the languages I am trying to improve?
As I thought so I did. I have been doing it for about 4 months now and it has really helped me improve my fluency in a couple of languages.
“What about words or phrases you don’t know?”, you might ask.
I have an easy but effective system which takes care of that problem. I memorize them with mnemonicson the fly and quickly note them down after each episode.
Next day I look them up and encode them. Quite an elegant solution, isn’t it?
Of course, it doesn’t work each time. Sometimes I am just too tired and I let myself get sucked into a TV whirlwind.
Total time: 5-15 hours
The Final Result
The results were beyond interesting. It was no secret to me that I learn a lot but I didn’t think that it’s that much!
Not even once did I sink below the level of 70 hours per week, although I am sure that it might happen in the future.
Thank God I am not a crack addict. Otherwise, I would be this guy who crawls through broken glass to lick other junkies’ nostrils to get his daily high.
Total time: 63-90 hours per week
Want to increase your weekly learning time? Read on. There is some food for thought for you there.
ACTIVE vs. PASSIVE LEARNING
Active use: 35-50 hours per week (talking to others or myself)
Semi-active use: about 15 hours per week (translating TV series in my mind)
Passive: 15-35 hours per week (reading + listening/watching)
CHALLENGES
Over 70 hours per week is certainly a lot of time. That’s why there is one important question which begs to be asked.
Does it all come easy? Or does it require some tremendous amount of will power? At the risk of rubbing some people the wrong way the answer is – It does come easy.
At this point of time in my life, I do most of those things without giving them much thought. But I had to work my way up to get there.
And believe me – it was a long walk and the slope was slippery.
There is definitely a number of challenges you need to face if you want to pump up your total learning time. Here are some of them.
CREATING HABITS
Definitely one of the most important things to master, if not the most important one. If you want to make sure that you will learn day in, day out, you need to build within yourself the urge to do it.
The urge that can only be built and fueled by habits.
Forget about the motivation. Motivation is for suckers. You have to show up every day until the habit of learning becomes the extension of yourself.
Only then will you be able to not only learn a lot without much effort but also crave it.
The general of productivity is that the fewer decisions you have to make, the better your general efficiency is. It’s hard to argue with that.
Let’s say that you want to read something, How much time do you usually spend before you pick up an article? 5 minutes? 10 minutes?
It might not seem like a lot. However, it adds up very quickly.
Soon it may turn out that at least a dozen of hours per week is trickling between your fingers.
The same goes for choosing movies or YT videos.
Me?
I am hell-bent on not letting that happen.
I would rather spend this time weaving wicker baskets than losing it due to my indecision.
That’s why my input-gathering process is almost fully automated.
In the morning, when I arrive at my desk with a steamy mug of coffee, everything I need is already in my e-mail box. Scientific papers, videos, articles. Everything.
I don’t need to spend even one minute more than I should trying to find the necessary information.
And yet, as you can clearly seem I still spend a lot of time learning and maitaning my languages which leads me to the last point.
WHY I WON’T LEARN NEW LANGUAGES ANYTIME SOON
People learn languages for different reasons.
Mine has always struck people as eccentric.
I haven’t learned languages because of my deep love for them.
No doubt I have fallen in love with them during the process of learning (except for French – f*** you French!) but my affection hasn’t been the main factor.
The main reason was always the pursuit of better memory.
And even though I know that I still have a lot to learn memory-wise, I know that learning languages won’t get me much further.
I don’t find languages challenging anymore. Sure, I haven’t learned Basque or even one of Asian languages. But I don’t need to.
The general principles of learning and memory improvement won’t change just because I switched to a new language.
And to be honest, what’s the difference between knowing 8 and 9 languages?
Or 10-12? Not that big, in my opinion.
However, the time you need to maintain them grows significantly with every new addition. Of course, some learners trade quality for quantity but I personally prefer to truly master the languages I know.
Languages vs other branches of knowledge
I have read in some scientific paper that learning a language to C1 level is tantamount to graduating from studies.
How come?
Both activities require thorough knowledge and understanding of about 10000 words/concepts.
But I don’t believe it to be true. I don’t know many college graduates who can use their knowledge as fluently and practically as C1 language learners can use their vocabulary.
And that is what bugs me. Why would I learn another language when there are so many other mysteries just waiting to be solved (I guess it’s the FOMOsyndrome?
So many branches of knowledge which seem to lure me. Every day, I seem to find yet another thing which I don’t know much about.
The choice is simple – I can either excel at many other things or simply learn another language or 5.
The latter is infinitely less exciting and practical.
So what’s next?
Years ago I promised myself that I would master 10 languages till I turn 40.
Right now I am 31 and I still have plenty of time to achieve my goal.
But I think that this time I will take my time.and stick to learning some other things and hopefully running this blog full-time.
CONCLUSION
Not everyone needs to be a polyglot but if this is a path you decide to tread, you should be fully aware that it requires much time and effort.
The path is fraught with various obstacles. Get rid of one of them and soon you will realize that another one took its place.
But if there was just one thing, I would like you to take away from this article, it would be this one:
You have to make the languages you learn a central part of your life, only then will you be able to truly master them.
Question for you:
What stops you from learning your target language(s) more often?”
Problem-solving is a skill that ranks very high on my list of evergreen skills. We all struggle with problems of different magnitude. Being able to tackle them in an organized way can make our lives way easier.
Unfortunately, there aren't many people that can pride themselves with being problem-solvers extraordinaire. One part of the issue is that they are not aware of the existence of problem-solving methodologies. Another problem, however, is settling for the wrong strategy. It's as ridiculous as trying to traverse the desert with a pair of sandals and a hamster at your disposal. Not only will you be swallowed by the vastness of possible solutions, but you will also look stupid.
In my years of trying to tackle different learning-related issues, I have come to realize that the right way to start solving any problems is identifying the constraints of an area at hand. Once you do, it's much easier to capitalize on those structural disadvantages and arrive at the right answer. This is the approach I have dubbed obstacle learning.
What Is Obstacle Thinking?
Obstacle thinking is the approach to problem-solving that emphasizes the importance of identifying bottlenecks in a given area. Their identification allows narrowing your vision.
This way, you can concentrate on what's truly essential, i.e. avoiding the said obstacles and then adding to the mix the elements that have been proven to work well within a given domain.
You can think about it as entering the invisible maze. If you do it ad-lib,all you will be doing most of the time is headbutting every inch of every wall until your brain convolutions straighten up.
However, the entire process will look completely different if you start with determining the potential constraints. The moment you identify a potential obstacle, a part of the maze materializes, and it allows you to move past it. If you identify enough constraints, you will be able to skillfully move through the maze until you find the exit.
Another way to look at the problem is thinking about doing jigsaw puzzles. Most people don't start assembling them randomly by grabbing a couple of pieces and praying that they fit. Instead, they begin by creating the outline of the picture and then slowly filling out the rest.
Why Not Start With Positive Instances?
Starting the problem-solving process with identifying constraints seems counterintuitive. Thus, the natural question arises - why shouldn't we start with positive instances, i.e. the concepts that are known to be true?
Nassim Taleb has mentioned a great explanation of this phenomenon in his book "Black Swan".
"In a famous argument, the logician W. V. Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can match a given series of facts. Such insight should warn us that the mere absence of nonsense may not be sufficient to make something true.
The implications of the above are far-reaching. Just because a solution consists of seemingly true facts, it doesn't mean that the entire solution is indeed verifiably true.
It's one of my biggest pet peeves ever. The internet is rife with various idiots who try to conceal their stupid theories under the disguise of science. If you are not careful enough, they will lull your vigilance with scientific banalities and then sell you on their fallacious solutions.
In other words, hundreds of potential solutions might seem true until you start adding constraints to the system.
I will demonstrate examples of this phenomenon at the end of the article.
Limitations - Why They Are Needed To Think Effectively
Even though starting the creative process with identifying constraints might seem counterintuitive, it's very natural. Everything that has ever existed has been born within the constraints of different variables.
The constraints of physics, chemistry, and geometry have governed life from its origins onward—and even into the technicum. “Underlying all the diversity of life is a finite set of natural forms that will recur over and over again anywhere in the cosmos where there is carbon-based life,” claim biochemists Michael Denton and Craig Marshall. Life, rather than being boundless and unlimited in every direction, is bounded and limited in many directions by the nature of matter itself. - Kevin Kelly - What Technology Wants
It's only logical to apply the same logic to problem-solving. Without directing and concentrating your effort within certain boundaries, you are almost guaranteed to fail. A number of choices you will have to face is simply too big.
However, identifying even one limitation shows you that a solution cannot be perfect in a given situation. Think about it.
Even one constraint has the power to disqualify hundreds or even thousands of potential solutions.
What Kind of Constraints Are There?
There are two kinds of limitations that need to be taken into consideration:
(1) Permanent constraints
This is the category we can't do anything about. Those limitations can't be overcome. They are usually specific to a given area of knowledge, but they can also transverse many different disciplines.
Examples:
(1) Using context in language learning
It's been proven beyond a shadow of the doubt that our knowledge is activated contextually. Any language learning method that fails to consider it can be automatically deemed as ineffective.
(2) Removing harmful compounds while composing diets
Depending on a person and their particular health issues, one must deal with lots of permanent limitations that need to be taken into consideration to maximize the benefits of a given diet.
For example:
Thyroid problems - two big steps are removing goitrogen-containing foods and gluten that impair the function of the thyroid.
Male fertility issues - removing alcohol, recreational drugs and other factors that increase the production of reactive oxygen species and damage sperm.
Etc.
Composing diets for different ailments is such a great example. Very often, the mere fact of identifying (and removing) those constraints (i.e., harmful compounds) will allow us to establish an excellent base for solving a problem at hand.
(3) Differential diagnosis
The very core of being a good diagnostician means you can apply obstacle thinking. Every symptom that doesn't fit the picture is a constraint that decreases the pool of potential options.
(2) Temporary constraints
Even though those limitations are no different from permanent constraints at the moment of tackling the problem, they can be overcome over time.
Examples:
(1) Budget
Limited budgets are a great example because even though they are an obvious obstacle, they can be increased later on. Alternatively, one might find a way to lower potential costs.
(2) Computational power
Computational power can be a limiting factor in a company for now. However, we know that it's one of the variables that become cheaper with time. It might turn out that it won't be an obstacle anymore in, e.g. two years.
Of course, we have to keep in mind that some factors can be both temporary and permanent, depending on a particular project. Deadlines are certainly one of them. Often they can't be changed because of external obligations. However, in other projects, they are merely a suggestion.
What's worse, some constraints will be self-imposed because of gaps in our knowledge. Once you expand it, it might turn out that they weren't even a problem in the first place.
Requirements for Using Obstacle Thinking Effectively
(1) Ability to amass and manage your knowledge
Most projects are multidisciplinary. They require extensive knowledge from many different areas. If you don't know how to acquire it and manage it, you will never have enough know-how to tackle problems effectively. You will be doomed to forever roam the hamster wheel of knowledge.
What's more, you should also have a good understanding of how to read and interpret scientific studies and comprehend what their limitations are. That requires a very diverse skillset.
(3) Time
Expanding your knowledge and analyzing data, etc. are all time-consuming processes. It's essential to keep in mind that arriving at the right solution might take some time.
(4) Ability to suspend your opinion
We live in quite depressing times where people who don't have an opinion on a topic are considered stupid or ignorant instead of being praised for their prudence. Forming your opinion too fast can be harmful to your problem-solving abilities. It's so easy to fall in love with your idea, even when it's demonstrably false. Before you know, you start disregarding any evidence that contradicts your opinion (see confirmation bias).
A much better solution is to suspend your opinion for the time being until you amass enough knowledge to have a bird's eye view on the problem you're trying to solve.
It takes a special kind of courage not to commit to any opinion, even temporarily. But choosing to be an ignoramus, for the time being, is undoubtedly the right choice for any quality thinker.
An Example of Obstacle Thinking in Action
Let's say that just like me, you are obsessed with finding the perfect learning strategy. Instead of starting with a specific method on our mind, let's focus on the potential constraints to quickly eliminate the ones that don't make much sense. In this case, I will skip the part where I analyze countless scientific papers to establish whether the limitations I quote are true.
(1) Limitation #1 - Passive rehearsal
Many years ago it was actually proven that passive rehearsal has little effect on whether or not information is later recalled from the long-term memory (Craik & Watkins, 1973).
Passive rehearsal is simply a mindless act of rattling off a cluster of pre-prepared information. It's like trying to desperately rehearse someone's phone number and hoping that it will help you remember it ten years from now.
This tells us that if we try to rely on ready-to-use materials, we will fail. In other words, this one piece of information allows to initially discard the following learning strategies:
Any flashcard system/app/method based on ready-to-use flashcards
Reading, re-reading and reading aloud
Rewriting information from other sources with almost no changes
Habituation is the diminishing of an innate response to a frequently repeated stimulus.
Each time the brain detects a stimulus, it forms a representation of that stimulus and compares that representation with its memory (that is, existing representations) of previously experienced stimuli. If there is no match, then a response is triggered, such as an orienting response, allowing the organism to study this new stimulus further. On the other hand, if there is a match, then the response is suppressed. In other words, responding to familiar stimuli decreases, or habituates.
Multiple exposures to the same stimulus are nothing else than habituation. Iwon't delve more into this topic as it deserves an article of its own. Instead, let's look at the repercussions of this phenomenon.
Even if you create your learning material yourself (e.g. flashcards), your brain will quickly stop reacting to it if you don't force yourself to look at it from many different perspectives and to apply it to many different problems.
We have to discard mnemonics as an effective long-term strategy. If thousands of pictures stand out, then nothing stands out.
Any strategy that doesn't introduce novelty and variety will limit my learning time. My brain and I will get quickly really fast.
The list goes on and on. With every next constraint, we will add into the system, a pool of potential winning strategies will diminish until we arrive at the final answer(s).
Obstacle Thinking - Summary
Obstacle thinking is probably the single most effective problem-solving methodology I know. It allows you to quickly separate the wheat from the chaff. Think about it.
Every potential constraint narrows down your focus by eliminating hundreds of faulty strategies. The more limitations you find, the easier it is to come to the right conclusion.
Unfortunately, simple doesn't mean that it's easy. The requirements for applying this strategy can certainly be considered strict. What's more, often, the right solutions may differ depending on the stage of the process we are trying to improve. For example, we can't expect that beginners and advanced learners will get the same benefits from one single strategy.
Even though obstacle learning thinking a relatively steep learning curve, it's still a must for any problem-solver.
Done reading? Time to learn!
Reading articles online is a great way to expand your knowledge. However, the sad thing is that after barely 1 day, we tend to forget most of the things we have read.
I am on the mission to change it. I have created over 20 flashcards that you can download to truly learn information from this article. It’s enough to download ANKI, and you’re good to go. This way, you will be able to speed up your learning in a more impactful way.
Finally, after some delay (due to my laziness in writing!) I’m proud to present the results and final thoughts concerning my language mission. If you haven’t been following my struggles, you can find all the details below.
The purpose of the mission
My mission had a dual purpose.
First of all, I wanted to demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to learn REALLY FAST. assuming of course that you
use some mnemonics
disregard almost all the advice you’ve ever heard in your life regarding (language) learning, but more about that later
Secondly, I wanted to ENCOURAGE YOU to think more seriously about your learning; to be BETTER. To question what you know. My learning philosophy is simple – experiment to see what does and what doesn’t work.
To put it brutally – if a horse is sick, you don’t pretend that everything is fine, try to ride or show it to your friends and say “it needs a little bit more time to get better, that’s all”. No. It won’t get better. You take a shotgun, lead a horse behind a barn and put it out of its misery. It’s that simple.
It’s simple. But it’s not easy. If you’ve been using the same ol’ methods for years, it’s hard to kiss them goodbye. I know.
About 3$. That’s the cost of my pocket dictionary.
Disclosure
It’s my duty to mention that I had following pre-exisitng advantages before the start of my mission:
I could already speak 8 languages
Including 2 Slavic languages; one of them is my mother tongue – Polish. It simply means that I could understand, right away, all the grammar constructions I stumbled across.
Also, the vocabulary between these languages is quite similar.
And finally, due to the language similarities, my listening skills were at quite a high level from the very beginning.
I had a profound knowledge of mnemonics
I’ve been experimenting with my own mnemonics systems for years and I’ve created the ones which work great for me.
Update 2017: A couple of months after this mission ended, I had to relearn all the words. Read more about severe limitations of mnemonics.
Altogether I spent about 140 hours during the duration of my mission. What was frustrating is that I had to spend about half of that time preparing the vocabulary lists!
Results
Results of the first test: level C1.1
Here are some more details:
The test consists of three parts.
There is a time limit of 30 minutes for each part.
The second and third parts can be entered only if you reach a minimum score.
The minimum score for entering part 2 is 40 points.
The minimum score for entering part 3 is 70 points (score in part 1 + part 2).
I managed to complete the test in 33 minutes and went through all 3 parts of it.
Results of the second test: level B2
Here are some more details:
Make sure you do not spend more than 40 minutes on doing the test.
You should not use any dictionary or any other help so that the result accurately reflects your knowledge.
Stop filling in and submit the test as soon as the questions are too difficult for you (Do not guess the answers).
If you are a complete beginner, there is no need to do the test.
Generally, the overall performance is calculated by averaging the scores you achieve in Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking and Grammar.
I had a chance to test all of them (except writing skills). However, some language competences had to be assessed by myself, not by a qualified teacher. It leaves definitely a lot of room for personal bias but it was impossible to avoid considering the nature of such an undertaking.
On a side note, I’ve been working as a language assessor for some time now, so I can only hope that my judgment is precise enough.
Did I Succeed?
Yep, I feel that I accomplished all the main goals of my mission:
Number of words
Altogether I’ve memorized about 3100 words. About 2860 of them are the words from my ANKI list, the rest of them are noted separately on a few pieces of paper.
Including my knowledge of the rules of word formation, my total vocabulary size should amount to about 4,5 – 6,5k words.
Level
Considering the results of official and unofficial language assessment, I would assess my level as B1.2. In other words – somewhere between B1 and B2 level.
Articles Related To The Mission
If you haven’t had a chance to do it already, here are some articles (more to come!) describing my approach to learning Czech (or should I say – learning in general).
Nootropics are certainly one of those things that capture your imagination. You pop a pill and everything becomes clear. You are more vigilant, more observant.
Sure, three months down the road you start resembling a patient with a full-blown neurological disorder. You catch yourself scratching your arms nervously while your eyes twitch.
And if your pill is nowhere to be found you drop on the floor and start rhythmically convulsing.
But hey man! Those moments of clarity!
In all seriousness - nootropics have definitely become a thing in the last couple of years. The appeal is understandable.
At the price of a pack of pills, you can become a better version of yourself.
Is it really the case? Nope.
If you ask me, it's definitely more of a fantasy for the naive. Let me explain step-by-step why it is so and what you can do instead to become this sexy learning-machine.
What Are Nootropics?
Not everyone is familiar with this notion. Since I don't want to risk keeping you in the dark, let's delve into it.
Nootropics are natural and synthetic compounds that can improve your general cognitive abilities, such as memory, attention, focus, and motivation.
As a rule of thumb, natural nootropics are much safer and can actually improve the brain's health (see Suliman et al. 2016).
As you can see the definition is very far from being precise.
Let's suppose you go into the panic mode before an important meeting and your colleague bitch-slaps you. You suddenly become more focused and sharper.
Can this backhander be treated as a nootropic?
Once again, the definition is unclear. What is clear is that, even though you might not realize it, you probably take some of them already.
Some Of The Available Nootropics?
Our civilization can pride itself on having a long, rich history of drugging ourselves to feel better and smarter. Here are some of the weapons of the mass enlightening:
Caffeine
If your head bobs like a crazy pigeon if you don't get your daily fix, you are probably not surprised to see it here.
These days, it can be found almost everywhere. Especially in soft drinks, dark chocolate and, of course, in coffee.
Effects: At normal doses, caffeine has variable effects on learning and memory, but it generally improves reaction time, wakefulness, concentration, and motor coordination. - Nehlig A (2010). "Is caffeine a cognitive enhancer?". Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
L-Theanine
L-Theanine, or simply theanine, can generally be found in tea.
Effects: Offers neuroprotection via stimulation of PKC phosphorylation; upregulation of PKCepsilon mRNA; induction of Bcl-X(L), Bcl-w, and BDNF mRNAs; and downregulation of PKCgamma, Bad, and Bax mRNAs.
Elevation of brain magnesium increased NMDA receptors (NMDARs) signaling, BDNF expression, density of presynaptic puncta, and synaptic plasticity in the prefrontal cortex.
The list goes on and on. As exciting as it all sounds, I would advise against taking most of them. Especially the ones which are intended for the patients with neurological disorders.
Why You Should Stay Away From Most Nootropics
Caffeine is still one of the best nootropics around
The CAF+ contains a combination of ingredients that have separately shown to boost cognitive performance, including caffeine, l-theanine, vinpocetine, l-tyrosine, and vitamin B6/B12.
It was supposed to be the next big thing in the world of nootropics. Alas, it turned out to be a flop.
Here is the conclusion:
We found that after 90 min, the delayed recall performance on the VLT after caffeine was better than after CAF+ treatment.
Further, caffeine, but not CAF+, improved the performance in a working memory task. In a complex choice reaction task caffeine improved the speed of responding.
Subjective alertness was increased as a result of CAF+ at 30 min after administration. Only caffeine increased diastolic blood pressure.
We conclude that in healthy young students, caffeine improves memory performance and sensorimotor speed, whereas CAF+ does not affect the cognitive performance at the dose tested.
And that's exactly my point. A lot of those compounds which are being plugged shamelessly by different fancy-sounding brain websites are close to useless.
Do yourself a favor and stick to the devil you know.
It's expensive
It's not uncommon to find comments on a Reddit about Nootropics saying that:
"500$ for nootropics is not that much. This is just the price of admission for finding the one which is right for you."
It doesn't sound alarming at all. No sir. Don't think of yourself as a cowardly version of a heroin addict. You're a brave brain-explorer! On a more serious note - a lot of these nootropics are not only shady but expensive as well. Keep that in mind, if you decide to try them out.
Unknown long-term effects
Even though natural nootropics are potentially safe, or even very safe, it definitely can't be said about synthetic nootropics. By taking them you automatically volunteer to become a guinea pig.
Many of the nootropics change your levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, GABA and many others.
The thing is that so do many drugs like cocaine.
The long-term effect is usually a strong imbalance of transmitter levels in order to compensate those extremes.
It reminds a lot of enthusiasts of brain-zapping couple of years ago. Even though there were almost no double-blind studies confirming its effectiveness, people glibly jumped on this bandwagon.
Call me old-fashioned but if somebody needs a pill every time they want to feel smart or sharp, maybe they are not that smart or sharp? After every use, it's time for a cold and lonely wake-up call.
It's a lazy solution
The important question to ask here is:
what kind of people would like to take such pills in the first place?
There are two groups:
a) lazy-ass slackers and loafers
These are people who have probably never put effort into any of the things they have been doing in their life. I know that you're not one of them because you can read. That takes us to the second group.
b) high-achievers
You know much, you've achieved much but you want more. That's great. That's admirable.
But as a high-achiever, you know that there is no such thing as a lunch for free. Things which are worth your time come with a price.
There are a lot of better, and more permanent, solutions to becoming a person with an extraordinary mind.
What to do instead of nootropics?
1. Improve short-term memory
Your short-term memory is the bottleneck of your ability to acquire knowledge. By improving it, you can greatly accelerate your learning rate.
If you eat like crap (e.g. a lot of processed foods) and you look at a cucumber as if it touched you in your childhood, you should definitely take care of this problem.
3. Fix your dietary indeficiencies
If you have problems with brain fog, concentration, and mental sharpness, there is a very good chance that your diet caused a lot of deficiencies. No nootropics will fix that for you.
Get your blood checked to see what minerals and vitamins you're lacking.
Not sure if you lack anything? Check your nails.
Healthy nails should be smooth and have consistent (pinkish) coloring.
Any spots, discoloration and so on should be alarming.
What's more, most of the time, you can basically assume that you lack Vitamin D3. Especially if you have an office job or don't live in a sunny climate. You probably also lack magnesiumunless you're a health buff.
4. Improve your lifestyle
More sport and more physical interactions with people. Both these things will give you a nice dopamine and serotonin kick. If you suspect that nobody loves you, try hugging stray dogs. Even this will do.
5. Learn how to learn faster
Call me biased but no pill will substitute this kind of knowledge. Let's assume that you want to learn a language and you gobbled up a magical tablet. If you use bad learning strategies, you will still get nowhere. This time, however, a little bit faster than before.
Knowing how to learn is a permanent power.
6. Learn how to be more productive and how to focus
If you don't know how to prioritize, nootropics will only make you browse all the cat pictures faster. Here is a good place to start.
7. Learn how to take meaningful breaks
Doing something all the time is definitely one of the worst learning strategies ever. Breaks and a good night sleep are a part of the job.
I should know. I consistently ignore and rediscover this piece of advice.
8. Learn how to make better decisions and how to think
There are dozens of mental models and biases which invisibly shape the decisions you make. Get to know them in order to reason more efficiently.
9. Be consistent and build your knowledge over time
You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive.
One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not.
Well, I went storming into Bode’s office and said, How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?
He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said,
You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years. I simply slunk out of the office!
Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works 10% more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former.
The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest.
I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate.
Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.
I took Bode’s remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done.
Final words
As enticing as nootropics might seem, I would strongly advise against using them. There are literally dozens of other, more permanent solutions, which you should try out first.
And I can tell you this - once you try most of them, you won't even remember why you wanted to give them a try in the first place.
Would you ever consider trying nootropics? Let me know in the comments!
Done reading? Time to learn!
Reading articles online is a great way to expand your knowledge. However, the sad thing is that after barely 1 day, we tend to forget most of the things we have read.
I am on the mission to change it. I have created over 26 flashcards that you can download to truly learn information from this article. It’s enough to download ANKI, and you’re good to go. This way, you will be able to speed up your learning in a more impactful way.
If you had asked me a few months ago how I feel about Facebook, I would have said that it’s probably the biggest time-eater in the world. However, within the last few weeks, I changed my mind quite drastically.
Believe it or not, but know I think it’s one of the best language learning tools in the world. Make yourself comfortable my friend – you’re in for the story.
Facebook, or There and Back Again
There
So About 4 years ago I was a full-blown Facebook junkie. I had to get my fix at least a few times a day. My hands would shake if I couldn’t. “I need more cat picture! I need more updates from friends! I need more of everything. Gimme! Arghhh!” So yeah, it was bad.
After some pondering and a lot of hesitation, I finally deleted it. The last straw for me was seeing a picture of my friend’s dinner with the following comment – “Yum, yum”.
I was a broken man. Rehab was excruciatingly hard for first 3 weeks. But soon thereafter my world became more peaceful. I felt less anxious and overwhelmed. The sun was shining brighter. And so on.
And back again
But I CAME BACK. I felt dirty. As if I was treading on everything I value. At least this time, I knew my time was under control because of the software I use to block the time-sucking websites.
Being a relative optimist, I decided to look at the bright side of my Facebook presence. I started participating in the language groups. I also refreshed contacts with some of the old friends.
Again In The Comfort Zone
At about the same time I was bothered by the fact that I don’t read enough. In other languages that is. I tallied up that per average I read between 300-1000 pages per week.
Sadly, over 95% of all the things I read is in English. What a wasted opportunity! I could be learning so many other languages if only I started reading in them. I knew that it had to change.
So I started with the question.
Why am I reading so much in English?
The answer came right away – because it’s convenient. Because it’s so damn convenient. I’ve subscribed to newsletters of over 15 websites. All in English. They come straight to my e-mail box. No effort whatsoever is required from my side.
What’s more, I read English books because
a) there are more of them than in any other language I know
b) because I got stuck in my comfort zone
Does it ring a bell? Do you find yourself consuming most of the media in just one language?
Then read on!
I knew that the first thing I had to do was to minimize the required amount of energy to take action.
Minimizing The Energy Required To Take Action
Let’s say that you want to take up running.
You promise yourself that you’ll do it 3-4 times per week for at least 20 minutes (a great example of a SMART goal!
Noble thought, my friend! However, it seems that no matter what you do, you can’t seem to get a grip on yourself. Every morning you have to look at yourself in the mirror with disappointment in your eyes.
You really do want to do it. It’s no lie. But you’re tired. Or it’s too cold. Or can’t find your shoes. Or don’t know where you’d like to run. There are too many decisions you have to make before you go out for a run. That’s why it’s so hard to get off your butt.
Now imagine a different situation. This time, you’ve planned all the details beforehand.
What’s more, you go to bed with your track-suit on and leave your sneakers by the bed.
That’s a commitment! As a result, the initial energy required to take action is drastically minimized.
Why Use Facebook For Language Learning?
936 million daily active users on average (for March 2015)
It means that most of us use it almost every day.
That, in its turn, means that you have already developed a habit of using it.
For many of us, it’s almost like an addiction.
over 30 million companies with active pages
Posts and news in hundreds of languages are at your fingertips!
it’s convenient
Timeline provides you with a stream of never-ending pictures and posts.
The only thing you have to do is scroll down.
All these things make FB a perfect tool for language learning!
Now, the question is – how to do it?
Unfollow Most Of Your Contacts On FB
“Give me a break, do I really have to?!”
Of course, you don’t have to. I haven’t unfollowed ALL my friends. But I was merciless in weeding out people who appear on my Timeline. I didn’t do it randomly. It was a process aided by the following questions:
Am I interested in a life of this person?
Do I believe this person has something interesting to say?
I unfollowed every person who didn’t fit the criteria.
In fact, I unfollowed about 98% of people who are among my friends.
Tough Decisions
It was hard – believe me. There is always this treacherous voice at the back of my head.
“Come on! Don’t you wanna know what’s going on in X’s life?!” Yes, the voice of the ever convincing Fear Of Missing Out.
“Maybe it’s right. Maybe I’ll miss something important? What if the Ebola Zombies invade Europe and I won’t know it!”
What if …x?! What if …Y?
That’s a risk you and I have to take. The truth is that you are behind the life’s wheel and you’re choosing the direction. Do you really want to let all that fluff and bullcrap into your life?
How many cat pictures can you watch?
Do you really care how somebody’s baby looks like if you haven’t even called this person in a few years?
Be brutally honest with yourself and get down to work.
What If I Can’t Do It?
Ok, maybe you’re not ready yet. I don’t blame you. I know it was damn hard for me.
Luckily, there is the option no 2.
Register a new FaceBook account and use it exclusively for language learning. Although, it’s better to use your main FB account. You might be asking yourself now – why all the effort?
What’s the next step”?
Start Liking And Following Pages!
By now your Timeline should look, more or less, like a wasteland.
From now on, all the pages you like will start appearing on your main FB page!
Here are some ideas of the pages you might want to follow if nothing comes to your mind at the moment.
Newspapers
All the biggest newspapers have their FB pages. Choose the ones you’re interested in and follow them! They update their pages many times per day.
They will provide your Timeline with an ongoing flood of news.
Most popular FB pages in …
I like this method since usually, the biggest pages are also the ones which care deeply about the quality of posts they share. Google “most popular FB pages in x (e.g. Russia, Turkey)” to find them.
Random pages of interest
Use the FB search field and try to type in words like “jokes”, “productivity”. Of course in your target language!
This way your Timeline will be full of posts of all kinds.
This way, you’ll make sure that the language you take in is diversified enough to guarantee you continuous growth!
Here is a small snippet of my 2nd FB account which I use for reading French and Russian news.
The Final Touch
You have come the long way, congratulations! There is just one more thing you can do to get the most out of using FB.
Change the default language settings to any language you’re learning. It’ll only be weird for a couple of days. After that, all the writings and words become normal, or even boring.
What’s more, you’ll see them many times per week.
Thanks to this, you’ll learn them in no time!
Now, I have a question for you – have you ever tried to change the default language settings of programmes and/or devices you use to learn a new language?
Learning vocabulary is the most important and time-consuming part of language learning. If you suck at it, you might be wasting dozens of hours each month due to the ineffective learning strategy.
Better make sure that your vocabulary learning strategy is not based on … (drum roll)
Passive Rehearsal Through Repetition
The typical vocabulary learning routine goes more or less like this – you encounter a word you don’t know, you translate it and place it in a notebook, or even better – in one of SR programmes like ANKI.
Next day, you start reviewing your vocabulary. You see the word “apple”, you say it in your mind, click to confirm that you recognize the word and move on to another one.
Oh…if you only knew how useless such a method is. The only worse method is probably watching TV and hoping that you will absorb the language one day.
You see, passive rehearsal through repetition has a very little effect on whether or not information is later recalled from long-term memory (Craik & Watkins, 1973).
I know it might be painful to take in such news but think about it. How many times have you rehearsed someone’s name, phone number or address, only to forget it a few minutes later?
The deep processing is the level of activity devoted to processing new information. The more effort you put into processing new information, the better the chance to remember it. Each new association is a new “mental hook” which you can attach to a piece of information. Such associations create a rich web of connections which makes later retrieval much easier.
The associations are even more important as the length of the words increases. It’s pure logic, isn’t it? It’s easier to remember “schnell” in German than “die Urheberrechtsverletzung” (copyright violation).
This phenomenon is known as the wordlength effect. Longer words take longer to rehearse (duh).
The studies of phonological memory span conducted by Baddeley and colleagues estimated that the average person’s phonological loop can retain approximately 2 seconds’ worth of speech (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975).
DIY – How To Deep-Process Your Vocabulary
With some practice and a little bit of imagination, it’s not that difficult to do.
Let’s start with some basic facts – you have 5 basic representational systems.
Basic representational systems:
Visual
Auditory
Kinesthetic (sensations)
Olfactory (smell)
Gustatory (taste)
As you can see, you have a wide array of, let’s call them, “sensory” tools to deep-process the vocabulary you learn. Compared to that, passive rehearsal of words seems kind of silly, doesn’t it?
Treat these systems as your point of reference. Now, onward to the example!
EXAMPLE:
Let’s assume that you want to memorize the Spanish word for “to joke”.
We have already established that saying the translation of this word in your mind is a waste of time.
Here is what you can do instead:
Say this word out loud!
It’s ridiculously easy but also quite effective. Uttering words out loud combines both auditory andkinesthetic stimuli.
How come?
Due to conduction of the sound to the inner ear through the bones of the skull (i.e. bone conduction). What’s more, it can also help you to improve your pronunciation.
Of course, you don’t have to stop here. Why not sing the word with the voice of Michael Jackson or Louis Armstrong?! Sure, maybe they will lock you up in an asylum. But at least you’ll be the only patient with such an impressive vocabulary!
Create a picture of the word
You can imagine it. Although it is much better to find some pictures on the Internet. Let’s say, that you google “to joke” and find the following picture which you really like:
Break down the word into smaller, familiar parts
Rarely will you find a word which doesn’t contain any familiar words or elements? You just have to concentrate a little bit to notice them! Let’s write down familiar parts of this word:
– BROmear (bro, you jokin’ or what?)
– broMEar – give me another joke!
– EAR – bro, you are always spitting into my ear when you tell jokes!
– bROMEar – they don’t like joking in Rome
These are just some of the possible suggestions! You can also associate it with:
If you want, you can always additionally associate a given word with a smell or taste. I rarely do it, since such associations are usually much weaker than the ones previously mentioned.
The Final Effect
This is how a card in ANKI looks like for this word. With the right associations, it’s incredibly hard to forget the vocabulary learned this way. Just remember not to overdo it! Try not to spend more than 5 minutes per word.
It seems like a lot of time, but considering the potential benefit of memorizing every word after the first try, I would say that it is well worth the time investment!
Question for you – have you ever deep-processed the vocabulary you learn?
Not to mutilate anyone, of course, but to have his confidence, strength, KNOWLEDGE... (and it's sure as hell more interesting than being "Jeff, an IT guy.")
And we all know that no assassin would be complete without secret knowledge of poisons. With knowledge like that - who would ever tread on you?
But what does it have to do with learning?! I rush to explain.
Usefulness In Learning
There are many principles which help us to understand how to memorize more effectively. But there is one which has a key function in our lives.
USEFULNESS
Your brain discards most of the information you come into contact with. It is useless. Why would you remember some date or a name of an obscure plant?
SURVIVAL - that's what important.
And needless to say, your profession is indispensable to your survival. Cooks remember recipes better than most non-cooks. Programmers have a better memory of code than people who simply dabble in coding.
And the list goes on... But let's concentrate on USEFULNESS.
Who Would You Like To Be?
I know that you have your profession. This is what you're great at and you stick to it - fully understandable. But what if you could create a set of characters to improve your life (and your learning curve)? Just like in role-playing games (e.g. Dungeons & Dragons).
You could be anyone you want, even if just for a day!
The Power Of Belief
But does pretending to be someone you're not make some knowledge useful? Yes, it does. It does if you choose to believe that you can be that person. Our brain is the most magnificent thing in the whole universe. And it has a truly breath-taking quality.
It can't tell fiction from reality. Just look at what power of belief can do to you:
I've prepared a list of 5 popular food products which contain various poisons. Of course, such products would be lethal only in extreme situations (and large doses) so take it with a grain of salt!
cherries - contain cyanogenic glycosides
Cherry (Prunus cerasus), as well as other Prunus species such as peach (Prunus persica), plum (Prunus domestica), almond (Prunus dulcis), and apricot (Prunus armeniaca). Leaves and seeds contain cyanogenic glycosides. (Wiki)
"When the seeds of cherries are crushed, chewed, or even slightly injured, they produce prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide). Next time you are eating cherries, remember not to suck on or chew the pip" (http://listverse.com).
apples - their seeds contain cyanide
"Apple seeds are very often eaten accidentally but you would need to chew and consume a fairly high number to get sick.
There are not enough seeds in one apple to kill, but it is absolutely possible to eat enough to die. I recommend avoiding apple eating competitions!" (http://listverse.com).
"Most people are unaware that marlin has been documented to accumulate harmful levels of mercury.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency health guidelines for fish consumption indicate that any fish with a mercury level greater than 1.5 parts per million (ppm) should not be consumed in any amount.
Marlin, especially large specimens, have been found to contain mercury levels as high as 15 ppm, or 10 times the EPA limit." (Source: http://takemarlinoffthemenu.org)
Potatoes contain toxic compounds known as glycoalkaloids, of which the most prevalent are solanine and chaconine. Solanine is also found in other members of the Solanaceae plant family, which includes Atropa belladonna ("deadly nightshade") and Hyoscyamus niger ("henbane") (see entries below). The concentration of glycoalkaloid in wild potatoes suffices to produce toxic effects in humans. (Wiki)
"Potatoes (like tomatoes) contain poison in the stems and leaves – and even in the potato itself if left to turn green (the green is due to a high concentration of the glycoalkaloid poison).
Potato poisoning is rare, but it does happen from time to time. Death normally comes after a period of weakness and confusion, followed by a coma.
The majority of cases of death by potato in the last fifty years in the USA have been the result of eating green potatoes or drinking potato-leaf tea". (http://listverse.com)
Prepare "The Action Plan" - A Story That Is
We also tend to remember stories better than facts.
That's why, to remember these poisons better, we can come up with some interesting story.
Let's say that you have an imaginary enemy called Bob. And, to put it gently, you're not the biggest fan of his. Why not invite him for a fancy dinner?
Compose the aforementioned products into the meal which Bob won't ever forget. Let it be a reminder to him that nobody messes with the assassin!
Conclusion
The huge takeaway from this article is that our brain creates its own reality. If you believe it - it's true.
Sotry to be creative- come up with your secret alter egos which can help you to memorize information better from the fields of your interest. Fake it until you make it.
And remember to put your knowledge to good use! I guess to balance this article, next time I should write about being a druid and healing...!
What other poisonous food ingredients do you know?
I often talk about what effective learning methods are all about but I have almost never mentioned all the memory experiments I have run which have failed miserably. It might give you the impression that this is the knowledge which came to me easily. On the contrary.
It was like wading through the puddle of crap to pick up something which seemed to be the gem of wisdom. Only to realize later that it was actually a fossilized chunk of crap. Only to realize a couple of months down the road that it was actually a beautiful diamond hidden beneath the dry shell.
I think you get my point. It was a confusing process where I had to rediscover time and time again different truths in different contents.
Of course, my process of reasoning wasn't very rigorous at the beginning. Neither were my memory experiments. I was kind of going with my gut and trying to notice whether I remember more or less.
Only later did I start to actually construct hypotheses and test them. Everything got even easier when I started learning more about memory and reading studies related to this area of knowledge.
Before I share with you my conclusions and failures, let's start with how my experiments were run.
set yourself a suitable deadline to test the idea (ideally, at least 3 weeks - 1 month)
3
test it
4
measure the results at the end of your memory experiment
5
draw conclusions
6
rinse and repeat
How did I choose words for my memory experiments?
This is a very important question. Some people think that any words will do. That's far from the truth.
If you want to run a meaningful memory experiment you need to make sure that the words tested are as different from any other words and concepts you know as it's only possible.
The reason is that your current knowledge modulates the new knowledge you want to acquire.
If you know English and you're learning French your results will be immediately distorted. Depending on a source, 40-50% of English words originate from French.
If you want to get unbiased results you need to test the words from languages you know nothing of.
In my case, I frequently tried to memorize words from languages like Basque, Finnish, and Hungarian. They were absolutely foreign to me and I couldn't associate them in any way with my background knowledge.
"Collectively, these findings provide strong evidence that pre-experimental stimulus familiarity determines the relative costs and benefits of experimental item repetition on the encoding of new item-source associations. By demonstrating the interaction between different types of stimulus familiarity, the present findings advance our understanding of how prior experience affects the formation of new episodic memories." - Pre-experimental stimulus familiarity modulates the effects of item repetition on source memory - Hongmi Lee, Kyungmi Kim, Do-Joon Yi, 2018
Also, it's worth noting that a typical batch of items which I tried to commit to my memory was 20. Typically, I tried to memorize between 3-5 batches.
What did I test?
Time to get to the nitty-gritty of my memory experiments. As you already know, I experimented almost exclusively with words which were completely foreign to me in order to minimize my background knowledge interference.
Another important part is the methods I used to test my knowledge. I always tested my recalls using the following methods:
Free recall describes the process in which a person is given a list of items to remember and then is tested by being asked to recall them in any order. Free recall often displays evidence of primacy and recency effects.
Primacy effects are displayed when the person recalls items presented at the beginning of the list earlier and more often. The recency effect is when the person recalls items presented at the end of the list earlier and more often. Free recall often begins with the end of the list and then moves to the beginning and middle of the list.
For that reason, I always tried to recall all the batches at once in order to minimize the number of learning sessions. That gave me the certainty that my results were warped.
Cued recall is when a person is given a list of items to remember and is then tested with cues to remember the material.
There are two basic experimental methods used to conduct cued recall, the study-test method, and the anticipation method. In the study-test method participants study a list of word pairs presented individually.
Immediately after or after a time delay, participants are tested in the study phase of the experiment on the word pairs just previously studied.
One word of each pair is presented in a random order and the participant is asked to recall the item with which it was originally paired. The participant can be tested for either forward recall, Ai is presented as a cue for Bi, or backward recall, Bi is presented as a cue for Ai.
In the anticipation method, participants are shown Ai and are asked to anticipate the word paired with it, Bi. If the participant cannot recall the word, the answer is revealed.
During an experiment using the anticipation method, the list of words is repeated until a certain percentage of Bi words are recalled. - Wikipedia.
The learning curve for cued recall increases systematically with the number of trials completed. This result has caused a debate about whether or not learning is all-or-none.
Why did I use both methods? Because they both show you different things.
"Free recall exercises, are good measures of initial learning and remembering (Mayer, 2009). However, transfer tasks, such as the written fill-in-the-blank activity and the problem-solving task are perhaps better measures of true learning (Mayer, 2009)."
Many people have argued with me that just because they are able to recall words after using some method, it surely means that it's effective. As you can see, it's only a part of the story.
That's why it's also so important to test any method for the prolonged period of time. Always give yourself at least 3 weeks to test your hypothesis. Then measure the results (here are examples of the things you can measure in language learning).
“There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.” – Enrico Fermi
Why even measure it at all?
Measuring your results certainly doesn't sound sexy but it's absolutely necessary. You can't know for sure that one method is better than the other if you don't verify it and you don't control your variables.
What's more, if you don't measure, you can't improve. And that means a great deal in the world of language learning. Using ineffective methods can literally mean that you will have wasted thousands of hours by the end of your life.
I am not that loco and I was never willing to take such a risk. And I am pretty sure you also don't want to be the guy with a tombstone saying, "It took him 20 years to learn a language to an A2 level, what a moron. Love, family."
Whenever you're in doubt - measure your results. It will help you get to the truth.
What does it mean that the experiment failed?
Under every experiment, you will find an explanation of why a given experiment failed or not.
What do I mean by that?
Most of the time it means that it either didn't provide me with the results I expected or it wasn't more effective than the method I tested it against.
Of course, in a sense, none of them failed. They all helped me to understand the science of memory better and to improve my memorization skills. Or in more elegant words of Thomas Edison, I can say that:
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas A. Edison
The list of methods I have tested
Below you will find a long list of methods I have tested throughout the years. I can't vouch that I have included all of them. I have a nasty habit of throwing away everything I don't need. Unfortunately, in many instances, the victim of my habit was a bunch of notes documenting my experiment.
All my experiments are accompanied by the main conclusions and complementary articles when needed. Enjoy!
Chapter 0 - The typical school stuff
I guess this is the type of learning which is a baseline for many people. All you do is what they tell you to during a class. You read something, do some grammar exercises, write an essay and so on.
Experiment status:
It failed.
Why did it fail?
What you give is what you get. I think I simply didn't apply myself to learning hence my results were just terrible.
The main takeaway:
Apply yourself? Learn regularly? Take your pick.
Chapter 1 - Using a notebook
The first learning system of my own devising was fairly uncomplicated. Ready for it? Every time when I used to encounter any English words I didn't know, I jotted them down.
Next, I rewrote ALL their meanings, collocations and such from an Oxford Dictionary into my notebook. Then I read my notes on my way to school.
You're probably wondering why I didn't just mark these words in a dictionary and read them there, huh?
Well, maybe because I was fed with a lead spoon as a child. Or it has something to do with repeatedly falling down headfirst from a tree.
I don't know. But these are some of the excuses I use. If it wasn't bad enough I used this method for at least 3 or years when I was about 18-22.
Experiment status:
It failed.
Why did it fail?
The method was clearly unsustainable. It took me a lot of time to rewrite all the words I needed. What's worse, there were so many of them that I couldn't review them in any regular way.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
This was my first system. It was terrible but it also taught me an important lesson. You will always progress, no matter how slow, if you have any kind of learning system in place. Sure, this one sucked but at least it gave me a systematized way of learning new words and their meanings.
The first program of this kind which I bought was called SuperMemo Advanced. It was a brilliant creation which ushered in the new era in the world of my personal learning.
Back then, I already spoke quite good English. Or at least that's what I thought. To my surprise, it quickly turned out that out of over 10k words which this program contained, I knew almost none.
My grind started. I started slogging through all these words with dogged determination. I was terrified by the number of reviews I soon amassed but somehow I pulled through. I think it took me about 18 months to cover all the words.
What about the final result?
My vocabulary certainly expanded. Initially, I could recall a lot of words but after some time, the novelty effect wore off. I soon found myself forgetting more and more words despite working my butt off every day.
And thus, I decided to keep on searching for my Holy Grail.
Experiment status:
It kinda failed.
Why did it kinda fail?
The main reason why my experiment failed to some degree is that I didn't create my own sentences. Most programs of this kind give you ready-to-learn sentences.
Unfortunately, if you don't actively encode words on your own, they will slip your memory anyway. The optimization algorithm which programs of this kind use is an extremely powerful tool.
Maybe even the most universal shield against forgetting we currently have. However, no amount of reviews can guarantee that the words you learn will be transferred into your long-term memory if you don't encode them (Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Craik & Tulving, 1975).
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
The optimization algorithms are your best friend learning-wise. It doesn't matter how much you delude yourself into thinking that you can learn faster by reading, listening or other means.
It won't happen.
Having a ready-to-use wordlist is extremely convenient and can speed up your learning. You won't have to waste your time scratching your head and thinking what's the next word you should learn.
I enrolled in a language school to master German and after about four years I was ready to sit the Goethe-Zertifikat B2 exam. The last trial before the real thing was a mock exam. I took it, I passed it and life felt great.
I felt so proud of myself as I was leaving my language school, "Now I know English, German and Polish, there are 7 languages to go".
The life had different plans for me. Just as I was ambling down the street I was approached by an elderly German couple asking me if I speak any German.
"I do", I replied proudly.
"Do you know any good restaurants around here?", they asked.
As they were finishing their question something terrible happened. I froze. I couldn't spew out any coherent answer. I huffed and puffed and floundered until I managed to form some vague answer.
As they were leaving I felt devastated. I spent 4 damn years in a language school and couldn't even hold a simple conversation! On top of this, I just passed a B2 certificate.
Frustrated by this experience I decided to simply pick up a Polish-German dictionary, mark the works I didn't know but I found useful and start creating short sentences with them.
I used to take this dictionary everywhere with me. I kept my nose in it and wandered around oblivious to my surroundings.
I definitely looked strange but at least I had my pants on most of the time and didn't yell "repent sinners" so that's nice.
Experiment status:
It kinda failed.
Why did it kinda fail?
The problem with this method was that it didn't allow me to review my vocabulary in any meaningful way. I was jumping from one word to another.
Oftentimes, I spent way too much time concentrating on the words I already knew. Considering that your average pocket dictionary has usually at least 15k words, it was the problem of considerable size.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
1. Even though this method didn't seem like much, I consider it a big success to some degree. It was then that I realized that creating my own sentences with virtually any word can boost my vocabulary retention.
Contrary to the common wisdom, it doesn't matter if your sentences don't sound like something that could originate from the silky smooth lips of a native speaker.
You need to encode words on your own and you need many words in order to convey your thoughts.
2. This method further reinforced my conviction that having a ready-to-use word list can positively affect my learning rate.
Up to this day, I remain a huge fan of pocket dictionaries. Even on the days, when I don't have much time, I can encode and learn up to 30 words in 15 minutes simply by picking them up from a dictionary.
Trust me, no other method comes even close to this.
Chapter 4 - Mnemonics
I stumbled across the first mentions about mnemonics in an article when I was about 20-21. Even though I was fascinated by the general idea behind mnemonics, I quickly forgot about it.
A couple of months later, by fate, I discovered a small book about mnemonics. It turned out to be a copy of Harry Lorayne's classic "* How To Develop a Super Power Memory (1957)".
One week later, I was a full-time mnemonics preacher.
How could I not?
Any person, who tried to learn anything with help of mnemonics can attest to their effectiveness. And that's true. Compared to your typical "cram and forget" approach, mnemonics work very well.
It takes some time and objectivity to discover that perhaps mnemonics are not as great as many experts like to believe. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Here is a list of different memory systems I have tried.
Classic mnemonics
If you have never heard of mnemonics, here is, more or less, how they work:
1
Find a word you want to learn.
2
Inspect it thoroughly and try to spot any associations or familiar word in it.
3
Create a funny/absurd picture based on these words or associations.
4
Place the picture in some location which is well-known to you (e.g. your home).
5
Repeat this process for many words and make sure to connect your pictures with each other.
6
Take a mental walk and decode these words.
Example:
Let's say that you want to learn a Spanish word for "trabajar". Upon a closer inspection, you notice that:
a) "traba" looks a lot like "drab" b) "jar", well, it looks like a "jar".
Next, you combine those words into a short story: you work as a slave at the desk in your room producing enormous "drab jars".
Can you see it?
Great.
The only thing left is to retrieve these words by imagining this entire situation.
If you have never tried this method, it can be quite effective. And, as you can probably guess, that was my initial impression as well.
Status:
It failed.
Why did it fail?
1. I have mentioned before that encoding your own vocabulary is extremely important. If that's true, then why do mnemonics work so badly for long-term memorization and retention?
Two types of encoding:
a) shallow encoding
Shallow encoding doesn't help you to connect the piece of information with other meaningful information nor does it help you to further your understanding of it.
It usually concentrates on meaningless banalities.
Example: You are trying to memorize the word "skada" (Swedish for "to damage"). The prime example of shallow encoding would be to start counting the number of vowels or consonants in this word.
In our case, it would also be creating meaningless pictures based on abstract associations which has nothing to do with the actual use of the word.
b) deep encoding
The absolute opposite of shallow encoding. This time you are trying to make meaningful information between different items.
The more the better. In the case of language learning, it's simply building sentences with the words you want to learn.
2. The other reason is fairly simple. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to find the right associations. Needless to say, spending 5 minutes on every word in order to do this is pointless.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
1. Even though this method didn't seem like much, I consider it a big success to some degree. It was then that I realized that creating my own sentences with virtually any word can boost my vocabulary retention. You need to encode words on your own and you need many words in order to convey your thoughts.
2. This method further reinforced my conviction that having a ready-to-use word list can positively affect my learning rate.
After some time, I decided that the main problem was the time I needed to find my associations. I decided to identify the most important prefixes for any language I was concentrating on at that point.
Example: The prefix "ent" is fairly popular in German. I decided to substitute it with the word Ent which is a race of tree-resembling creatures from Tolkien's fantasy world Middle-earth.
Every time I encountered some word starting with "ent" I could immediately create a picture involving the Ents.
How did this method affect my learning pace?
I started memorizing words lightning fast. Partly because I have created my own "mnemonic picture dictionary" which consisted of over 1000 syllables with their respective pictures.
And yet, once again.
Experiment status:
It failed.
Why did it fail?
Unfortunately, I failed to recognize that quick short-term memorization doesn't equal successful long-term memorization.
Sure, I was memorizing word quicker but I still had problems using them in conversation and kept on forgetting them anyway.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
Please check the main takeaway for classic mnemonics.
Mnemonics and meditation
Another brilliant idea of mine was thinking that if I only improve the vividness and clarity of my pictures, I will be able to retain them much longer.
I decided to include a 30-minute meditation session to my learning schedule. During that time, the only thing I did was revisiting my mnemonic stories and making them more vivid.
Experiment status:
It failed.
Why did it fail?
No matter how clear your pictures are - if you don't apply active encoding to your learning, you will inevitably fail.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
Please check the main takeaway for classic mnemonics.
Mnemonics with SRS
The next step for me was combining mnemonics with SR programs like ANKI. I figured out that if I only optimize my repetitions, my retention rate will go through the roof.
Even with this method, I was using a lot of variations. Among others, I tried to:
1
use Google map images to memorize thousands of words at the same time
2
use virtual and phantom locations and connect them into memory palaces
3
shrink my stories to squeeze even dozens of them into one room
Experiment status:
It failed.
Why did it fail?
This is where I gave up on mnemonics. My stats and personal experience were very clear about this method of learning.
It doesn't matter how much I tweak every tiny element of this method - it will always suck as it fails to encapture the very essence of learning - applying contextual learning and deep encoding.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
Please check the main takeaway for classic mnemonics.
I started looking into passive learning years after I started my language learning/memory journey. I didn't do it because I believed they are very effective.
On the contrary, I have never been a fan of passive learning and I don't understand why so many language bloggers promote them.
Passive learning, as appealing as it might be, has been found, time and time again, terribly ineffective compared to active learning.
The best argumentation for this line of learning I have seen so far is quoting the misbegotten theory of Krashen who was debunked one year after it was published.
As negative as this introduction may sound, I still was very curious how many words I can pick up and activate from passive learning.
Extensive reading
Experiment 1:
I have always been a bookworm so this experiment was quite pleasant to me. In 2016 I decided to read about 60 Swedish articles in the span of about 2 months.
At that time I was already on a C1, or maybe C1 / C2 level. That means I could read without any problems.
In total, I read 52000 words, mainly from the major Swedish news outlets. At about 300 words/min, it took me about 17 hours to go through them all and about 2 hours to find something interesting to read.
I didn't write down any words, I was just trying to memorize them while reading (without mnemonics).
The final result?
After a careful analysis of my vocabulary, I found out that I picked up 5 extra words.
In other words, I spend 19 hours and had nothing to show for. To fully showcase how ridiculously slow that pace it's worth reminding you that on a bad day, I can encode and learn up to 30 words in 15 minutes simply by picking them up from a dictionary and encoding them in ANKI.
That experiment definitely echoes the experience of my students. Even though it's only an anecdote.
Over one year ago, a student of mine who learned German decided to read the first two books of the Harry Potter series in German.
At the time, she was on a B1/B2 level. I tried to discourage her from doing it and direct her efforts to active learning but she put her foot down.
After about 4 months she told me that she finished reading them - in total about 1000 pages or so.
The result was once again quite depressing. Once she told me about her intention, I started jotting down EVERY NEW WORD which came up during our classes. It wasn't difficult at all as I taught her from the very beginning. I knew exactly which words she already used.
After 4 months, countless hours, 1000 pages she managed to introduce 0 extra words to her parlance.
Experiment 2:
In my next experiment conducted in May 2018, I set off to check how many new words I can pick up from watching English movies with French subtitles. I was pretty sure that this method would be more effective since it involves more sensory channels.
In total, I watched about 60 hours worth of TV series. My level at that time was about B1. During that time I was able to pick up 11 words, most of which I was able to use spontaneously.
I haven't been able to memorize other words than the ones I learned before. In other words, it allowed me to learn more.
Experiment status:
it was a success and a failure at the same time.
Why did it fail/succeed?
1. The experiment was certainly a success because it confirmed something I have been telling for a long time. Passive learning can be an amazing tool if you use it as an adjacent method.
Every day you should do your best to concentrate on active learning. Once you're done and you can't din more words into your head, feel free to read or listen as much as you want.
Spontaneous activation of words is much easier once you already have these words in your head. This is definitely something my experiment confirmed.
Even though I avoided speaking for 2 months, my fluency was actually higher after 60 hours of reading. Mind you that I didn't pick up almost any new words. But the ones I knew came to my mind much quicker.
2. The experiment also failed because clearly reading was subpar to basically any active learning method, I have ever tried.
The main takeaways (i.e. what I learned):
1. "Free recall exercises, are good measures of initial learning and remembering (Mayer, 2009). However, transfer tasks, such as the written fill-in-the-blank activity and the problem-solving task are perhaps better measures of true learning (Mayer, 2009)."
Just because you have a general impression of remembering words after a reading session, it doesn't mean that you've committed them to your memory. The only tests which can confirm involve the active use of the said words.
2. Acquisition of new vocabulary from reading will be terribly slow and ineffective until you learn about 5k words. 5000 words allow you to understand about 98% of most ordinary texts (Nation (1990) and Laufer (1997)).
Such a vocabulary size warrants also accurate contextual guessing (Coady et al., 1993; Hirsh & Nation, 1992; Laufer, 1997). If you're hell-bent on learning this way, make sure that you know at least 3k words as it's the minimum threshold needed for contextual guessing. (Hazenberg and Hulstijn, 1996).
3. Your ability to speak fluently and produce spontaneous speech is dependent to a high degree on the amount of input you expose yourself to.
As painful as it is for my analytical heart, I have never run any rigorous memory experiment involving extensive listening. All I have are my anecdotes concerning three main languages I teach (Swedish, English, German). For that reason, please take it with a grain of salt.
I haven't done any form of extensive listening practice for any of those languages until I was at least at a B2 level. In other words, my vocabulary amounted to at least 5k words which warranted quite accurate contextual guessing.
Even though I can't give you any specific number, we're talking about thousands of hours of listening practice for English and hundreds of hours for both Swedish and German. My main listening activities concentrated mainly on watching TV series and movies.
Status:
It succeeded!
Why did it succeed?
Despite the lack of detailed stats, I could definitely notice that my ability to produce spontaneous speech and to understand was greatly increased.
What's more, vocabulary acquisition was also much higher compared to extensive reading. The probable reason is, once again, the wealth of stimuli, which is related to watching movies.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
1. Extensive listening is certainly the most useful form of passive learning. Especially up to a C1 level.
2. The vocabulary acquisition rate is also quite high provided that you build your core vocabulary first. I can only speculate that on earlier stages, it would be quite ineffective since the cognitive load would be too high to enable effective learning.
It's worth keeping in mind that extensive listening is still quite a terrible tool of acquiring vocabulary compared to almost any active learning strategy. Once again, it can be treated as a perfect supplement to active learning.
Chapter 4 - Random memory experiments
All the experiments presented here reflect a very interesting stage in my memory journey. Back then, I was willing to run almost any memory experiment as long as there is at least one scientific paper behind it.
In hindsight, sometimes I don't know what the hell I was thinking!
Holding my urine
Judge me all you want, I did it. Years ago I read this study whose conclusion was that holding your urine improves decision making before choosing an immediate or a delayed financial reward.
As you can see, it had nothing to do with language learning or memory improvement. Of course, that didn't stop me. The experiment went on for 3 weeks. During that time I almost pissed myself a couple of times but it certainly did nothing for my retention rate.
Fun fact:
a Dutch scientist conducting this study, Mirjam Tusk, was actually awarded Ig Nobel.
Status:
a debacle
Why did it fail?
Because I was a silly and impressionable dummy. But hey! At least I have an anecdote to share!
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
Screw you Miriam and your research.
Learning in nature
There are a lot of studies which show that spending time in nature helps to boost your memory. Some of them even show that staring at a photo of trees or a brisk walk in the woods can improve your memory and attention performance by 20%.
And obviously, that was a good enough reason for me to try it.
For three weeks in 2014, I spend 1 hour per day learning Swedish in the nearby park. The results were quite clear - no advantage whatsoever compared to studying at home.
Status:
It failed.
Why did it fail?
Because the memory experiment conducted in the lab are usually detached from reality and don't carry over to real life? That would be my guess. Interestingly, I noticed that my attention performance dropped while learning in the park. I was constantly distracted by damn squirrels, dogs, and bawling children. The general conditions weren't very conducive to studying.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
Learn where there is a minimal amount of distraction in order to maximize your memory performance.
Emotional modulation of the learned material
One of the undeniable laws of learning says that we always remember better items which are emotionally salient. That gave me the idea that if I learn how to modulate this saliency, I could use it to my advantage to boost my retention.
I did lots of weird things to achieve this goal. I screamed foreign words out at the top of my lungs. I made myself furious or jealous with the help of my imagination and then proceeded to memorize short lists of words.
Status:
It failed.
Why did it fail?
Truth be told, I was able to remember a lot of these words right away so the first impression suggests that the method works. But as I usually say, in order to truly discover whether something works you need to run delayed recall tests.
You have to wait at least 1 or 2 weeks before you retest your memory. Only then do you get a clear answer about whether a method works or not. This strategy failed.
In hindsight, the reason is simple - if everything stands out emotionally, nothing stands out emotionally.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
Just don't.
Learning before going to sleep
Another great strategy which I have heard about was learning before going to sleep. Like all short memory experiments of mine, it lasted 3 weeks in September 2015. The idea for this experiment was sparked by research showing a correlation between time of studying and how it can potentially improve your recall.
The protocol was very simple. I tried to memorize 10 random words from languages I knew right before going to sleep.
How did I fare?
Not much better than usually. My retention rate was improved by about 4%.
Status:
It failed.
Why did it fail?
I know that you might think that 4% is not too shabby and it's worth something. However, in my case, I deemed the results less than impressive. Especially considering that I tried to memorize words from the languages I already knew which was a major mistake.
What's more, if we include other co-founders, my results won't be much better than the chance. I had definitely better results with practicing motor skills before going to bed.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
Try at your own risk - I don't see any super-duper benefits. It's much more important to have a sound sleeping schedule than to practice at any specific time.
Combining learning with physical activity
There is plenty of research demonstrating the benefits of combining physical activity with learning. The general idea is to space your learning sessions and to interrupt them with bouts of vigorous exercise.
Here is a great excerpt from Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative (2011).
One immediate outcome of the research is a process known as spaced learning, in which teachers give short lessons, sometimes of less than ten minutes, before changing to physical activity and then repeating the lesson. In one trial, the pupils scored up to 90 percent in a science paper after one session involving three 20-minute bursts, interspersed with ten-minute breaks for physical activity. The pupils had not covered any part of the science syllabus before the lessons.
I started testing this idea in early 2016. Since I dislike gyms, I decided to weave in quick calisthenics workouts into my learning schedule.
Long story short, such an approach managed to significantly improve my attention span and slightly boosted my recall.
Status:
It succeeded!
Why did it succeed?
Even though there is a lot of great science which explains in a detailed way how exercise can help you with studying, I think it has a lot to do with Serial-position effect.
Serial-position effect is the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst.
Why do I think so?
Because I have noticed similar improvements while taking so-called meaningful breaks i.e. taking a walk, or just lying down and breathing mindfully.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
Mixing work-outs with your learning is certainly worth replicating.
Read more:
John J. Ratey - Spark, The Revolutionary New Science Of The Brain And Exercise
Learning with pictures
1. a traditional approach
I am more than sure that even if you haven't tried using pictures in your own studies, you at least heard how great of a method that is.
That's why you definitely increase your chances of memorizing a word by adding pictures (read more about the picture superiority effect).
But the real question which many people seem to ignore is - how much does it really help?
My answer is - not that much. Most of the time you will be able to just remember a picture very well. Based on my experiments I can say that the overall benefit of using pictures in learning is not big and amounts to less than 5%. At least when you stick to a typical approach i.e. adding random pictures to your ANKI flashcards.
Is there a better way?
2. a different approach
Since my initial results with this method weren't very satisfying I decided to step it up and tried to check how different kind of pictures affect my recall. What's more, I also verified how using the same picture in many flashcards affects my learning.
What kind of pictures did I use?
I concentrated on pictures which are emotionally salient. I tried everything starting from gore pictures to porn pictures. The results, especially with the latter, weren't very good. I was sitting there like a horny idiot and couldn't concentrate even one bit on any of the words. It's like having a sexy teacher in high school. You can't wait till you get to your classes but once you do, you don't hear any words.
Funny enough, I remember most of the pictures from this experiment to this day which only further proves to me that your typical approach won't work here.
So what kind of pictures did work?
Pictures from my personal collection. I found out that if I use one picture in a lot of flashcards where every flashcard concentrates on one word, I am able to recall words extremely easily. In addition, my retention rate has also been improved, although not as significantly as my ability to retrieve words.
Status:
failure/success.
Why did it fail?
While it's true that it's really easy to memorize picture, I haven't noticed any amazing benefits using a typical approach i.e. inserting a new picture into every flashcard.
Why did it succeed?
I think that my approach to using pictures in language learning is so effective because it mimics a lot how we normally acquire vocabulary as children. It's much easier to memorize names of different objects and phenomena if the same situation occurs frequently.
I have never seen any scientific experiments in this vein, so I hope that the linguistic community will pick it up one day.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
If you want to use pictures in your language studies, don't waste time trying to find a new picture for every word. Choose one picture and use it multiple times in different flashcards. Each time try to memorize a different word.
Learning with GIFS
Don't worry, this will be a short one. If you haven't known this before, you can insert GIFs into your ANKI flashcards. Overall, it will give you an additional recall and retrieval boost.
Status:
It succeeded!
Why did it succeed?
GIFs are very similar to real life situation. There is some dynamism there connected with visual stimulus.
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
It works provided that, once again, you use the same GIF for many flashcards.
Writing vs speaking
Another interesting experiment which I set out to conduct, in 2017 if I am not mistaken, was to settle once and for all what's better for language learning memory-wise - writing or speaking?
I won't elaborate about it since I have already written a full article about this problem (you can find the link below).
The main takeaway (i.e. what I learned):
All in all, my opinion is that for the most people out there, speaking is the superior learning method as it allows you to practice what probably matters to you the most – being able to communicate. What’s more, writing offers almost no benefits memory-wise compare to speaking.
Having that said, you should remember that the ultimate answer might be more complex for you. Some learn a language to write, some to watch movies and some to talk. Choose your goal and choose your preferred learning method in accordance with it.
Even though conducting all these experiments might seem like a lot of work, I think it was more than worth it. Especially since I have always been more interested in how memory works than knowing many languages.
I thought that it might be interesting for you to see how my quest for better memory has influenced my learning speed throughout the years. However, please remember that using the right methods is one thing. Another is that with every next language, it's getting easier and easier to learn the next ones.
Of course, even a layman might learn extremely fast if they know how to do it. I have managed to teach a lot of people to a B2 level in a couple of months with just 1 hour of classes per week so it can't be that bad (read more). Heck, some people who took my course Vocabulary Labs managed to do it without any help whatsoever within that time frame.
Side note: the numbers below don't represent my current levels, just how fast I learned these languages to a B2 level.
My learning pace over the years
The languages below are chronologically ordered starting with the ones which I learned first. I never bothered tracking how much time I needed to get a C1 level and beyond in most of these languages. The number below don't represent my current levels, just how fast I learned these languages to a B2 level.
Learning English
When did I start? When I was 12.
Time needed to get to a B2 level: 7 years
Was the level verified? Yes, an FCE certificate
Learning Russian
When did I start? When I was 15.
Time needed to get to a B2 level: 10 years
Was the level verified? Yes, by a private tutor
Learning German
When did I start? When I was 20.
Time needed to get to a B2 level: 4-5 years
Was the level verified? Yes, a mock Goethe-Zertifikat B2
Learning Spanish
When did I start? When I was 25.
Time needed to get to a B2 level: 1-1,5 year
Was the level verified? No
Learning French
When did I start? When I was 26.
Time needed to get to a B1 level: 6 months
Time needed to get to a B2 level: about 2 years
Was the level verified? No
Learning Swedish
When did I start? When I was 27.
Time needed to get to a B2 level: 3,5 months
Was the level verified? Yes, a multifaceted, internal verification in one of the global corporations
Czech was also the last language I learned. About that time I decided to focus on other fields of science and improving my languages.
Right now, for the most European languages, I don't think it would take me more than 6-8 weeks to learn them to a B2 level. When it comes to trickier languages like Hungarian or any Asian language it's hard to say as I never looked into them deeply. Although probably if enough number of people are interested I will do another language mission in the future and will document my progress thoroughly.
Does it mean that these methods are bad?
As you have seen, I have classified quite many methods with which I have experimented as a failure. Does it mean they are inherently bad? Not necessarily. Depending on your current stage in language learning, many of them might boost your learning significantly provided that the one you're using right now is bad.
Even my results which show modest boosts (e.g. 5%) in recall and retrieval rate should be taken with a grain of salt. For example, if you're a person who is not very physically active, you might experience a significant increase in your ability to recall if just work out more.
Regardless of that, a lot of my experiments should show you rough effectiveness of many of these methods. I hope that one day I will find time to come back to this article and expand my lists of experiments including some others which I missed this time.
You might also wonder why I haven't covered many of the popular apps and learning systems in this article. The answer is very simple - I didn't have to. There are dozens of principles of memory to master in order to learn effectively. Once you acquire them, you can simply disregard many popular solutions because you can spot all the mistakes they are perpetuating. Not every experiment is worth your time.
How many of these methods have you experimented with? Let me know.
I have the greatest pleasure to introduce my friend and ex-student – Mariusz who I had the honor to teach (Swedish) not so long ago.
Mariusz started his journey with Swedish in March and thanks to the super effective mix of grit, right methods and mnemonics got to (almost) B2 level at Swedish. The level was assessed by one of the language schools in our hometown at the beginning of October.
How fast is that? Pretty damn fast if you ask me! Especially since he had only a 1,5 h lesson once per week for just 4 months!
Warning: if you’re new to the world of mnemonics, please do not think that we’re having a really bad, acid-induced trip. Instead click hereto hop on the list and get your own 7-part mnemonics course.
Without further ado – enter Mariusz!
How to memorize grammatical genders with use of mnemonics
Come along for a stroll! How I memorized Swedish A1 level ett-gender nouns. It is known that there are only two grammatic genders in Swedish and they are described with their proper indefinite articles – ‘en‘ or ‘ett‘.
The first one covers, depending on sources, about 75% of all the nouns, while the other the remaining 25%. It was obvious, that with the aim to pick always the correct one, it’s sufficient to memorize the smaller group of nouns. So I made use of mnemonics.
I’m not certain why but from the very beginning I have already imagined the en-nouns as green and the ett-nouns as light blue, particularly while revising vocab with Anki, and I colored at least the ‘ett’ ones.
As I was wading through, at first, quite big amounts of upcoming words and the number of the blue ones began to grow, I felt the need to arrange them, preferably into one vast made-up Loci. Then I created a picture of a seaside in my memory.
The sea (ett hav) seemed to fit my needs the best because the only bigger blue objects that I came up with were the sky or the planet Earth, too vast to take up a virtual walk along. So I landed by the Baltic Sea on a beach I am familiar with because I’ve spent my holidays there many times, taking long runs in the sand in early mornings.
Having appeared there once again, I saw in front of me the extensive mass of water reaching up to the horizon on my left and right. Although the sand was yellowish, I realized that after every step I took left a footstep (ett spår) illuminating with bluish light (ett ljus). Cool, isn’t it? I looked around hastily and to my surprise, I spotted even more phantom-like bluish objects.
The nearest one was a table (ett bord ) with my Swedish grammar book, opened on a site with a test (ett test). I always feel pain (ett ont) when I make a mistake (ett fel). I left it as I found it and continued to explore the surroundings to find something more inspirational.
Not too far away, more or less halfway of the left-side shore, there was a stage on which a music band played a sort of heavy metal, sounding similar to the Polish metal band… oh, I forgot, what was its name (ett namn)?
Seepsteen (Sias van Schalkwyk)
Oh yes, the name was Vader. Maybe to spice up the atmosphere of the heavy and furious songs, the weather (ett väder) at the venue was about to get bad (such a shame!), as I saw a big grey-blue cloud (ett moln) thereover.I gave the gig a better look.
Seemingly, the frontman had a sibling (ett syskon) in the same band, but the difference between them was that, unlike his brother, he wore a weird blue beard (ett skägg).
Maybe that’s because he’d always had a big ego (ett stort ego) and wanted to show off? Or simply got crazy on drugs (ett knark). Apart from that, whenever he didn’t sing he sipped his beer (ett öl). And…
If you would like to know how my short story continues, I can only say, that on the right side of the beach one can see a big company (ett företag) which processes the water (ett vatten) to make it clear again before letting it into the sea.
Not to mention other countless objects. If one day there’s no more place available at the seaside, I’ll certainly check what’s behind the distant tip of land so that I could go on with my travel. And you’re invited too!
Mariusz Hebdzynski
Let’s take a look
That’s not a place to sugarcoat anything so let’s get straight to the meat of the matter.
Have you noticed how static Mariusz’s picture is? There is very little action and far too few emotions. If you see a book which reminds of your mistakes you should punch it time and time again! Guys on the stage should go crazy since they are likely to be stoned!
Action and emotions are the mortar of your associations. If used appropriately, they can increase your recall manyfold.
too few distinctive places
I don’t know exactly how the said beach looks like. But the thing about beaches is that there are not many distinctive places there to place many pictures. It might work assuming that we don’t flood such a scene with too many associations but in the long run it’s not good enough.
Variations of this method
You might say that the example used in this article was pretty useless, after all, there were only two articles. What about German where there are 3 of them?! Or about Russian where the grammatical gender is not even specified by an article?!
Well, the main principle doesn’t change – we just need two distinctive locations to memorize the grammatical gender. Logically, the nouns which don’t appear in any of the stories placed in these locations must fall into the third gender category – piece of cake!
That’s it, have fun and let me know if you decide to use this method (or have used it already!).
Growing-up has to be one of the saddest things ever from the outside perspective. It’s like a backward evolution. You see how amazingly curious creatures turn into mindless corporate drones. You see how the pursuit of knowledge turns into the pursuit of money.
I believe that curiosity and the power to create are the very things that can ward off all the negative in the world. However, for those qualities to survive, you have to feed them continuously. The problem is that modern times actively discourage people from becoming apolymath.
What’s more, we live in the conviction that there is not enough lifetime to master many areas of expertise.
I want to show you that it’s possible if you play your cards right. Within your lifetime, you can become great at many things. But before we get to the specifics, let’s start with a fundamental question:
How to Master Many Fields of Knowledge – Is It Worth It?
I like to think of knowing many things as of the magical glasses – the more you know, the more you can see.
Being stuck in one field of specialty is nothing short of being blindfolded. You can go throughout life without being able to spot all those enchanting intricacies coming from the expanded perspective.
Everything starts making sense. You know why leaves are green. You know why bread turns brown.
Unfortunately, being good at many things is not encouraged these days. We want everyone to be ultra-specialized, which breeds ignorance in almost all other areas.
Kant elegantly touched upon it years ago:
“It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all.
I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.
The guardians who have kindly taken upon themselves the work of supervision will soon see to it that by far the largest part of mankind (including the entire fair sex) should consider the step forward to maturity not only as difficult but also as highly dangerous.
Having first infatuated their domesticated animals, and carefully prevented the docile creatures from daring to take a single step without the leading-strings to which they are tied, they next show them the danger which threatens them if they try to walk unaided.
Now this danger is not in fact so very great, for they would certainly learn to walk eventually after a few falls.
But an example of this kind is intimidating, and usually frightens them off from further attempts.”
It couldn’t be any more accurate. Of course, we don’t have to know everything. But will it hurt to learn just a little bit from many areas of knowledge? Were we created to be stuck in one groove all of our lives?
Why You Should Master Many Fields of Knowledge
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
~ Robert Anson Heinlein
Even though it’s advisable to master at least one field of knowledge intimately, it’s usually not necessary to do it for more than one.
How to Master Many Fields of Knowledge – the Pareto Principle
One of the first logical foundations which will allow you to build a wide array of skills is the Pareto Principle.
The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
In other words, find out what’s essential in a given field of knowledge and learn it. This way, you will be able to double-down on what’s important and save a lot of time in the process.
How much time is needed to be good?
Of course, just telling you to apply the Pareto Principle would be lazy. We need more specifics.
From the work of K. Anders Ericsson, we know that to be world-class at something, you need about 10k hours of deliberate practice.
Of course, throughout the years, many other researchers have proven that this number might vary depending on, among others, the complexity of a given skill.
However, for simplicity’s sake, I will stick to this number.
Even though the number looks scary, you should not forget that you don’t need to become world-class in every field of knowledge. With just about 1-2k hours, you might become an ordinary expert.
If you apply the Pareto Principle to this number, you will see that with just 200-400 hours of your time, you will be able to understand most of the things in this field.
Yikes. Maybe that still looks way too scary. But there is one more thing you can do to learn even smarter.
Working smarter – The Pareto Principle of the Pareto Principle
Once again – the Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. However, if you apply the Pareto principle to the Pareto principle, you might see that roughly 64% of the effects come from 4% of the causes.
It means that if you can determine the absolute essentials, you will be able to become good at something while spending only 4% of your time/effort.
In other words, with just between 40-80 hours, you will know your way around a given discipline.
Example 1
For example, what if you don’t trust your endocrinologist and would like to, sort of, become one.
Easy, it’s enough that you learn:
what hormones are
how they function
what are the main hormones in our body
how they are produced
sprinkle on top some knowledge about Type 1 and 2 Diabetes, thyroid disorders, PCOS, cortisol- and testosterone-related disorders.
As difficult as it’s to believe, most specialists deal with the same old cases day in, day out.
Remember – you don’t need to know every possible exception to every possible rule to be good.
Example 2
What if you want to be a semi-professional gourmet? No problem! Memorize the scale for describing foods and start tasting!
Mayonnaise, for example, is supposed to be evaluated along:
1) six dimensions of appearance
(color, color intensity, chroma, shine, lumpiness, and bubbles)
2) ten dimensions of texture:
(adhesiveness to lips, firmness, denseness, and so on)
3) and fourteen dimensions of flavor split among three
subgroups:
a) aromatics (eggy, mustardy, and so forth);
b) basic tastes (salty, sour, and sweet);
c) chemical-feeling factors (burn, pungent, astringent).
Example 3
What if you want to get good at persuading people (because manipulation is such a dirty word)? I would dare to say that reading Cialdini’s classic book should be enough to be at least decent at this craft. The rest is practice and the automation of those rules.
A famous quote by Bruce Lee echoes that thought:
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Oftentimes, you might discover that a slightly smaller knowledge that is automated is much better than knowing a lot of theory.
Even though we are talking about mastering potentially a lot of fields of knowledge, we all have to start somewhere. Here is a simple list that might help you with the preparation process.
1. Make a list of all the things you want to learn and choose no more than 3
Once you master those fields of expertise, you will be able to move on to the next ones.
2. Make sure they are potentially applicable to your life
I want to emphasize that you can learn whatever you want. However, if you choose useful skills at the beginning, you will find it much easier to find time to practice them.
Learning practical things is also extremely rewarding and can help you keep your motivation high.
3. Choose how much time you want to devote to them daily
I don’t want to be too lax in my calculations, that’s why I am going to assume that being good enough at something requires 100 hours.
That tells us that with about 1 hour per day for each field of knowledge, you should be able to know them relatively well in a bit over three months.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that the more you know, the easier it will be for you to acquire even more skills and knowledge (so-called the Snowball Effect).
Remember that you don’t have to cling to these numbers religiously – they are here to impose some general guidelines.
4. Determine what you should learn
You can try to google what are the essentials of the given area of specialty or contact somebody who does it for a living. That should do the trick.
5. Get your learning materials
Once you know what to learn, this step shouldn’t be too difficult. The only thing I can add here is this – make sure that your source of knowledge is reliable. You don’t want to waste your time remembering things that have no reflection in reality.
How to Master Many Fields of Knowledge – Recommended Strategies
Congratulations! Now you know roughly how to organize your learning. It’s time you familiarized yourself with the strategies which might help you achieve your goals faster and with less effort.
1. Use deliberate practice
Deliberate practice is a highly structured activity engaged in with the specific goal of improving performance. – source.
Common characteristics of deep learning:
it gives you a specific goal
it requires your full attention
it’s energy-devouring and exhausting but not time-consuming
it gives you feedback
In other words, deliberate practice gives you a goal and tells you to mercilessly concentrate on a given concept until you’re ready to move on to the next one.
I will be the first to admit that it’s not the most pleasant learning strategy. However, if you power through it, you will find out that it’s the quickest one out there. For me, a little pain for a lot of gains is undoubtedly a trade-off I am willing to make (read more about deliberate practice here).
2. Combine skills (aka laddering, skill transfer)
It’s important to realize that a lot of different skills might be combined to save you time and make your practice sessions more productive.
For example, you can:
exercise and listen to a lecture at the same time
learn a language and use it to master a particular area of knowledge
learn how to negotiate to get a job in a different department where you will be able to use your newly acquired programming skills
The number of combinations is endless. Give it some thought and contemplate what kind of combinations might work for you.
I like to watch pointless YT videos from time to time, but I never do it without a work-out session.
3. Use and automate your knowledge
Not every skill has to be useful, but it’s certainly much easier to maintain it if you automate its use, and you can use it. At least on a semi-regular basis (read more about automating your skills here).
4. Do interesting things / choose difficult projects
Simple tasks don’t require much brainpower – probably that’s why soon multifunctional AI blenders will replace 50% of our planet.
If you want to let, your talents shine, always strive to take up challenging projects which involve the use of many different skills. It doesn’t matter whether they are a part of your job description or just a personal project. Try to make them relatively challenging relative to your current skill set (read more about doing the hard work here).
5. Help others
Helping others has to be one of the best ways to master many fields of knowledge. There are thousands of people in the world who might benefit from your expertise. Find them and do your best to help them alleviate at least part of their problems.
Not only will you feel slightly better and decrease your chances of becoming a skull ashtray for all the hellish abominations below us, but you will also consolidate your skills significantly better.
Why?
Because the more you’re able to embed your knowledge in reality, the easier it is to remember it.
How to Master Many Fields of Knowledge – Summary
Many people think that trying to master many fields of knowledge is silly. Why bother if you can pay somebody for their expertise or do something less taxing.
However, the truth is that doing so can be one of the most rewarding experiences in your life. Once you wrap your head around main concepts from many different disciplines, your life will improve. You, in turn, will become more confident.
And the entire process doesn’t have to take that much time if you stick to the strategies mentioned in this article. Good luck on your journey!
I guess that I didn’t take this one, crucial thing into consideration when I published my article about fun ways to read.
Some people have the short attention span or even add ADD. And it’s quite difficult to read anything with such a condition. Or to do anything for that matter. You know how it goes – halfway through an article tears come down to your eyes and your brain starts yelling
It’s like being drunk – you start with one activity (like reading), your mind goes blank and just a few moments later you realize that you’re arranging matches in the order of importance.
“How did I get here?”. And it happens to the best of us.
This video serves us as a grim reminder of our times.
As you know Wikipedia is available in many languages. What you might not know that there is the magical link in the left top corner of the website which randomly chooses some Wiki page for you!
How AMAZING is that?!
I’m seriously addicted to browsing Wikipedia daily. And I hope you can get hooked on it as well.After all, there are not many beneficial addictions around, so don’t be picky!
Instructions are staggeringly simple:
1) change the language of the Wikipedia to your target language (in my case it’s often Spanish and French) 2) click this wonderful button 3) start reading
Advantages of this approach
It’s not a perfect solution (but is there really such a thing?!) but you have to appreciate the obvious advantages of this method
1) You get your daily reading practice done (duh!)
2)The reading material is diversified
3) If you get bored you can switch what you read within just a few seconds
4)You boost your creativity. It’s a great way to ensure the constant inflow of interesting information.Since creativity arises from a constant churn of ideas, it’s a great way to improve your problem-solving skills
5)You increase your general knowledge. You’ll be shocked how many breath-taking things you can get to know in just 15 minutes per day.If you aim at being silver-tongued and well-rounded, it’s definitely the way to go!
Go ahead, give it a try! And let me know if you find something interesting!
It's generally true that we all learn effectively in a very similar. However, we certainly react differently to bigger workloads. Some find it motivating; some find it tedious and frustrating. This difference is obvious even among my students.
Some write to me that they find flashcards so interesting that they can work for hours on end. Others start strong and find themselves more and more exhausted with every passing week. It's understandable - high learning pace always comes with the price. The prices, in this case, is increased effort.
You probably have noticed that regardless of your attitude to learning, you get really weary after some time. It might be 20 or 40 minutes, but it inevitably happens. One way to combat this, like I have suggested in one of the previous articles, is to break your learning into many sessions. However, there is one more strategy that will allow you to both increases the duration of your session and the joy you get out of it.
We can achieve all those things by manipulating your levels of dopamine. Let me explain step-by-step how it works.
What Is Dopamine?
In the brain, dopamine functions mainly as a neurotransmitter. The brain includes several distinct dopamine pathways, one of which plays a major role in the motivational component of reward-motivated behavior.
The anticipation of most types of rewards increases the level of dopamine in the brain, and many addictive drugs increase dopamine release or block its reuptake into neurons following release. The dopamine release is also necessary for Initial memory consolidation.
The most important information for us is that it's the main driver of reward learning in the brain. It makes us focused and vigilant and craving for more of any dopamine-boosting stimulus.
How Can You Increase Dopamine Levels?
Now that you roughly know what dopamine is and how it can drive your learning, it's time to answer the following question:
What can you do to boost your dopamine levels?
It's simple. Lots and lots of cocaine instead of sugar in your coffee! Lol 😄 Ok, not really. It's not a very sustainable approach. The answer is quite complex, and it envelopes many lifestyle-related things.
1. Diet
For example, low-carb diets are naturally more dopamine-based as they revolve around lots of protein-heavy products. Those products, on the other hand, contain an amino acid called Tyrosine that is a precursor to dopamine (i.e. it gets converted into it).
Carbohydrate-heavy diets bring quite the opposite effect as such products are very Tryptophane-rich. Tryptophane is also an amino-acid but, contrary to Tyrosine, it gets converted into serotonin, which then, gets converted into melatonin. I am sure that you have already heard something about this hormone. Melatonin is one of the main hormones that signal that it's time to go to sleep and thus makes us drowsy and sleepy.
In other words, to simplify things:
Low-carb diets -> more dopamine -> you're more vigilant and focused
High-carb diets- > more serotonine -> more melatonin -> you become drowsy and sleepy
There are also lots of herbs and plants that can further boost this effect, however, just temporarily. One of the best examples is coffee that releases dopamine in the prefrontal cortex.
Any kind of exercise and especially high-intensity exercise will help you to achieve the same effect (Loprinzi, P. D. (2019)). It's a good idea to interrupt your learning sessions to do some push-ups, squats, jumping jacks, or whatever else that floats your boat. Not only will you look better, but you will also boost your concentration and tickle your reward centres the right way.
3. Novelty
All those basic tricks above will definitely help, don't get me wrong, especially if you haven't been eating well or exercising. Then the effects should be even more impressive. However, there is one more thing which I find even more useful if you have lots of reviews to do.
Tons of flashcards usually mean one thing for your brain: BORING! One thing you should know about the brain is that it's a disgusting junkie. It likes varied and exciting things. That's why social media are so addictive. One "ping" and your brain goes haywire. "Who could it be?! Have they written something nice about me?!: Hell, most of us can't even go to the toilet without a mobile phone anymore because there is nothing to do. And if that happens, we start reading product labels to keep ourselves entertained.
Now guess how exciting a 2-hour ANKI session is according to this sponge? Yep. You're right - not very. This is our bane, but interestingly, we can use this "property" of our brain to our advantage.
All we need to learn longer is to provide our brains with a little bit of Novelty. If all the flashcards look the same, even if they are pictures, our brain just shuts off after some time.
Here are some ways in which Novelty affects our brain:
How Novelty Affects Your Brain and How It Can Help You With Making Learning Sessions Longer
There is a ton of research on the role of dopamine and novelty in learning, but I will do my best to not go-over-the top. Here is a handful of studies you can read on that topic:
"The major "novelty center" of the brain--called the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA)--might be activated by the unexpectedness of a stimulus, the emotional arousal it causes, or the need to respond behaviorally."
"Researchers have long suspected that the human brain is particularly attracted to new information and that this might be important for learning. They are now a step closer to understanding why. A region in the midbrain (substantia nigra/ventral tegmental), which is responsible for regulating our motivation and reward-processing, responds better to Novelty than to the familiar. This system also regulates levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain, and could aid learning."
"We find that familiarity increased retrieval of other unrelated memories but reduced the chances for memory formation. On the other hand, Novelty enhanced the later formation of distinct memories without worrying about previous experiences."
How To Use Novelty To Make Your Learning Sessions Longer and More Enjoyable
I have been experimenting with a new approach to doing ANKI for quite some time, and I must say that even I am surprised by the results. It seems that incorporating this dopamine-centred approach can significantly boost your willingness to learn.
Doing it is very easy.
You need to interweave your "normal" flashcards with dopamine (i.e. novelty-related) flashcards.
Those dopamine-boosting flashcards should be different from flashcards in order to keep the novelty factor at a high level.
Such cards can include the following things that have already been mentioned in other units or will be mentioned in the modules to come:
Jokes
Gifs
Funny pictures
Other kinds of pictures
Snapshots from movies/TV Series
Short videos
Anecdotes
Lines from movies
Fragments of lyrics
Proverbs
Excerpts from articles/books
Those elements, ideally, should be related to your target language. However, even if not all of them are, that's ok. They will still boost your dopamine levels.
If you take a cold, hard look at those elements, you will quickly notice that NONE of them forces you to retrieve anything. That's one of the reasons why they become such a welcome distraction. Ordinary flashcards demand effortful retrieval while those remaining flashcards provide you with distraction and additional passive exposure to your target language.
Feel free to experiment with this strategy and let me know about your results.
Make Your Learning Sessions Longer and More Enjoyable by Manipulating Dopamine Levels - Summary
Dopamine is the main driver of reward learning in the brain. Its release helps us stay motivated, interested and vigilant.
The four simple ways to boost your dopamine levels are:
low-carb diets
exercise
supplements (e.g. some herbs or caffeine)
novelty
Out of all four of them, novelty can certainly give you the easiest boost. What's more, it doesn't take much to introduce this strategy into your learning plan. All you need is to interweave your normal flashcards with anything that you deem fun, funny or plain interesting.
Keep in mind that those dopamine flashcards shouldn't force you to retrieve any information effortfully. They are there as a welcome distraction. You can treat them like a friend, telling you a joke or showing some meme.
I have never had big problems with doing my reviews. Still, with this strategy, I have noticed even more motivation to go through my flashcards.
Feel free to experiment with this strategy and let me know about your results!
Done reading? Time to learn!
Reading articles online is a great way to expand your knowledge. However, the sad thing is that after barely 1 day, we tend to forget most of the things we have read.
I am on the mission to change it. I have created over 11 flashcards that you can download to truly learn information from this article. It’s enough to download ANKI, and you’re good to go. This way, you will be able to speed up your learning in a more impactful way.
Cognitive resources are limited so it makes sense to use them wisely.
In everyday situations, there is no necessity to stimulate our brain to be “original”.
Let’s be honest – how challenging is learning 5 new words per day?
Not very.
You can use any learning method and you will still succeed.
Such questions can really make your brain sweat and question the effectiveness of strategies you’ve been using so far.
3) They make you use the strategies you have heard of but couldn’t be bothered to use
Be honest with yourself. How many articles about productivity and learning strategies have you read so far?
20, 50, 100?
And how many pieces of advice have you used practically? I guess that this ratio doesn’t look favorably, right? I know it all too well. I tend to hoard hundreds of articles about different learning strategies. And then I struggle to use even just a few of them.
Because why bother?
After all, we are all set in our ways.
That’s why the period of preparation for such tasks gives me the opportunity to dust off the long list of mental tools I have gathered throughout the years.
Tools which I haven’t had the motivation to use before or simply didn’t need at the time.
4) They push the borders of what you previously thought is possible
Challenge breeds inspiration.
If you force yourself to do things which are seemingly impossible or you have no skills for, you give yourself an opportunity to push the boundaries of your comfort zone.
And more often than not, you will find the way to accomplish your goals
Choose one thing you´d like to try but are afraid to do wrong, and go for it!
5) They Boost Your General Life Satisfaction And Confidence
It’s time to be frank here. I didn’t enjoy these challenges. Want to know what was the result of learning over 850 during one day? A terrible headache. I have never had a migraine in my life but I assume that it’s exactly what it feels like.
Just the slightest sound at the end of this day was sending surges of pain throughout my head and made me feel as if my brain was screwed by a nail-pawed hedgehog.
Did I hate it? You betcha.
Did I feel damn proud the next day? Hell yeah!
You see, normally I am very self-conscious and critical about myself.
But I doubt that I’ll ever forget the pride I felt the next day after “over-850- words-per-day challenge”.
It was verging on unhealthy Johny Bravo-style self-love.
But I’ll be damned if I didn’t deserve it.
Conclusion
As weird as setting big goals in language learning might seem, I have found them time and time again to be one of the most reliable catalysts for self-improvement.
Sure, it´s comfy to do the same ol’, same ol’ day in and day out.
But if you don´t challenge yourself and try new things, how will you realize your true potential?
Now I would love to get to know your thought on this subject.
What do you think about using big goals as a way to optimize your learning strategies?
Is it a “hell yeah” or “a little bit over-the-top”?
[su_frame]Today we have a fantastic post from Sean Hopwood, MBA – founder and President of Day Translations, Inc., an online localization and Spanish translation services. Check out his website, and enjoy the post![/su_frame]
As one of the most spoken languages in the world, Spanish deserves a place on your list of languages to master.
Many a native English speaker, however, has struggled with the Spanish tongue because it requires a greater level of flexibility than English. You’ll have to work hard at polishing your pronunciation if you want to be able to speak with a solidly good Spanish accent.
It also means not despairing or quitting on your dream of speaking Spanish like a native when yet another Spanish speaker fails to understand you.
If you’re aiming to take your Spanish skills to a higher level, read the following 5 fun ways of improving your Spanish pronunciation to find out innovative ways of speaking more like a local.
1. Pick Your Accent
If you’re just starting to learn Spanish, you may be having problems distinguishing between different Spanish accents. Argentina, Spain, Mexico, Cuba and all other Spanish speaking countries in the world speak their own version of Spanish.
Some are so dramatically different, they may not even sound like Spanish to you.
However, don’t feel overwhelmed. The first step in improving your accent is to pick a Spanish speaking country whose accent and dialect you want to focus on.
Does Spain resonate with you because it is in Europe? Or Mexico due to the dominance of Mexican Spanish in the United States? Simply listen to the dialects that are out there and choose one that works for you and stick with it.
Once you adopt the following fun ways of improving your Spanish pronunciation and perfect your accent, adapting it to the Spanish speaking country you are in will not be so difficult.
2. Monitor Your “B’s” and “V’s”
Many students of Spanish tend to have problems differentiating the Spanish ‘b’ from ‘v’. To the untrained ear, these two letters can sound very similar – so similar you might think someone asked you for a ‘beso‘ (kiss) when what they really said is ‘vaso‘ (glass).
Let’s take this step by step: to emit the perfect Spanish pronunciation of ‘v’, for a second let your teeth rest on your bottom lip as if you are going to say the word ‘vest‘ and practice pairing this ‘v’ with the Spanish vowels of ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’ and ‘u’.
The Spanish ‘b’ is similar to the English ‘b’, as in ‘break’ or ‘berries’ and you may also practice pairing the Spanish ‘b’ with the language’s vowels.
Switch back and forth between these mouth positions when you pronounce words like ‘viento‘ (wind) and ‘bella‘ (pretty). If the two sounds sound similar, then you are doing something right.
3. Pronounce those Accents
Amongst the fun ways of improving your Spanish pronunciation is emphasizing Spanish accents. It may be all right for someone who is new to the Spanish language to ignore the little dashes written above a certain syllable in a Spanish word, but if you really want to perfect your Spanish pronunciation, it’s time you paid attention.
Word accents are especially important in Spanish because not only do they alter the meaning of the word, they can make all the difference on whether or not you’ll be understood.
For example, the word for ‘father’ is written as ‘papá’ with the accent on the last letter meaning you should emphasize the last bit of the word more. When you miss the accent, you have the evenly pronounced word ‘papa,’ which means ‘potato.’
Don’t make the mistake of calling someone’s father a potato by paying attention to word accents! One of the best ways to practice your accented words is to read out loud a lot. With practice, you will visually recall the words in your head as you hear yourself and others speak the accented words.
4. Tongue Twist Your Way to Good Pronunciation
Tongue twisters or ‘trabalenguas‘ is a wonderful way to improve your Spanish accent and pronunciation. The repetitive aspect of tongue twisters may make it hard for you to say the tongue twisting phrase quickly but they are relatively easy to commit to memory.
Each tongue twister gives your tongue a good workout and helps loosen it up so that it can easily adapt to Spanish pronunciation. Online, you can find a good many ‘trabalenguas’ that you can say daily to practice your pronunciation. Not only that, you will also be adding to your vocabulary. Here’s an example:
Tres tigres tragaban trigo, tres tigres en un tribal. ¿Que tigre tragaba mas..? Los tres igual.
Do you want to give it a try? Here are some websites with challenging ‘trabalenguas’:
When you’ve been around Spanish speakers long enough, you’ll notice they tend to occasionally link or blend words together.
When will they do this?
When the last letter of a certain word matches the first letter of the following word. For instance, the phrase ‘dos sacos’ (two coats) would sound like ‘dosacos.’
Spanish speakers also link words when the last letter of a certain word is a consonant and the first letter of the following word is a vowel. The question “¿Estás enamorado?” (Are you in love?) would sound linked, as in “¿Estásenamorado?”
Another instance of linking words happens when the last letter of a word and the first letter of the following word are both vowels, such as in the sentence: “Ella está enfadada.” (She’s angry.) The untrained ear would hear it as one long word: “ellaestáenfadada.”
Learning how to link words is one of the fun ways of improving your Spanish pronunciation. Developing an ear for linked words also improves your listening skills and better prepares you as you practice linking and blending your words.
In the end, the goal is to comprehend what Spanish speakers are saying when they blend words.
Conclusion
These 5 tips are certain to help you perfect your accent so that you can communicate more clearly with your fellow Spanish speakers.
While focusing on your pronunciation is one aspect of improving your command of the language, don’t forget to keep up with the other aspects of language learning such as grammar, reading, vocabulary, and speaking.
Focusing your full attention on Spanish learning while tackling all aspects of the language will gradually help you achieve your dream of speaking the language fluently.
Author Bio:
Sean Hopwood, MBA is founder and President of Day Translations, Inc., an online localization and Spanish translation services provider, dedicated to the improvement of global communications. By helping both corporations and the individual, Day Translations provides a necessary service at the same time as developing opportunities for greater sympathy and understanding worldwide.
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