Learning How to Learn
By Barbara Oakley PhD, Terrence Sejnowski PhD, Alistair McConville
To start out with this report; I strongly agreed with the idea, being in groups of like-minded individuals, of the second guest author from Chapter Ten (10). For instance, in school if you like electronics you might join the A/V (Audio / Video) club, or maybe a computer club. The same goes with Meetups for grown ups, or maybe kids. In the case for myself, I am trying to learn Mandarin, and I joined a Meetup group for people learning to speak with other Mandarin speakers. Sadly, my current skills match that to a preschooler (I need to learn my pinyins). In the case where you might not find a group or meetup; make your own. I may not have the ambition to do that, nor the time to devote to something of that endeavor, but that should be an option for people or students to take.
Chapter Twelve (12), I can relate to with my current trade. As a web developer, maybe I should consider myself lucky that in this trade you are going to learning all the time as new, emerging technologies will come out year after year. For instance, I had felt that PHP was starting to feel stale, but I noticed a trend to using JavaScript for everything. I was slightly confused, and I had no idea what was Node.js, NPM, and others.
To keep things interesting for me, I started using different techniques and frameworks with PHP like the Laravel framework. Doing this kept my “brain links” growing, but if I kept doing the same thing repeatedly then all I was doing was lazy-learning. Meanwhile with me working on new technologies like Vue and Node.js (from my project reports on Fridays); I am doing interleaving learning as I am mixing things up with my web development skill sets.
As for Chapter Thirteen (13), one thing that I had noticed when working on a project, and if I am listening to music or even a podcast I do not focus so well on either. I keep telling myself that it was just background noise. In one chapter, they refer to learning in different environments and music was one characteristic of an environment.
When studying for a test, in a library, you may get yourself familiar with the characteristics of that environment, but when you keep going to the library you get used to it. You get more comfortable, but once you take the test in a classroom, your “natural habitat” is gone and you find yourself in an alien surroundings.
When it comes to work; it is nice to get yourself in a different area to work; for example, working at an internet cafe like Panera's (I like those Turkey Bacon Bravo sandwiches) or in most people’s cases: Starbucks. Just be careful with your Wifi. Switch it around, go to one of those places, a library, or some place that you will want to work.
Now that I learned how to “learn” better; I’ll take what I learned from the book, and apply it to different skills that I need in the future. There is so much to learn in the web development, and other IT fields like machine learning, but there is one thing that I might need a little more help to learn and that is languages. No, I am not talking about C++, Perl, or Python. I am referring to is: 中文. Yes, foreign languages, specifically Mandarin Chinese, but this book will not teach me how to learn chinese. Instead Forever Fluent will teach me how to learn any language, and help prevent myself from forgetting it. This will be my next audiobook though I did not “read” that much last week.
Forever Fluent
By Gabriel Wyner
Chapter one (1) of this language book is mostly the author’s life experience with learning a language. There was a couple of funny parts about cheating a test, and suffering the consequences, but in the end it is an introduction. He does point out three key things when starting a new language:
Start pronunciations
Avoid translations
Spaced Repetition Systems (SRS)