Whether it’s a form of note-taking or regular repetition or the like, what are some self-education techniques and tools you’ve developed to help yourself learn on your own?
It’s always interesting imo to read about how some folks teach themselves different stuff.
Getting good sleep helps a lot. That’s how you store what you learned. I found trying to explain the subject matter to someone else, real, imaginary, or rubber duck, helped me figure out what I didn’t know.
For stuff like chess, programming, drawing, etc where there is a skill you can learn…
Just do it. Every day. Do it in manageable steps. So for example if you wanna program, make a goal to create a calculator app. Then work out how to do that. Then do it.
Just keep doing progressively more difficult projects. After calculator app maybe a demo/visualization of sorting algorithms. And then a basic web server. And then a 2d video game. Etc
Learning by doing is the only real way to learn. Even in CS school the classes were great for certain things (I liked data structures & algorithms) but generally speaking the classes are there to facilitate you teaching yourself by doing.
Tldr: do the thing you wanna learn. Do it regularly. Every day if possible. Even if only 5 minutes.
For programming languages, it helps to find a task that actually fits the language well.
I learned Python as a junior sysadmin in the early 2000s specifically because it was the best language for plugging together different Internet services. The senior sysadmin on my team had written a piece of code in Python to migrate users from one email server to another, by connecting with IMAP to each server and transferring their mail. I needed to maintain this code, so I studied up on Python specifically focusing on the email libraries.
I was coming from Perl, which was the best language at the time for certain sysadmin tasks (like logs analysis). But Python’s built-in libraries made it really easy to work with email servers, web servers, and so on. One language feature I really appreciated was the exception system, where many errors that might pass unchecked in C or Perl (and produce unpredictable behavior later) would instead crash the program with a useful diagnostic message.
I learned Haskell several years later because I’d gone to work in Silicon Valley and all the cool CS nerds were into Haskell. I didn’t find a task that actually needed it until I found myself working on a problem that involved both text parsing and combinatorics. You need to express math facts about trees of strings? Haskell is the right tool for the job.
I’d learned elementary C in high school, but I’m not sure I really got C until I had picked up an electronics hobby in my 30s and built myself a blinky bike light controlled by an AVR microcontroller. C on an 8-bit Harvard-architecture machine is way different from C on i386 or x86_64 Linux.
When you feel like head is bloated or you start being easily distracted, take a break and do something to ease yourself. I usually play a game for 30 minutes or something.
Some days it just doesn’t work and then you gotta give it a break. Forcing knowledge onto yourself does not work long term in my opinion.
What I also find handy: Take a walk and think about what you’ve learned.
I’m feeling this information bloat for weeks now. I have not tried taking a walk tho. mind I ask if I should try to think on nothing or focus on the thing I want to learn/that’s bloating me?
I like how we use bloat here
A good one is a half hour sit-com. Like The Simpsons, or Big Bang Theory. Whatever you prefer. Take a few minutes to slow your brain down, put on a sit-com or cartoon and try to relax. When the shows over, get back to it. I like this way because it times itself, I can’t just add five more minutes, the shows over.
problem is I only like media that makes you think, not in a deep way, but in an intriguing fantasy way. And it doesn’t help much when I try to get my mind off of things and find Gravity Falls 11 years late.
This happened a week or two ago.
Walking helps to get your mind free. I usually listen to a podcast and think a bit about what I’ve read. Trying to understand it.
I’m not a pro, but that usually helps a lot.
For straight memorising, I used to rewrite by hand the text. I took a long time, but I was stuck in my head since I had to “think” every word as I wrote it. Then usually I didn’t even had to read it again. But that was in high school, so probably it wouldn’t work that well now
Not sure if this is taught in school anymore, but I found the outline process of note-taking to be helpful in both lectures and reading material.
This was the most decent website I came up with that describes the process: https://www.taskade.com/blog/outline-method-of-note-taking/
I felt it was the best way of quickly organizing topics, subtopics, and important items in a way that was simple to read and understand relationships between subjects.
Here is a free evidence-based resource for self-esteem.
I used to use this website a lot with my clients when I was a caseworker. I’ve found some of the resources helpful myself. Here is their resource page. Distress Intolerance is a neat one.
Thanks gonads125! This looks really useful
“A Kite in the Wind” has been pretty great for helping learn to write. I work as a storyboard artist and I’m trying to develop my own stuff, but I struggle with the writing part. This book helped, especially the first two essays. Remarkably practical advice; stuff you just don’t hear anywhere else.
https://www.amazon.com/Kite-Wind-Fiction-Writers-Their/dp/1595340726
Thanks for the book suggestion! I checked and it’s available via my library, so I may have to give it a read sometime!
I am a big fan of the Cornell Note Taking System. It really helped organize my undergrad notes much better than any other system I tried. Also, it is the only system that is Andy Bernard approved!
Making good goals and evaluating your progress periodically.
There are a lot of resources you can use to get guidance on what constitutes a “good” goal, but the basics are that it should be measurable, have a clearly defined end date or timeline, and it should be attainable but still challenging.
So your goal of “I want to learn Japanese” might become “by November 2024 I want to be able to pass the 3rd level Japanese language proficiency test.”
“I want to run a marathon” might look like “I want to complete the 2024 Chicago marathon in under 5 hours.”
Once you have your goal I find it helps to sort of work it backwards from the finish line. In the Japanese language example you work through the steps it takes to pass the test and set checkpoints along the way. These checkpoints can also be structured as goals: “I need to memorize 15 kanji per month to prepare for the test,” “I need to complete one lesson per month in order to reach the level of proficiency needed,” etc.
And then you evaluate your progress periodically to see if you are moving at the pace you expected. I like to check in about every one to two weeks, but no more than two weeks in between check-ins or I start to lose sight of what happened since last check-in.
If you’re moving faster than you thought, maybe you can adjust your checkpoints or work in additional learning tasks. If you’re moving slower than you’d hoped you can look back on what roadblocks prevented you from progressing and make a plan to deal with future roadblocks, or even adjust your overall goal/expectations if needed.
I read out loud. It helps me remember what I’m reading.
