I’ve spent 12 years in school and 5 years in university, but in those 17 years, nobody ever bothered to show me how to learn. But the reality is that learning is easy when you know how your brain works.
In this essay I will introduce you to 5 learning hacks that will increase your learning success and maybe also your grades:
1 . Have fun
After spending years in schools & colleges, we tend to forget that learning is a fun activity. Small children love to learn new things, it is when coercion starts at school that our motivation for learning dwindles.
So I recommend not forcing yourself to learn things that don’t interest you. In most cases, the content will not stick anyway.
However, I understand that this is not always possible when you are still at school.
In this case, try to find an angle that interests you. For example, if you love physics and math but hate history, you can make the latter more interesting by learning more about the experiments of Archimedes, Pythagoras, or Galileo. This also works the other way around: As a history nerd, you could spark your interest in math by learning how the old greeks calculated the radius of the earth or the number Pi, or how Galileo disproving Aristotle’s theory of gravity by dropping objects from the tower of Pisa.
2. Use mnemonics
“Mnemonics are mainly about visualizing abstract information. This works because our mind is a visual machine: It doesn’t work well with abstract or non-personal information like numbers, but it is pretty good at remembering pictures and stories.
As a consequence, converting numbers into relatable pictures makes them a lot easier to remember. And the more humorous, absurd, or sexual the images become, the easier it is to decipher the abstract information later.
But mnemonics don’t just work with numbers: They’re also useful for all kinds of information that doesn’t trigger images in your head.
Let’s say that you are trying to learn German and you have difficulties remembering the word “schnell”, which means fast.
Schnell kind of sounds similar to the word snail. So if you picture a snail that is running very fast at the 100 meters speed race, you will probably remember this German vocabulary simply because of the absurdity of this image.”
Teachers often despise mnemonics, because they don’t help you to get a deeper understanding of a topic. However, they are absolutely useful for learning vocabularies or technical terms. They’re like a screwdriver in your tool kit: you wouldn’t try to solve every problem with the screwdriver, but it is the best tool available for certain tasks.
3. Remember everything with Spaced Repetition
No matter what you learn, if you are not repeating the knowledge it will fade away. It was Hermann Ebbinghaus, who suggested that information loss over time follows a forgetting curve, but that forgetting could be reset with repetition based on active recall.
So if you repeat information at the right time, you stop forgetting it. Also, with each successful repetition, you can increase the time interval between the next repetition.
Spaced repetition can easily be done with physical flashcards in a physical box. However, in modern times people mostly do it with apps like Anki, that show you the right flashcards at the right time.
4. Take notes
It was at university, where I got my most toxic learning advice:
“Don’t take notes during lecture. Everything relevant is in the script.”
This is terrible advice because when we are taking notes, we force ourselves to formulate the content into our own words.
As Sönke Ahrens put it: “We tend to think we understand what we read — until we try to rewrite it in our own words.”
Writting is thinking: if you write about a topic, you will immediately notice your logical loopholes. Just when you are able to formulate something clearly in your own words, you can be sure that you have understood the topic.
Note-taking also forces you to read more deliberately. So you will do deep reading instead of superficial speed reading.
Moreover, note-taking is a gift for your future self: You take a note so that you will stumble over it again in the future when you need it.
5. Build a Zettelkasten
If you want to stumble over a note in the future, you need to save it. Normally, we take notes in a linear way. This is problematic because we tend to not look back at older notes and there is little or no connection between new and old notes.
The slip box (also known as a Zettelkasten) addresses this issue: It is a decentralized way to organize notes. Notes are written on flashcards and connected with other similar notes.
In this way, you are building a knowledge web: Informations compounds. And the more you know, the easier it is to learn new things.
Connecting old and new knowledge also helps you repeat your old notes. The Zettelkasten is also a spaced-repetition device.
Moreover, creativity is about finding unexpected connections: The Zettelkasten allows you to find those connections because you will link connected notes — that were taken in totally different contexts — and generate a lot of new insights that way.
Conclusion
At school, I felt like a prison inmate.
Sentenced for 12 years, at an age where this time span seemed like an eternity. A dull place, with absurd and arbitrary rules. A place that tried to hammer knowledge so hard into my mind, that it left the brain immediately on the other side
And when school ended, like a released prisoner, I had no idea what to do in my life. It was just after graduating from university, that the joy of learning came back. It was then that I really learned how to learn and now learning is a part of my life I don’t want to give up.