Effective learning methods are better than sea tactics, and efficient learning thinking can get twice the result with half the effort. Students and staff, no matter what industry they are engaged in or what they do, should learn more knowledge with an "empty cup" mentality. Rote memorization is the most stupid method, and everyone does not advocate it. Today, Bian Xiao will show his micro-friends the efficient learning methods shared by Scott Young, the author of How to Learn Effectively.

The article is very long and useful. Bian Xiao strongly suggested this. Please read it patiently.

About Scott Young.

Within one year, I completed all 33 courses of the legendary MIT computer science course, from linear algebra to computational theory. All subjects are self-taught. At this rate, it only takes about 1.5 weeks to master a course completely.

Easily control the course

Scott Young: I always want to learn faster and faster, and I'm very excited about it. Mastering those important knowledge, professional knowledge and skilled skills will be your professional capital and help you make money and enjoy life. If living well is your goal, learning can lead you to the place you yearn for.

Although learning fast has many advantages, most people are reluctant to learn "how to learn". Probably because we don't believe in such a good thing, in our opinion, the speed of learning depends only on good genes and talents. It is true that there are always some people who have natural resources, but research shows that your learning methods are also very important. Deeper knowledge processing and learning new things from time to time will double your learning efficiency in some cases. Yes, the study of "deliberate practice" shows that without correct methods, learning will stagnate forever.

Today, I want to share my learning strategies and see how I can complete the four-year MIT computer science course in 12 months. This strategy has been tempered by 33 courses, trying to find out the tricks of learning faster, which methods are useful and which are not.

Why is rote learning useless?

Many students may laugh at me and think that it only takes 1 year to complete the four-year course. After all, I don't know anything and I can always cram for the exam, can't I? Unfortunately, this strategy doesn't work at MIT. First of all, MIT exams require problem-solving skills, and often produce some unprecedented questions. Secondly, MIT's courses pay attention to gradual progress. Even if you can memorize an exam, the seventh lesson of the same series of courses may not be able to keep up. Besides rote learning, I have to find ways to speed up the understanding process.

Can you speed up your understanding?

"Aha!" When we finally figured it out, we all cheered so suddenly. The problem is that most people do not think systematically. The classic way for students to learn is to listen to lectures and read books; If you still don't understand, you should do a lot of exercises (sea questions) or reread your notes. Without a systematic method, it seems impossible to understand it faster. After all, the psychological mechanism of epiphany is completely unknown.

Worse, understanding itself is hardly a switch. It is like layers of onion skin, from the most superficial understanding to the deep understanding, layer by layer to consolidate the understanding of the scientific revolution. Peeling such onions is a little-known and easily overlooked understanding process.

The first step in accelerating learning is to reveal the process. How to understand the problem and deepen understanding depends on two factors:

1. Establish knowledge link;

2. Self-debugging and debugging.

Knowledge connections are important because they are the starting point for understanding an idea. I was obsessed with Fourier transform until I realized that it converted pressure into pitch or radiation into color. These views tend to establish a connection between what you know and what you don't know. Debugging is as important as debugging, because you often make mistakes. In the end, these mistakes are still incomplete and there is no answer.

Poor understanding is like a software program full of mistakes. If you can debug yourself efficiently, you will greatly speed up the learning process. Establishing accurate knowledge connection and debugging is enough to form a profound insight into the problem. Mechanization skills and rote memorization are usually beneficial only after you have a positive intuition about the nature of the problem.

Study: You learn faster.

Over the years, I have perfected a method that can accelerate the process of enhancing understanding step by step. This method is used by me in various disciplines, including mathematics, biology, physics, economics and engineering. Only a few modifications are needed, and it is also effective in mastering practical skills such as programming, design or language. The basic structure of this method is knowledge, practice and introspection. I will explain each stage, let you know how to realize them as efficiently as possible, and give detailed examples to illustrate how I applied them to practical courses.

The first stage: knowledge coverage

If you don't even have a topographic map, you can't organize an attack. Therefore, the first step in in-depth study is to have a general impression of what you need to learn. If you are in class, this means that you have to read handouts or textbooks; If you teach yourself, you might as well read more books on the same subject and research each other.

A common mistake made by students is that this stage is the most important. In many ways, this stage is the least efficient, because you only get the least return on knowledge per unit time. I often speed up the completion of this stage, which is very beneficial, so that I can devote more time to the next two stages.

If you are watching a lecture video, you'd better tune it to 1.5x or 2x to fast forward. This is easy to do, as long as you download the video and then use the "speed adjustment" function of the player. So I spent two days watching a semester's course video. If you are reading a book, I suggest that you don't spend time highlighting words. This will only make your knowledge understanding stay at a low level, and in the long run, it will also make learning inefficient. A better way is to take notes occasionally when reading, or write a summary after reading each major chapter.

The second stage: practice

Doing exercises can greatly promote your knowledge understanding. However, if you are not careful, you may fall into two efficiency traps:

No immediate feedback: Research shows that if you want to learn better, you need immediate feedback. So it's best to have the answer in hand when you do the problem. All over the world. Every time I finish a question, I will check the answer and check myself. Practice without feedback or late feedback will only seriously hinder learning efficiency;

Tactics on the Sea: Just as some people think that learning begins and ends in the classroom, some students also think that most knowledge understanding comes from practice questions. Yes, you can always build a knowledge framework through sea tactics, but this process is slow and inefficient.

Practice should highlight the areas of knowledge where you need to build better intuition. Some technologies, such as Feynman technology, which I will talk about, are very effective for this. For non-technical subjects, it requires you to master concepts rather than solve problems, so you often only need to complete the minimum number of exercises. For these subjects, you'd better spend more time in the third stage to form an epiphany.

The third stage: introspection

Covering knowledge and doing exercises is to let you know what you don't understand. This is not as easy as it sounds. After all, knowing means knowing, and not knowing means not knowing. It is very difficult. You think you know everything, but you don't, so you always make mistakes; In other words, you have no concept of a comprehensive subject, but you can't see clearly what you don't understand.

Feynman Skills will help you find the missing, fill the blank and go further on the road of knowledge. When you can accurately identify the knowledge points you don't understand, this skill helps you fill the gaps in knowledge, especially the huge gaps that are the most difficult to fill. This technique can also be used for these two purposes. Even if you really understand an idea, it can connect you with more ideas, so you can continue to learn and deepen your understanding.

Feynman technique

This technology was inspired by richard feynman, a physics prize winner. In his autobiography, he mentioned that he had been struggling with a difficult research paper. His method is to carefully review the supporting materials of this paper until he has mastered the relevant knowledge base and understood the difficult ideas.

Feynman's technique is the same. To deal with an idea with complicated details and rich connotations, you should divide it into small pieces of knowledge and deal with them one by one. You can finally fill all the gaps in knowledge, otherwise, these gaps will prevent you from understanding the idea.

Feynman's technique is simple:

1. Take a piece of white paper;

2. Write an idea or process you want to understand at the top of the white paper;

Explain it in your own words, as if you were teaching others the idea.

The most important thing is to divide a train of thought, although it may repeat some already understood knowledge points. But you will eventually reach a critical point that you can't explain clearly. This is the knowledge gap you need to fill. In order to fill this gap, you can look up the textbook, ask the teacher, or search the answer online. Generally speaking, once you define your confusion or misunderstanding accurately, it is relatively easy to find the exact answer.

I have used this Feynman technique hundreds of times, and I am sure it can cope with all kinds of learning situations. However, because the learning situation has its own characteristics and needs to be mastered flexibly, it seems difficult to get started, so I will try to give some different examples.

Deal with concepts that completely confuse you.

In this regard, I still insist on using Feynman technique, but I opened the textbook and found a chapter explaining this concept. I read the author's explanation first, and then imitated it carefully, trying to explain and clarify it with my own thinking. In this way, the "guided" Feynman technique is very useful when you can't write down any explanation in your own words.

Handle various processes

You can also use Feynman skills to understand the process you need to use. Look at all the steps, not only to explain what each step is doing, but also to know how it is done. I often understand the proof process of mathematics, the equation of chemistry and the glycolysis process of biology.

Deal with various formulas

Understand the formula, not memorize it. So, when you see a formula, but you can't understand its operation mechanism, try to divide it by Feynman technique.

Deal with what needs to be memorized.

Feynman skills can also help you check whether you have mastered the advanced knowledge concepts of non-technical subjects. For a certain topic, Feynman technique can be successfully applied without referring to the original materials (handouts, teaching materials, etc.). ), prove that you have understood and remembered.

Form a deeper intuition

Combined with exercises, Feynman technique can help you peel off the superficial skin of knowledge understanding. But it can also help you delve deeper and go further, not just superficial understanding, but profound knowledge intuition. It is not easy to understand an idea intuitively. It looks a little mysterious, but this is not its true colors. Most intuitions of an idea can be classified as follows:

Analogy, Visualization and Simplification

Analogy: You understand an idea by identifying important similarities between it and an idea that is easier to understand; Visualization: abstract concepts often become useful intuition, as long as we can build a picture for them in our minds, even if this picture is only an incomplete expression of a larger and more diverse idea; Simplification: A famous scientist once said that if you can't explain something to your grandmother, you haven't fully understood it. Simplification is an art, which strengthens the thinking connection between basic concepts and complex concepts.

You can use Feynman technique to stimulate these intuition. Once you have a general understanding of an idea, the next step is to analyze it in depth and see if it can be explained by the above three intuitions. It is understandable to borrow existing image metaphors during this period. For example, understanding complex numbers in two-dimensional space is hardly novel, but it allows you to visualize concepts well and form them in your mind. DNA replication is imagined as pulling a one-way zipper, which is not a perfect analogy, but it will become useful as long as you know the similarities and differences in your heart.

Strategies to speed up learning

In this article, I describe three stages of learning: knowledge, practice and introspection. But this may make you misunderstand that they are always executed separately in different periods and never overlap or repeat. In fact, with the deepening of your understanding of knowledge, you may go through these stages again and again. When you read a chapter for the first time, you can only get a superficial impression, but after you have practiced and established your intuition, you will come back and read it again, and you will have a deeper understanding, that is, you will learn something new by looking back.

Study hard, even if you are not a student.

This process is not only suitable for students, but also helps to learn complex skills or accumulate professional knowledge of a subject. To learn skills such as programming or design, most people will follow the first two stages. They read a related basic book and then experience it in a project. However, you can use Feynman technique to go further, better lock in and express your profound views clearly. The same is true for the accumulation of professional knowledge on a topic; The only difference is that you need to collect some study materials, including related research articles, books, etc., and then build your own knowledge. In any case, as long as you know what you want to master, you must study hard and learn deeply.