3 ms·
Sorry, but you're wrong. You're not reading a book five times, cover to cover. That's not a productive use of your time. Instead, you should breeze through the
by pdog 9y ago
Sorry, but you're wrong.
You're not reading a book five times, cover to cover. That's not a productive use of your time. Instead, you should breeze through the table of contents. Skim the first chapter. Still interested? Skip to the last chapter and read that. Jump around to the parts that interest you. Read through it again with a broad outline of what you're reading. Encounter a boring section? Skip ahead by twenty pages or drop the book altogether.
This is the best strategy for reading books for knowledge, and not just to say you've read a certain book.
- laythea 9y agoI agree that this scatter based approach to learning works very well for me, mainly because I am always interested in what I am learning. This approach also works for narrow scope based topics, by "flitting" between resources (internet links etc) rather than obsess about a single (possibly badly worded) article/tutorial.
- awa 9y agoI am reading "How to read a book" and the process you described is akin to inspectional reading. The book goes in great detail how to utilize the inspectional reading process and improve it. It also describes the next step "analytical reading" which comprises of mostly asking questions about the topic in general and about the author's intent.
- tigershark 9y agoI'm sorry, but I don't think you have much experience in learning. In this way you will only remember a fraction compared to focusing step by step on the different topics and purposefully recall all the concepts, ideally putting them to practice starting from scratch without looking at all at the book. Source: pretty much every research about learning agrees that the conscious efforts of recalling, especially with spaced repetition is the best way to learn something. Plus anecdotally decades of experience in learning a huge amount of topics, programming languages, human languages and whatever. If you want to learn something useful I think that it may be helpful for you the course "learning how to learn", already cited by someone else here, in coursera that explains quite well why just skimming and reading a book is a very inefficient way of learning something. Accordingly to that course and a lot of the current learning research I'm not the one that is wrong.
- WheelsAtLarge 9y agoI wouldn't say that reading a book multiple times is wrong. People learn in different ways. One way works for some and another way works for others. Anyway, finding the interesting parts of a book is a good tip, one of the axioms of learning is that you'll learn much faster if you are interested. Building interest on the book/subject by reading what we find interesting is an excellent way to learn. Of course you have to eventually read what you previously found uninteresting. Hopefully by then you'll have enough knowledge or curiosity to get thru it. What helps is to constantly ask questions as you go through the book and finding the answers will help. Generally speaking humans need to solve problems to survive. Our brain gets a hit of Dopamine every time we get an answer. So, by asking why as we read, we'll be rewarded by learning. My tip is to make sure you understand the subject. By putting it in your own words. A problem with reading is that it's easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we know something when in reality we don't. We need to constantly test ourselves.