7 ms·

> Instead of arbitrarily memorizing things, look for the explanation that makes it obvious. This is a higher learning method that I’ve always found most natura

> Instead of arbitrarily memorizing things, look for the explanation that makes it obvious. This is a higher learning method that I’ve always found most natural. I don’t memorize stuff, I try to understand it instead. That said, there is still great value in the classical learning model—if you don’t know the terminology of the subject it’s difficult to reason about that subject.

ergothus 8y ago
Every time I switch to a new area I try this, and every time it causes me great frustration. Learning materials arent setup to this, (and possibly brains). You have to learn enough fundamentals (usually via rote) before you can get overarching themes. At my newest job I am trying to soak in the fundamentals as opposed to rote practicing them before putting any conscious effort at understanding them, but it is too soon to say if it is working. My stress level is dramatically down though.
- twodave 8y ago
  I think part of this is just highlighting the differences between our language center and the analytic part of our brains. And I also think this differs greatly between individuals (a huge reason why our family home-schools). For instance, I have never had trouble with things like English grammar and spelling. For grammar, the rules have just always made sense, and, for spelling, usually just seeing the word written down a time or two is enough to remember how to spell it. On the other hand, my 9 year old, who is an even more avid reader than I was at that age, cannot form a grammatically correct sentence or spell even slightly less-than-simple words without referring to a list of rules that she has memorized about how these things are supposed to be done. She's the same in math. She knows she needs to borrow/carry but she hasn't made the leap to understand why (and given her personality, she may never be interested, which is a tough thing to swallow as parents who values learning as much as we do). So the advice in this article would be totally useless to her. Then again, she's a better artist already than I'll ever be. In the end, I tend to think of this all as healthy. We don't need a thousand thumbs in our body, and we don't need everyone to be interested in understanding lots of things. We need artists, public servants and mothers. We need teachers and garbage truck drivers and child advocates.
  - ergothus 8y ago
    I must have expressed myself poorly: When I try to pick up a new skill, I would start by asking "what are the higher-level rules?" or some variation. Generally speaking, I've had a very, VERY low success rate at getting answers. When I did get answers, they always relied on a context I didn't have, because I was brand new. Some areas I pick up intuitively, others take work, and others I completely suck at, but in none of them have I been able to START at the higher level understanding. It all requires context, and pushing to get the higher level rules before I have the context has always failed and left me frustrated with either myself (I'm an idiot!) or others (Don't these idiots understand their own jobs?!).
    - twodave 8y ago
      Sure, that makes sense. I think whether we pick something up intuitively or not has a lot to do with our past experience and level of pure intellect. To me, being able to quickly internalize new things and cut to the complexities/challenges of those subjects is the basis of genius.
    - wenc 8y ago
      Yes. It's like learning a language by first learning the grammar -- that works if you already have semantic tree of grammar that you can patch in from a related language family (say Portuguese to Spanish), but for most people this doesn't work. Most people need to start by memorizing phrases by rote first. It's only after we are familiar with the language that the underlying structures emerge. This applies to learning math too. Unless we are already familiar with the structures in place, we typically first read the axioms, then look at the examples and try to work through some of them to gain familiarity, and then the underlying structure reveals itself to us. It reminds me of a quote: "Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn't bother you any more." Familiarity precedes true understanding. This is also why people who read textbooks in a linear passive fashion don't do well in tests. They read and think they know the material, but if they are tested on it, they fail because they haven't truly grappled with the problem space.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  Different people have different balance of skills. I like to use highschool chemistry as the litmus test. On the extremes there are people like me, stereotyped as successful physicists or engineers that love the math side but hated memorizing the tables of ions (poor ability to memorize, good ability to reason), and the people that are stereotyped as successful biologists that hated the math in their chemistry courses but memorized the entire periodic table just by looking at it (tremendous ability to memorize, poor ability to reason). Of course there are also all the people in-between. If you lean towards memorization, obviously if you need an answer, your best bet is to remember when someone told you the answer. If you lean towards reasoning, your best bet is to conceptualize a few fundamentals, and derive the answer on the spot (because you have no hope of recalling it.) This difference means that some people are naturally suited for some fields of study over others, for example the usefulness of recall in biology where everything is a huge tangled web of interacting parts. Another example of these stereotypes in action is the meme that engineers can't spell (which makes sense in the English language, because spelling has little in the way of overarching structure and is mostly recall). The point of all this being, you have to recognize where you stand on the reasoning-recalling spectrum and adjust your learning strategy accordingly. Something that works for someone on one end might not work at all for someone on the other.
  - ergothus 8y ago
    It's not a matter of memorization, at least for me, it is exposure. You can understand the underlying rules without enough exposure to the subjects of those rules. I suck at memorizing and dont use it as a study technique, but when picking up a new skill I cant say "what are the underlying principles?" because I lack the context. (Well I can say that, and then I'll get frustrated when no one can express them for me, and the ones that try dont make sense)
  - fossuser 8y ago
    I don't really buy this as a real difference. I suspect that the memorization is just brute force via flashcards or practice and that's more straightforward for people to 'study'. The other method of deriving and actually understanding is generally harder and usually relies on existing knowledge you learned in previous grades (it gets harder to use that method over time if you haven't been). It's also something the teacher may not be capable of either depending on school district. I'd guess for a large percentage of people they never learn the non-memorization form of studying because they're never really exposed to it and because it's often not rewarded (sometimes it's punished). The brighter kids might pick it up anyway, but I'd suspect they could do the brute force memorization like the other kids if they similarly weren't as capable of it.
- thibran 8y ago
  Humans with the ability to explain something in a structured way are rare because it requires a lot of different skills. First you need to know the topic well. Second you need to have emotional intelligence to know to current level of your trainee, to get him/her onboard with the new knowledge. Third you have to think about how to group and link the information you want to communicate. Forth the content must be reduced to the bare minimum and then plan what else should be explored, since learning with a tutor is most times the beginning of a voyage and not the end. This is hard, so people fail at it all the time. The default – a.k.a fallback method – is to just list all things. This is not only confusing as hell, it is even worse. You never know what you don't know with this methodology, because you have absolutely no context about how something is meant to be use... For example Books about programming languages often explain only the rules of the language, but totally forgets to explain how the language is used in practice and which tools are commonly used or which homepages have useful content that almost every programmer of language X uses. A greenhorn has understandably a very hard time without all those information. E.g. setting up a Common Lisp project with Quicklisp which has the code under a namespace takes 20-30 steps (installing Quicklisp using a Lisp REPL, configuring Emacs, configuring the project) – no wonder almost everyone gets lost in the process. And a lot of programming languages are like that.
charlietango92 8y ago
I function better when learning like this, but also feel that it's one of those 'easier said than done' ideas. Understanding can come with time, and doesn't always even then guarantee retention. That being said, if anyone has study/memory tips, I'm all ears :)
crimsonalucard 8y ago
Most of the things worth your time to understand are so complex you need to memorize and internalize multitudes of other concepts first before you can even hope to understand what you're learning. I truly mean internalize. For example relativity. You cannot understand relativity just by following the logic from first principles all the way to enlightenment. You need to not only understand the earlier principles, you actually need to practice and internalize the earlier principles using techniques of memorization. Newtons laws of motion and vectors must become second nature to you through repeated practice and memorization before you can move forward. Simply understanding one concept is not enough to move on to the next concept.
dggsgsdgsd 8y ago
lslslfmadsčl
scarejunba 8y ago
Hmm, perhaps we’re talking about different things but I don’t mind memorizing the alphabet of a language or (partly) its vocabulary but the pronunciation is best learned in terms of its fundamental components and to an extent, so is the vocabulary. Fortunately, most things in modern life require no active memorization. You use and you remember. But if I were to learn Hindi, I would memorize the basic glyphs of Devanagari. It’s the highest ROI operation for the task.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Would that be because e.g. an alphabet or a language (notably English) is not a product with a solid reasoning behind it (like Esperanto is iirc) but an evolution? Like a cultural thing? There's no practical reason why certain combinations of letters in the English language are pronounced differently depending on the words, it's just a "that's how it is" thing which you have to just remember.
  - strokirk 8y ago
    There are reasons, but historical rather than logical. I guess those reasons could be considered extra things to memorize as well (but for me they help).
mcv 8y ago
I've had the same thing. It was impossible for me to remember complex mathematical equations in school until I figured out how to derive them myself. That didn't help me with integration, sadly. Same with history: years are meaningless. What's interesting is how historical events follow from earlier events and lead to later events.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  For anyone stuck on integration, here are some nice materials for problem solving strategies, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED214787.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED214787.pdf
- jolmg 8y ago
  > Same with history: years are meaningless. What's interesting is how historical events follow from earlier events and lead to later events. That's also how I learned what history I know. The trouble with that is not knowing how differently themed events are positioned relative to each other in time. For example, I don't know how events of political history linked to events of computer history.
  - mcv 8y ago
    You can always look up the relevant years. That's easier than the other way around.
  - empath75 8y ago
    Surely you can connect WWII with the early years of computer science at the very least :)
- mikhailfranco 8y ago
  I strongly identify with the parent comment: I have poor rote learning of isolated facts, but strong spatial abilities (sporting and visualization), relational memory and explanatory insight through the implied graph of connections. When I was young, I played with construction toys (Lego, Meccano) and board games, including Snakes and Ladders (Chutes & Ladders in the US). Later, when learning history, I found I was not remembering dates by their year number, but visualizing their position in the decade and century on the zig-zag of the S&L board. I implicitly grew a spatial layout of multiple centuries, often with certain viewpoints that made sense for topics of study. I excelled in history because of my relational understanding laid over this 3D spatial view of the world timeline. Perhaps you can guess my field of academic specialization and the sweet-spot in my career as a programmer? ... physics degree, then 3D graphics and information visualization.
bsenftner 8y ago
My mother has an interesting story related to this: she is/was a child prodigy. She graduated high school (Texas, early 50's) at age 13, earned an accounting undergrad at 16, and then University of Chicago law school. During law school, she worked as a CPA, and although she knew her job, all the tasks, roles, and strategic aspects of her position, it was not until she worked as a CPA for a few years when one day "it just clicked" and she realized what she was doing. She says it was a shock to her system, simply realizing. It ruined her productivity for the day, but she laughs now, telling about the strange questions she asked people that day.
madeuptempacct 8y ago
This sounds great, until you realize you still have to memorize a bunch of stuff. Random foreign words are never going to be "intuitive" to you. Neither is whatever "covalent" and "ionic". Though, sure - it's far better to understand the logic for things where it's possible.
lopatin 8y ago
I tend to take the understand-don't-memorize approach to stuff as well. It's served me well in general, but it's also why I nearly failed micro-biology in high school.
- wenc 8y ago
  > understand-don't-memorize approach I hear you. This is actually an oversimplification that is received wisdom among American students and educators (often used as an argument against the rote-learning tendencies of non-Western education systems, which are the other extreme), but in practice it is wrong in its basic articulation. This was an article on HN awhile ago about using Anki to read the literature of an entire field or subfield [1], but it also touches on the role of memory in learning. Without memory, it's hard to see deep connections across vast areas of knowledge. You can't always "look things up" if you don't know if those things exist. [1] http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
dragonwriter 8y ago
Also, a lot of time finding the explanation that makes things obvious requires getting a lot of specific things into memory, where you can make the connections and see the common threads.
konaraddio 8y ago
I think everyone does this to some extent. The problem is there's a tradeoff* so we optimize to this with varying degrees of success. *Memorizing takes less time but you sacrifice depth of understanding and duration of retention. Understanding the "why" provides a great depth of understanding and a lengthy duration of retention but, depending on the material, it can take a long time and potentially lead you down a rabbit hole if you continue to seek understanding of the underlying abstractions.
empath75 8y ago
Yep. People often ask me how I remember so much stuff and I really just remember a skeleton of knowledge that I reconstruct when needed. Like I know a general ordering of historical events for example and a few years, but I don’t remember the year everything happened. And I don’t even memorize the order but rather causal connections. If someone asked me when something happened or who the president or the king of England was, I try and piece it together from what I know of the context.

ergothus 8y ago

Every time I switch to a new area I try this, and every time it causes me great frustration. Learning materials arent setup to this, (and possibly brains). You have to learn enough fundamentals (usually via rote) before you can get overarching themes. At my newest job I am trying to soak in the fundamentals as opposed to rote practicing them before putting any conscious effort at understanding them, but it is too soon to say if it is working. My stress level is dramatically down though.

twodave 8y ago
I think part of this is just highlighting the differences between our language center and the analytic part of our brains. And I also think this differs greatly between individuals (a huge reason why our family home-schools). For instance, I have never had trouble with things like English grammar and spelling. For grammar, the rules have just always made sense, and, for spelling, usually just seeing the word written down a time or two is enough to remember how to spell it. On the other hand, my 9 year old, who is an even more avid reader than I was at that age, cannot form a grammatically correct sentence or spell even slightly less-than-simple words without referring to a list of rules that she has memorized about how these things are supposed to be done. She's the same in math. She knows she needs to borrow/carry but she hasn't made the leap to understand why (and given her personality, she may never be interested, which is a tough thing to swallow as parents who values learning as much as we do). So the advice in this article would be totally useless to her. Then again, she's a better artist already than I'll ever be. In the end, I tend to think of this all as healthy. We don't need a thousand thumbs in our body, and we don't need everyone to be interested in understanding lots of things. We need artists, public servants and mothers. We need teachers and garbage truck drivers and child advocates.
- ergothus 8y ago
  I must have expressed myself poorly: When I try to pick up a new skill, I would start by asking "what are the higher-level rules?" or some variation. Generally speaking, I've had a very, VERY low success rate at getting answers. When I did get answers, they always relied on a context I didn't have, because I was brand new. Some areas I pick up intuitively, others take work, and others I completely suck at, but in none of them have I been able to START at the higher level understanding. It all requires context, and pushing to get the higher level rules before I have the context has always failed and left me frustrated with either myself (I'm an idiot!) or others (Don't these idiots understand their own jobs?!).
  - twodave 8y ago
    Sure, that makes sense. I think whether we pick something up intuitively or not has a lot to do with our past experience and level of pure intellect. To me, being able to quickly internalize new things and cut to the complexities/challenges of those subjects is the basis of genius.
  - wenc 8y ago
    Yes. It's like learning a language by first learning the grammar -- that works if you already have semantic tree of grammar that you can patch in from a related language family (say Portuguese to Spanish), but for most people this doesn't work. Most people need to start by memorizing phrases by rote first. It's only after we are familiar with the language that the underlying structures emerge. This applies to learning math too. Unless we are already familiar with the structures in place, we typically first read the axioms, then look at the examples and try to work through some of them to gain familiarity, and then the underlying structure reveals itself to us. It reminds me of a quote: "Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn't bother you any more." Familiarity precedes true understanding. This is also why people who read textbooks in a linear passive fashion don't do well in tests. They read and think they know the material, but if they are tested on it, they fail because they haven't truly grappled with the problem space.
whatshisface 8y ago
Different people have different balance of skills. I like to use highschool chemistry as the litmus test. On the extremes there are people like me, stereotyped as successful physicists or engineers that love the math side but hated memorizing the tables of ions (poor ability to memorize, good ability to reason), and the people that are stereotyped as successful biologists that hated the math in their chemistry courses but memorized the entire periodic table just by looking at it (tremendous ability to memorize, poor ability to reason). Of course there are also all the people in-between. If you lean towards memorization, obviously if you need an answer, your best bet is to remember when someone told you the answer. If you lean towards reasoning, your best bet is to conceptualize a few fundamentals, and derive the answer on the spot (because you have no hope of recalling it.) This difference means that some people are naturally suited for some fields of study over others, for example the usefulness of recall in biology where everything is a huge tangled web of interacting parts. Another example of these stereotypes in action is the meme that engineers can't spell (which makes sense in the English language, because spelling has little in the way of overarching structure and is mostly recall). The point of all this being, you have to recognize where you stand on the reasoning-recalling spectrum and adjust your learning strategy accordingly. Something that works for someone on one end might not work at all for someone on the other.
- ergothus 8y ago
  It's not a matter of memorization, at least for me, it is exposure. You can understand the underlying rules without enough exposure to the subjects of those rules. I suck at memorizing and dont use it as a study technique, but when picking up a new skill I cant say "what are the underlying principles?" because I lack the context. (Well I can say that, and then I'll get frustrated when no one can express them for me, and the ones that try dont make sense)
- fossuser 8y ago
  I don't really buy this as a real difference. I suspect that the memorization is just brute force via flashcards or practice and that's more straightforward for people to 'study'. The other method of deriving and actually understanding is generally harder and usually relies on existing knowledge you learned in previous grades (it gets harder to use that method over time if you haven't been). It's also something the teacher may not be capable of either depending on school district. I'd guess for a large percentage of people they never learn the non-memorization form of studying because they're never really exposed to it and because it's often not rewarded (sometimes it's punished). The brighter kids might pick it up anyway, but I'd suspect they could do the brute force memorization like the other kids if they similarly weren't as capable of it.
thibran 8y ago
Humans with the ability to explain something in a structured way are rare because it requires a lot of different skills. First you need to know the topic well. Second you need to have emotional intelligence to know to current level of your trainee, to get him/her onboard with the new knowledge. Third you have to think about how to group and link the information you want to communicate. Forth the content must be reduced to the bare minimum and then plan what else should be explored, since learning with a tutor is most times the beginning of a voyage and not the end. This is hard, so people fail at it all the time. The default – a.k.a fallback method – is to just list all things. This is not only confusing as hell, it is even worse. You never know what you don't know with this methodology, because you have absolutely no context about how something is meant to be use... For example Books about programming languages often explain only the rules of the language, but totally forgets to explain how the language is used in practice and which tools are commonly used or which homepages have useful content that almost every programmer of language X uses. A greenhorn has understandably a very hard time without all those information. E.g. setting up a Common Lisp project with Quicklisp which has the code under a namespace takes 20-30 steps (installing Quicklisp using a Lisp REPL, configuring Emacs, configuring the project) – no wonder almost everyone gets lost in the process. And a lot of programming languages are like that.

charlietango92 8y ago

I function better when learning like this, but also feel that it's one of those 'easier said than done' ideas. Understanding can come with time, and doesn't always even then guarantee retention. That being said, if anyone has study/memory tips, I'm all ears :)

crimsonalucard 8y ago

Most of the things worth your time to understand are so complex you need to memorize and internalize multitudes of other concepts first before you can even hope to understand what you're learning. I truly mean internalize. For example relativity. You cannot understand relativity just by following the logic from first principles all the way to enlightenment. You need to not only understand the earlier principles, you actually need to practice and internalize the earlier principles using techniques of memorization. Newtons laws of motion and vectors must become second nature to you through repeated practice and memorization before you can move forward. Simply understanding one concept is not enough to move on to the next concept.

dggsgsdgsd 8y ago

lslslfmadsčl

scarejunba 8y ago

Hmm, perhaps we’re talking about different things but I don’t mind memorizing the alphabet of a language or (partly) its vocabulary but the pronunciation is best learned in terms of its fundamental components and to an extent, so is the vocabulary. Fortunately, most things in modern life require no active memorization. You use and you remember. But if I were to learn Hindi, I would memorize the basic glyphs of Devanagari. It’s the highest ROI operation for the task.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Would that be because e.g. an alphabet or a language (notably English) is not a product with a solid reasoning behind it (like Esperanto is iirc) but an evolution? Like a cultural thing? There's no practical reason why certain combinations of letters in the English language are pronounced differently depending on the words, it's just a "that's how it is" thing which you have to just remember.
- strokirk 8y ago
  There are reasons, but historical rather than logical. I guess those reasons could be considered extra things to memorize as well (but for me they help).

mcv 8y ago

I've had the same thing. It was impossible for me to remember complex mathematical equations in school until I figured out how to derive them myself. That didn't help me with integration, sadly. Same with history: years are meaningless. What's interesting is how historical events follow from earlier events and lead to later events.

jacobolus 8y ago
For anyone stuck on integration, here are some nice materials for problem solving strategies, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED214787.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED214787.pdf
jolmg 8y ago
> Same with history: years are meaningless. What's interesting is how historical events follow from earlier events and lead to later events. That's also how I learned what history I know. The trouble with that is not knowing how differently themed events are positioned relative to each other in time. For example, I don't know how events of political history linked to events of computer history.
- mcv 8y ago
  You can always look up the relevant years. That's easier than the other way around.
- empath75 8y ago
  Surely you can connect WWII with the early years of computer science at the very least :)
mikhailfranco 8y ago
I strongly identify with the parent comment: I have poor rote learning of isolated facts, but strong spatial abilities (sporting and visualization), relational memory and explanatory insight through the implied graph of connections. When I was young, I played with construction toys (Lego, Meccano) and board games, including Snakes and Ladders (Chutes & Ladders in the US). Later, when learning history, I found I was not remembering dates by their year number, but visualizing their position in the decade and century on the zig-zag of the S&L board. I implicitly grew a spatial layout of multiple centuries, often with certain viewpoints that made sense for topics of study. I excelled in history because of my relational understanding laid over this 3D spatial view of the world timeline. Perhaps you can guess my field of academic specialization and the sweet-spot in my career as a programmer? ... physics degree, then 3D graphics and information visualization.

bsenftner 8y ago

My mother has an interesting story related to this: she is/was a child prodigy. She graduated high school (Texas, early 50's) at age 13, earned an accounting undergrad at 16, and then University of Chicago law school. During law school, she worked as a CPA, and although she knew her job, all the tasks, roles, and strategic aspects of her position, it was not until she worked as a CPA for a few years when one day "it just clicked" and she realized what she was doing. She says it was a shock to her system, simply realizing. It ruined her productivity for the day, but she laughs now, telling about the strange questions she asked people that day.

madeuptempacct 8y ago

This sounds great, until you realize you still have to memorize a bunch of stuff. Random foreign words are never going to be "intuitive" to you. Neither is whatever "covalent" and "ionic". Though, sure - it's far better to understand the logic for things where it's possible.

lopatin 8y ago

I tend to take the understand-don't-memorize approach to stuff as well. It's served me well in general, but it's also why I nearly failed micro-biology in high school.

wenc 8y ago
> understand-don't-memorize approach I hear you. This is actually an oversimplification that is received wisdom among American students and educators (often used as an argument against the rote-learning tendencies of non-Western education systems, which are the other extreme), but in practice it is wrong in its basic articulation. This was an article on HN awhile ago about using Anki to read the literature of an entire field or subfield [1], but it also touches on the role of memory in learning. Without memory, it's hard to see deep connections across vast areas of knowledge. You can't always "look things up" if you don't know if those things exist. [1] http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

dragonwriter 8y ago

Also, a lot of time finding the explanation that makes things obvious requires getting a lot of specific things into memory, where you can make the connections and see the common threads.

konaraddio 8y ago

I think everyone does this to some extent. The problem is there's a tradeoff* so we optimize to this with varying degrees of success. *Memorizing takes less time but you sacrifice depth of understanding and duration of retention. Understanding the "why" provides a great depth of understanding and a lengthy duration of retention but, depending on the material, it can take a long time and potentially lead you down a rabbit hole if you continue to seek understanding of the underlying abstractions.

empath75 8y ago

Yep. People often ask me how I remember so much stuff and I really just remember a skeleton of knowledge that I reconstruct when needed. Like I know a general ordering of historical events for example and a few years, but I don’t remember the year everything happened. And I don’t even memorize the order but rather causal connections. If someone asked me when something happened or who the president or the king of England was, I try and piece it together from what I know of the context.