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Nope, I'm not any good at any of the maths. My own model is that it's like reading, you need a critical mass of vocabulary and/or grammar (one can make up for
by lsc 7y ago
Nope, I'm not any good at any of the maths. My own model is that it's like reading, you need a critical mass of vocabulary and/or grammar (one can make up for the other, to some extent) before you can understand much of anything. with most subjects, if you understand 80% of the paragraph, you can fill in the blanks pretty easily, and thus your learning rate goes way up.
That, and I think like reading, it takes a lot of practice, and that practice is really hard before you are good enough at reading to see the story. I think I'm at the point in math where I can't read it well enough for it to tell me a story, so practice is a real slog, just like it was for reading at that point.
- Tainnor 7y agoDon't despair too much; maths is a hard subject and even the best mathematicians struggle with new material. You're dealing with crazily abstract ideas and your brain just has to get used to them. That takes time. If you're having trouble with specific material (e.g. calculus), sometimes the reason might be that there's something else that you don't quite understand well enough yet that is a prerequisite. In such a case, the first step would be to identify what that is (it could be unfamiliarity with trigonometry or a lack of skills in algebraic manipulations) and then go back and refresh that.