Good morning/Evening /Night to everyone. I hope you are all doing well. This post is a follow up to the last post I wrote about how I learned English in 3 months. As I finished writing it, I started thinking about why that particular method of learning worked so well for me. I went on YouTube and stumbled upon Jason Sung’s “Encoding 2: Basic Steps to study more efficiently”. He is a medical doctor and a learning coach, and I want to clarify that I have absolutely no partnership with him, nobody is paying me to write about him.
Basically, he says that the most effective method for learning efficiently as possible is familiarizing. In other words, apply the new concept you learn as soon and as often as you’re able to.
It is then that it dawned on me. That’s what I had been doing most of my life actually. I am an engineering student and I am always trying to search for faster, better methods of learning a subject. To this day, I have not found any method better than just applying. I noticed I instinctively gravitated to that method whenever I wanted to learn a new concept quickly.
When I wanted to learn English, I just started reading books in English, even without understanding most of it. In my second year of university, I had one week to prepare a Calculus exam, with passable grades. However, I wanted to have a 20/20 this time, but I didn’t know most of the coursework. As I had limited time, I decided to dive headfirst into the math exercises. I did those by the dozens each night. A week later, I took my exam and I got 19.5/20. My teacher was shocked to say the least. Be it in calculus, English, physics, every time I applied the above method, it works without fail. I have not applied it enough times (and got my usual mediocre grades) to notice that when I do apply it, it works extremely well. In fact, at school, I am known as the “sudden genius” because of the suddenness at which I can get very good grades after an influx of bad grades.
Why don’t I, say, know 9+ languages then?
Because I don’t want it strong enough.
Is that a bad thing though? Not necessarily. I believe we all have that one moment that makes us do things we did not know possible. My case, I see no point in learning 9 languages in my life at the moment. So, I don’t do it. However, I am guilty of not doing things that could really benefit me in the long run (such as fitness). That is something I have worked on and continues to work on. I failed at many things. But I succeeded at many others (be on the lookout for my future post about how I completely gave up soda and started cooking my own food 90% of the time).
CONCLUSION
Encoding, per se, is as effective in academia as it is out of it. However, it requires energy and dedication. For the average person, it is unrealistic of us to multitask so well. You can be excellent in one or two things, and be average in others. Personally, I see that as a win-win. Find that one concept you really want to learn, and dive headfirst into applying it continuously and as much as possible.
Lastly, welcome mistakes. I personally made so many mistakes when I was learning English or calculus or cooking, but had I berated myself every time I slipped up instead of moving on (which was a lot), I wouldn’t have progressed as much as I did. Focusing on failures always result in decision paralysis in my case, but that’s a story for another time.
Moral of the story? If you want to excel at something, then familiarize with it as much as possible. The time you dedicate to it determines your outcome.
Hope this post was helpful. If you are interested in more posts like these, don’t forget to subscribe to follow. With that, ArriveDerci! (I may or may not be dabbling in some Italian)
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