Your Learning Guide

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Your Learning Guide is now available as a free ebook: The Crowdsourced Guide to Learning! Congratulations to everyone whose tips were included - we hope you agree they look great in (electronic) print.

Our top this week comes from Peter.

“When I read something, even if I think I have fully understood it, I find that I don’t really assimilate it until I turn it into my own words.”

I like to learn something because it looks/sounds interesting or stimulating, and the information may come in handy at any point in my life. (This concept motivates me to try and learn new things, acquire skills and think of myself as a lifelong learner.) There is no best place for learning, but a clean and peaceful (as far as is possible) environments help. Try to avoid the ‘bed’ or a comfy couch as a place to 'work on learning’. I am an auditory and visual learner, primarily.

I am still learning from my own grandchildren as I’m curious about the skills they have, and keep asking them to teach me some of those. 

Listening is an important element in communication due to the fact that if someone doesn’t understand what the native or foreign language student is saying it becomes difficult to answer and share information properly. I introduce some tips designed to help intermediate students:

Watch television wisely. Some students spend several hours watching, movies , series and soap operas in English with the audio and subtitle in English but this kind of immersion is not highly recommended. News and documentaries are a better challenge because they mix spoken English with an academic variety of the language.

Begin watching movies and cartoons of stories you are familiar with in English and with the subtitles on in English. If it’s hard at first, you can watch in your language and after that in English. Write down in a notebook the vocabulary, words and expressions, that appear more frequently also write sentences to put the vocabulary acquired in context. 

I used to hate the thought of coming home from work to sit and study. So I looked at the things I like doing and found one that I could combine with study; listening to music (I even bought better headphones to help with this...any excuse). 

I watch the tutorials and take notes to break down presentations in key chunks/concepts, also to avoid dreaming away/thinking of other things while watching/listening. The quizzes are great way to consolidate knowledge as are the Q and A among students/with tutors because they highlight critical points in their thinking, sometimes different from mine.   

I mostly study in my study (lucky me) unless I am travelling. Then I study anywhere, often reading the texts rather than viewing the online tutorials. The only hiccup could be lack of Internet access. 

Experiment revising in a few different places to decide what you prefer, usually a quiet area in your home is best but some people prefer to head to the library to avoid distractions at home. I prefer to be alone but others prefer working next to others revising to make you feel bad if you stop, its all about your choice! 

Then even if its in house, set an alarm for a reasonable time (I’d say 9/9.30) and make sure you get up and dressed, revising in pjs sounds a lovely idea but I find getting up, dressed and washing my face makes me feel awake and prepared and therefore the day is much more productive.   

Set yourself targets and be organised but don’t spend too much time doing this! If you have 5 exams in 3 weeks write a schedule of what you’ll do each day taking into account the hardness of each subject and which order the exams are in. 

My tips are to find short spells to study; 30 minutes to 1 hour is quite enough for me, usually after I have checked my emails first thing in the morning when my mind has not been cluttered by other things.