#learning methods

Since it’s my birthday today I would like to show y’all not only the origins behind me posting history facts, but also where my passionate love for history and dinosaurs comes from!

So when I was a pre-k toddler my parents lived near to Disney World and a couple times a month they would drive out with me to Animal Kingdom and head straight to “The Boneyard Playground”.

Here I would spend hours exploring and messing around however the area isn’t just filled with slides and things to climb on, though there are a lot as you can tell!

My favorite being the Columbian Mammoth that is found in the fossil dig sandbox, where I would enjoy using a brush to brush off the sand off their bones!

Most importantly there are these Boards found in the playground that are full of info on the remains that you can find here, which are accurate for 1998, the year it opened!

Which as a little kid who was both dyslexic and a functioning autistic, I actually enjoyed trying to reading, as I like many other kids that visited the site, I got to physically feel and see the exact bones they were talking about!

These boards I have always hoped to recreate in spirit with their accurate information and providing as many visual images on the fact that I can squeeze into them to help better connect to the facts!

Recently I revisited the site as it’s set to be permanently closed and destroyed later next year, which I highly recommend you go visit if you get a chance!

I hope I have shown the importance for sites like these in educating others, as not everyone learns best through books especially ones with boring writing and / or without colorful pictures!

Florilegia is a practice of reading and pondering, of conversing with literature by pulling out the phrases that “sparkle,” removing them from their original context into a new one. Fresh meaning may be discovered in this aggregation of sparklets, their conversation with each other. In new context they may generate new ideas, create questions or beauties or conundrums.

"No matter how much I love learning Chinese, studying from a textbook can start to get boring after a while. While the textbook’s explanations are clear, sometimes I just need to see a word used in a different context to gain a clear understanding of it. One thing that helps me to overcome these difficulties while continuing to improve my Chinese is watching Chinese TV shows."

Thanks for the question! I hope I can help.

First of all let me say that it isn’t easy for me. I’m probably the oldest person in the langblr community, and as you age learning becomes harder. I’ve never been good at memorizing anything except dance choreography, and songs. I know some people can memorize the complete kana in a couple of hours, but my brain doesn’t work that way. 

I think something people forget is to set up their learning methods to compliment their learning style. What does that mean? People are mechanical, audio, visual, and physical learners. Take this test to find your learning style. 

Example: I’m a hard audio learner because I have terrible eyesight. Before I started learning anything, even basic kana, I spent hours watching Japanese tv shows and listening to Japanese music. I also liked the NHK classes as they are setup in podcast format. Since I’m an audio learner that set up my foundation to learn words. As I watch shows (I’ll make a post about this) I started with shows that repeated a lot of the same words. Once I hear something, for me that’s my foundation for remembering it. 

If you are a mechanical learner you might try writing the same word a 100 times, or in sentences to help you remember. If you are visual, you definitely want to download the Kanji Study app.  If you are a physical learner, set yourself some kind of game with the words you want to learn so that your body moves as you learn. 

I do think everyone should start with learning the Kana, then the Kanji radicals. I think that’s the best way to give yourself a foundation like learning the ABCs and phonetics as a child. 

Try learning words that align with your interests. Do you like dogs? Art? Baseball? Whatever things you are interested in, try creating vocabulary words for those. Then you can try to write or speak about your interests in Japanese. My first dive into self created vocab was baseball. I learned it fairly quickly and it gave me confidence. 

Unfortunately the tried and true method of language learning is repetition. The more time you spend learning the easier it will become. As I’ve said before, it takes a person 18 months of hearing a language to start speaking it as a child. Then it takes a few years more to learn to read and write in the language. We don’t really think about it at the time because we are small children, but that timeline is going to be close to your current learning timeline. And since you are probably not going to be fully immersed in the language, it’s going to take longer.

Why I Hate Note Cards 

or Disadvantages of Using Note Cards for Studying

(Disclaimer: I talk about university level studying. It’s my opinion based on my experiences)

Imagine: you have a book and you have two ways to store this book to find it later:

You put the book on a random shelf of your enormous library.

You put the book on the shelf that alphabetically matches the author and the name of it.

Of course, everyone would choose the second option. 

The note cards are your first option because you pick random information from the pile of cards and put it on a random “shelf” of your brain. There’s no systematic learning process. How do you expect to find it later if you don’t know where you’ve stored it? The only way is to memorize this random spot, but you need to consume extra power to do so. 

That being said, note cards don’t promote systematic learning and they don’t connect new information with an old one. It’s just random memorization. 

Another huge disadvantage of studying with note cards is that they don’t promote understanding of concepts and processes. Some students that I tutor try to study physiology with note cards. HOW? They don’t understand how all events are connected to each other so they won’t be able to analyze case studies properly (unless they memorize the whole book which is ridiculous). 

You can’t just memorize material on a university level. You need to fully understand why something is happening and what it can cause. That’s the path to be a good professional. 

And a bonus disadvantage of note cards: it’s a huge waste of paper!! 

If you’re one of the students who thinks that only note cards work for you, check out my blog post about many different methods of learning.