Reddit mentions: The best memory improvement books

I was in basically your place last year and am still on my journey, self learning takes a lot of self discipline though, and given that life will at some time get in the way of your goals, its best you have the right mindset starting out. This track I am about to recommend is what I call the Python Track, and its the track I more or less have followed, making many mistakes, so you do not have to. First, before you even look at computer code, sign up for this free course, Learning how to learn, if money is not an issue I highly recommend the book, by the same professor that teaches the course , self learning something of this magnitude can be very challenging, this book will help you overcome some if not all of these challenges, if you follow the techniques outlined. Next, read Code, This book is probably the most recommended book on this sub-reddit and for good reason. Code is just well written and so easy to understand, you will have a much greater appreciation for learning to program once you have read this book. Now you are ready for programming, As your search will show, the most common advice from where to start is Codecademy, now the most common advice would be don't worry about what language you choose, the language is just a tool, and this true, however many sources cite Python as an easy language to learn, and I would agree. Now, one thing you need to realize early is, learning or becoming proficient in anything for that matter, can be made easier by building upon little successes(one of many great rules in A Mind for Numbers). That said, once you progress through Codecademy, you will quickly realize, either it holds your hand too much, or you have difficulty holding the information in your head, these are common complaints, but Codecademy's greatest strength is its ability to ease a person into the world of programming without throwing them in the deep end of the pool. Course 2 is taught by Dr. Chuck, take the course called Python for Everyone . There are several courses on the website but I feel this is the most natural progression from CodeCademy, it will be more challenging, but not overwhelmingly so. Once you finish this course, you can either follow the rest of Dr. Chuck's courses if you really want to or advance to the intermediate level.
Now its time for the intermediate level courses you can start with Learn to Program the Fundamentals and follow its two course track, or you can take An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python(Part1)
either intermediate track is great, see which suits you best, all Coursera courses are offered on a regular basis with the option to audit them freely(check out the wealth of non-programming courses also!!!). You will at this point realize that you are TIRED of going over for-loops, all I have to say to that is, repetition is key. The most common answer given on this sub when someone asks how they can get better at programming, is practice, followed by the next common answer build something you care about(I will get to this). After you have selected and finished an intermediate level track, feel free to browse Coursera for any other classes that grab your interest, as now you have the tools to explore on your own, but DO NOT!!! take more than one course at a time, or if you do, limit yourself to a taking one course on a certain day and the other course on another day, Do Not get into the very bad habit/mistake of signing up for courses left and right barely getting past week two in all 10 courses you signed up for; as so many people myself included have done. Finally, the advanced level, many people say the gold standard for learning to program on the web are these two classes. Either Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python or CS50 these are considered the best and for good reason. Though this sub seems to recommend CS50 more often, in keeping with the Python theme I must recommend the MIT course, also because I feel its pacing is better, however I do want to let it be known that CS50 does incorporate Python towards the end of the course, and has the added benefit of giving you a deadline of a year to complete the 12 week course, whereas the MIT course is split into two parts spanning about 15 weeks total(offered 2 -3 times a year). Once you complete these courses you will be ready and capable for whatever programming challenges you are willing to undertake, as well as your own personal projects, program often, google and this sub reddit are your friends, don't let programming consume your entire life, and most of all have fun with it all, if you have any questions or need any help, myself and many many others would be glad to help you, best of luck, haha I feel like I'm talking to my 27 year old self from last year.

Focusing on the reward, product, or outcome isn't very effective.

Instead, we should focus on the process (flow of time, and the habits and actions associated with that time).



Edit: Gold! :)

The bulk of what follows are notes from a class that I and 200,000 more students all over the world are finishing this week online from the University of California, San Diego called Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects and the textbook A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra).

The book and the lectures are incredibly well cited. You can download the lectures free.

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When we focus on the reward or the product of the task that we need to perform, it doesn't really address the real reason that we're procrastinating, and can release stress related chemicals making us even less motivated.

Why we procrastinate: When we think of something we have to do that's unpleasant or uncomfortable, it literally triggers neural discomfort in the part of our brain associated with pain: the insular cortex. Focusing on the reward or the product/outcome of the task can amplify this neural discomfort because the task has yet to be performed.

So what happens when we procrastinate? We first think of the thing that we don't want to do. Our insular cortex receives that discomfort/pain message and our brain immediately switches our attention and thoughts to something else that's pleasant, temporarily relieving that discomfort and triggering a cue for us to do something else. We're distracted and procrastinating now. This only temporarily eases the discomfort of that neural response.

The good news: It's absolutely normal to feel negative or uncomfortable thoughts when starting anything. Research shows that when we engage in the activity for a couple of minutes, the neural response in the insular cortex eases and we don't feel as much discomfort. In other words, the more we engage in the task we're putting off, the better we'll feel about doing it.

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Movation in our brain

Neuromodulators: These are chemicals that influence how neurons respond to other neurons and whether or not we get out of bed in the morning. Those chemicals?

acetylcholine: This chemical controls focused learning and attention. Supplements exist.

dopamine: This is THE rewards chemical and the most important chemical for motivation; release it and you feel good. Too much, and life sucks over time (stay away from bad drugs). Lose dopamine and you have no motivation. Like, if you literally have no dopamine you go catatonic. No joke. Learn to do things that release this chemical naturally and you're good.

serotonin: This is the chemical that controls your social life and risk-taking behavior. Prozac increases this chemical in the brain. Low serotonin levels means high-risk behavior. The most violent criminals in our prisons have the lowest serotonin levels. Keep that chemical in check.

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Four things to understand about our habits:

A Cue: This is an event that welcomes our engagement or participation. Phone, porn, food, thoughts; you get the idea. Cues are neither helpful nor harmful.

A Routine: This is the mindless activity that we engage in after having received the cue. Routines can be useful, harmless, or harmful.

A reward: Habits develop or continue because they give us pleasant feelings. Procrastination is one of them because it makes us feel good, temporarily. In this way, procrastination is like an addiction. We do it for the temporary good feelings. Immediate reward. We can, however, rewire to become "addicted" to new habits by rewarding ourselves for new routines.

A Belief: Habits have power because of our belief in them. To change a habit we must change the underlying belief.

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Spread out your tasks and your rewards for improved productivity and better motivation.

Our brains have a lot to do. Focusing too long on something is like doing too much exercise. Our brains need breaks from the tasks that we're performing. By breaking our productivity into smaller chunks and taking a break with a reward (remember, we need the reward fairly soon because procrastination gives us the dopamine feel-good chemical now) we'll find it's much easier to be better motivated. The reward can be internet time, tv, book, walk, coffee, etc. I've found that anything I'm doing while I procrastinate can often be used as the reward during breaks.

Pomodoro (google it): Set a timer for 25:00. Turn off interruptions. Focus on your task. Take a break with a reward and let your brain relax for a bit. Hint: You're releasing dopamine with the reward and training your brain to crave the new behavior.

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Changing our procrastination habits

Cues - If we change our reaction to these (see above) we win. Turn off the stuff that distracts you and gently ignore any new distractions while you're focused on your task.

Routine - Rewire here by developing a plan or new ritual to react to the cue. By engaging in new reactions and new routines, and rewarding ourselves immediately after, we'll begin to crave habits that are more productive. I've already been doing this with success more or less, but this information helps me to understand why it works. Perform tasks in smaller chunks. Spread those chunks out to make the project more manageable. Set your timer for 25:00, or shorter, or longer (not very much) and take a break - five minutes minimum but go longer if the task is super taxing.

Reward - Super important! Reward yourself with something to indulge in immediately after your task Doesn't have to be food or cost money. It's your time and your indulgence. Remember: One of the reasons that procrastination is one of our default habits is because we're rewarded immediately for it. We're training our brains to crave a better feel-good response, one that's not too distant in the future, and one that helps us change our habit. No reward = we won't feel good about changing our habit.

Belief - Change the underlying belief about the task you're going to perform. Don't tell yourself elaborate stories about how hard it will be or how long it will take. Focus on the process (flow of time, and the habits and actions associated with that time), and not the outcome, product, or completion. Understand that for the larger stuff you'll only be focused in small increments of time, and only on the task at hand. (Hard lesson: Our environment, our friends, our family, and our level of understanding and knowing our place in the cosmos will directly effect whether or not we'll ever believe that anything is worth doing in life, even in small increments of time. By broadening these things or changing them completely, we'll find it much easier to change our attitudes, behaviors, and habits.)

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It's normal to feel negative or uncomfortable thoughts when starting anything. Engage in the activity for a couple of minutes and those feelings will go away. Because research and science.

Don't judge yourself: Allow your mind to relax into a flow of the work or activity you're going to engage in. Everybody sucks at stuff in the beginning. Life's messy and so is the stuff we have to do to get things done. Take breaks and vacations. Research shows that people who balance fun time with work time outperform workaholics over and over and over.

When distractions or new cues present themselves, let them go; gently ignore them and relax back into the process and flow of the activity.

"I'm different and special and I'm a genius and none of this applies to me." No you're not and yes it does. Look, some of us may have more astrocytes than others (look that up) so we have some talent. But without a plan to do something with those astrocytes, we're going to be stuck with the same addiction to procrastination.

Not all procrastination is bad. Sometimes our brain really does need a break, so take one. Sometimes we're spending too much time on a large task and need to break it up into smaller tasks. Smaller tasks makes it more manageable and taking breaks helps our brains relax. Less stress, more dopamine, healthy brain. Balanced leisure time with productivity time makes us more productive. Because research and science.

Write down the things you want to accomplish the night before. This frees up energy in your prefrontal cortex and makes it easier for you to get started. Again, because science. While you sleep your brain processes that stuff and you're more likely to actually do them.

Keep a planner journal to outline what works and what doesn't as pertains to changing your procrastination responses and routines.

No rewards until you've finished the immediate task/pomodoro.

Keep an eye on procrastination cues.

Gain trust in your new system.

Have backup plans for when you still procrastinate.

Be bad at it for awhile.

tl;dr: When we procrastinate, it's because thinking of doing something unpleasant can trigger discomfort in the part of our brain associated with pain. Focusing on the reward or the product/outcome of the task can amplify this same discomfort, because the unpleasant task has yet to be done. Our brain switches to more pleasant thoughts to release dopamine (feel-good chemical), but this only temporarily feels good. In this, procrastination shares common features with addiction. We can tackle procrastination by focusing on the process of the task (the flow of time, and the habits and actions associated with that time), and taking breaks with small rewards.

Yes, I did speedreading. But it's not very suitable for highly technical material like engineering, scientific, or mathematical texts. And way too much work for recreational reading (it takes all the fun out of it). I liked testing my speed and comprehension after runs (because the results looked impressive). But I was in engineering college at the time, and so it wasn't applicable to things like chemistry and physics. I ended up only really getting a tangible benefit out of it just once, when I had to try memorizing a 100+ page instruction manual in an hour (and then pass a test), or possibly go to jail sometime later (long story).


Note that the more you read in general (the more practice you get) the faster you'll get naturally, up to a certain point. And the more you expand your vocabulary will help as well (since you'll understand more without the need to guess definitions from context, or look them up). But of course the speed reading techniques WILL greatly accelerate you-- at least for certain types of material (I'd read at least 2000 books by college, because I was a bespectacled teenage geek with virtually no social life; so I'd had plenty of practice, even before learning speed reading).


In college I actually got more use out of rapid note-taking, using a technique from a book called How to be twice as smart. That book has several items you might like in it (including mnemonic techniques I believe):

http://www.amazon.com/How-Twice-Smart-Brainpower-Unleashing/dp/0134023390

Mnemonics would probably be more useful to many people than speed reading-- but they are similar to speed reading in that it can take considerable work to utilize them. I read a book once about a guy with the best tested memory in the world, and it turned out he used his own geographical mnemonic technique in his head. He kept a whole virtual town in his noggin, and whenever he wanted to remember something, he'd find somewhere to put it in that imaginary town, and after that he could always return to retrieve it again (sorry for the very brief synopsis, but I read that 30+ years ago, and never tried to memorize it in detail at the time: I was reading it for fun and to avoid studying, more than anything else).


Yes, I believe there's mnemonic techniques you can use for general purposes-- but as I've rarely had need for such since college, I no longer have them readily at hand in memory (stuff you don't regularly use gets tougher to recall over decades). The Twice as smart book may list some of those.


I mainly used meditation and yoga to relax. I learned and used self-hypnosis to get myself through some particularly difficult engineering classes. Created a trigger I could use to put myself immediately into a highly receptive state during lectures, and actually visualize almost like a hallucination what the professor was describing in real time (the most vivid image in my recollection now has to do with the inner workings of an electric motor). The first time I took the class, I failed it. I think at least half the class failed with me. I was totally lost. My school used certain classes as filters to weed out big bunches of students, and encourage them to change their majors to something easier. The second time though, using the self-hypnosis, I got a B.

Yeah, it'd be a much better story if I'd gotten an A. But I was personally wildly pleased with the B! Plus the fact that I may have been one of the few students during the finals who wasn't scared out of my mind (some of the teachers did a great job at terrorizing us).

I also invested some time in something called Silva Mind Control, to try beefing up my powers of visualization. Basically it was very similar to self-hypnosis, only with some intriguing tales by the authors about the technique possibly helping you acquire certain superhuman capabilities as well (ha, ha). The superhuman promises stuff really helped me and a friend pursue it for a while. I remember spending a whole xmas vacation (4 weeks) doing visualization exercises from the book (it was mentally very strenuous). Also around that same time I read a sci fi book (maybe by Silverberg? unsure) where the hero himself used techniques like self-hypnosis to gain superhuman abilities. So I was really gung ho on it at the time! Ha, ha.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silva_Method

Adam Smith Powers of Mind was another intriguing book I read around this time-- and seemed to list some major results relating to things like hypnosis and other forms of mental training that science at that time could not explain.

http://www.amazon.com/Powers-Mind-Adam-Smith/dp/0671447971

I've done/tried a LOT of stuff. Many of which might be embaressing to admit now. Like hung out with this hippy dude for a while who was really into Scientology (this was way back like 35 years ago, when Scientology was much less well known-- and more of a tantalyzing mystery-- than today). I actually read Dianetics by Hubbard.

I read all the earliest Carlos Castaneda books. Did acid, mushrooms, speed, pot, etc., etc. Drank to excess quite a few times. Bought a book called How to increase your intelligence (I think the link below is to the same work):


http://www.amazon.com/How-Increase-Your-Intelligence-Wenger/dp/0880471522

This book had some pretty weird exercises to do in it. But I know I did at least some of them (decades back).

There's quite a lot of mind expansion possibilities to be found in various editions of the old Whole Earth Catalog too. The WEC was basically the internet in a book, before the internet existed. Only the WEC pointed almost exclusively just to excellent books on almost every significant topic under the sun.

The WEC was where I found the main two books on self-hypnosis I ended up using (among maybe 100 other tomes).


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog




This is just a sampling of my own plodding course. But maybe you'll find something useful (or at least entertaining) among it all.

There are a lot of good comments mentioning that you should first take good care of yourself and check if ADHD is an issue.

I consider myself to be on the neurotypical end of spectrum and here's what I got running currently.

Ok, first a word of warning. I have been trying to find different things that work with me for several years so the end result is kind of a mix and match of several things. These most definelty won't work for everyone so don't try them all at once and don't worry if they don't stick. Also, sorry for the wall of text.

At one point I was getting overwhelmed with work and started looking for help online and started with blinkist.com The site offers summaries and the main ideas of several books. I found some interesting ones and got the whole books in to my hands afterwards. I used the free trial to find the most interesting ones and copied them down in to a file for myself :)

The best books I have so far read that have helped me:

The now habit - Neil Fiore
This helped me a lot when I was way over my head any things started to fall out of my hands. It had some great things relating on how you should prioritize time to play and have fun. Actually reserving time for them on your calendar. It helped me with trying to focus getting the first draft done instead of aiming for perfect right away. I also had some good things about being merciful with yourself.

Getting things done - David Allen
A really extensive system. I picked some of the things for my own use but many of the things have fallen out.
The main thing I have currently in use is having categories for tasks and some of the task organizing. Also reviewing the tasks every once in a while is excellent for getting rid of those old tasks that have been hangin on for an eternity as you find that maybe they aren't important after all as you have gotten along quite well without actually doing them.

Your Memory How it works and how to imprve it - Kenneth L. Higbee
An interesting book about the things that affect remembering and learing things. A more recent thing I read and I am still trying to find ways to utilize it. I now know that I got a way to remember things that I abosultely have to but I still rely mainly on other things. By the way, googling the name of the book seems to offer a pdf version of the book.

I wrote some of the main ideas I got from the books for myself to read again if I need it.


Apps in use:

Onenote. This is my main tool with work. ConnieLingus24 mentioned it already and I would recommend it as well. I use the Onenote 2016 desktop app as it seems more stable and has nice add ons when compared with the app found in windows 10 store. I have each new task in it's own page with all the relevant information pasted on the page (the outlook integration is great), the pages are on their own sections grouped by project. I have a main page with a kind of kanban look with tables with links to the tasks. Took some time to set it up but it's infinitely easier to find the information related to tasks afterwards.
Also the Onetastic add on is extremely nice. The onecalendar by itself has saved me time a lot as it shows which pages you have edited in a calendar view. If I know I had a meeting last month I can just search for the proper day and see what pages I have fiddled with that day. I got so excited with the thing that I ended up training others in the office on OneNote.

Wunderlist. This one I use more in my personal life. My day to day things are in a bulletjournal, but all the lists that don't need to be dealt with right now or today but are more like just waiting for the proper time are located there. Also a bonus is that I can share the lists with my SO. We got our reading challenges and knitting challenges up there as we wouldn't otherwise remember what we bet on and what's the prize. Also if I have to run errands and I can't use my bullet journal I tend to write the things for today on wunderlist and check them off in my phone.

The main tool:
Bulletjournal. I tried using google calendar and other things but in the end this was the only one that worked with me. I didn't take all the fancy stuff like mood trackers and what nots on my bujo and I am not too worried about getting it looking pretty. I did but some pictures on the covers but the insides are filled with things I don't want to show others so it doesn't matter how ugly it is inside. No one else is going to see it anyway.
The best parts for me are the future log, monthly log, week log and day log.
I got plans for the long run in the future log, the next and ongoing month in the month logs and with the week log I am forced to see what is going to happen each week a bit in advance.
Each morning I start the day with writing the plan for the current day and it helps a ton. I know what needs to happen and the amount of mental stress from remembering everything is a lot smaller. The most help I have gotten to my productivity has definetly been just because of this. The feeling that things are somewhere down where I can access them without worrying about losing something important is a huge relief. My SO has also felt a lot happier as things we have talked about actually happen as I write them down and get the chance to do them.

TLDR;

Bullet journal is a heaven sent. Be kind to yourself and remember to reserve time for play.

Edit: Apparently I had nothing better to do than this evening, so here's a wall of text. Hope it's useful for you.

EditII: Didn't expect so many people to look at this, either.. so I'll say: this isn't an in depth zero-to-hero guide for Japanese, this is just a tidy gathering of the path I took to learn Japanese to my current level (minus a few textbooks), which is definitely still very far from fluent. I'm personally learning Japanese for its literature, and the vast majority of what I did was aimed at getting into books as fast as possible (cough Heisig cough) -- if you don't care about reading, I'll be the first to say that a lot of what's here might not be interesting to you. Google around and see if my suggestions fit your learning style or not. Japanese is weird in that there are literally resources for everything, so I'm sure there's something that fits you.

EditIII: Just wanted to link the DJTguide, a library of tons of resources organized into different skills and stuff. If you don't like my suggestions, I'd personally start here to find something else.

intro -- textbook stuff -- post-textbook stuff -- tutoring -- loose timeline

I have lived in Japan (for school) for two years, speaking nothing before I arrived (fully intended on going to Spain instead lol)...and am now somewhere between N2/N1, which is the level of fluency required to work with Japanese businesses/join a Japanese-conducted program. At this point no conversation is a problem, I can read modern literature for enjoyment (older stuff literally employed a partially different language and requires its own study), and follow movies/comedy shows/anime without subtitles if I'm pay attention.

I didn't try nearly as hard as I could have, so I honestly think you could reach my level of "fluency" if you make a religion of it -- a research student at my university came speaking nothing one year ago and now speaks notably better than I do across the board (on behalf of being forced to communicate with people for like 12 hours a day). Granted, you don't have the luxury of multiple Japanese people needing to communicate with you in order to do their job, and thus adjusting their language to your level to communicate with you all day every day... but I still think you can learn enough in a year to thoroughly enjoy yourself, at the very least.

Here's how I'd do that.

Textbook Stuff

1. Read The Kanji -- don't use this for kanji. Make a free account, use it to learn the Hiragana and Katakana (two of Japanese's three alphabet systems; 48 characters each and phonetic. One is for Japanese-origin words, the other is for loan words and other random things). It just throws flash cards at you with each of the symbols; you can probably commit them to memory in a few hours. It's okay if you forget a few or several or even most of them at first; you're going to see these things so often that they'll be impossible to forget before long. We're just shooting to prime your passive memory so that you'll see a word written, have your curiosity irked, and be able to work it out, connecting that forgotten information to more and more recent memories to help remember them. Plus, this is a model for your year as a whole -- contextually acquiring passive understanding that stretches your boundaries, then diving back inwards and working to solidify passive knowledge that has become useful for your current situation or will allow you to express something you want to express currently, into knowledge that gradually becomes active.
   
   
2. Buy Genki I, its workbook, Genki II, and its workbook. This will walk you from knowing absolutely no Japanese at the beginning of Genki I, and while mileage varies, I was personally able to make sense of ShiroKuma Cafe (see the link in the next section) upon completing Genki II. I'm currently taking the first "advanced" level Japanese course at my uni, meaning that I have had the opportunity to talk with other "advanced" (apostraphes meaning take with a grain of salt, looking at myself) learners about how they learned Japanese, and the Genki series is by and large the crowd favorite.
   
   
3. Buy Heisig, or you can probably find a version somewhere on the interwebs....... make an account at Kanji Koohii (a site where people work together progressing through Heisig, mainly by sharing the mneumonics they make for the kanji), and otherwise follow the instructions on Nihongo Shark's Blog. He suggests to completely put learning Japanese on hold till you finish the 2200 Kanji in this deck in 97 days, but I think that's ambitious as is, and eats too much of your year up. So I personally would say learn 15 a day, every day, until you finish -- that will have you finishing in around 5 months, you'll be on target with the 6 months I'm plotting out for Genki I + II even if you miss a few days. (see below).
   
   
4. Others might disagree and you can make up your own mind, but I personally think learning the Kanji is essential. They take time to learn at first, but repay you dividends later on when you accumulate vocabulary basically without thinking, passively, by reading or watching subtitled shows. Plus, any resource you'll use past the beginner stage will require kanji.. meaning if you don't learn them, you can't use these resources, and gimp yourself down the road. They're incredibly logical and like legos; the resources in #3 basically talk about the most efficient way to build things out of those legos (to help remember what each lego is). Also look into Moonwalks with Einstein if you'reinterested in memory in general. The thing about Kanji is that they unlock Japanese, as every single Kanji has a unique meaning, and Japanese words are basically simple definitions of themselves. Take fire extinguisher, for example: 消火器。It literally means extinguish-fire-utensil/tool. Good luck understanding a random word like that in any other language at first sight, but it's easy in Japanese, and the vast majority of Japanese words are exactly like this. Learning the Kanji allows you to take a word you've never seen before, instantly have a reliable guess as to what it means... and depending on your familiarity with the Kanji, maybe even how to read it. This happens to a lesser extent in conversation, also. Kanji are a new system of logic, but once you adjust to it, it's pure magic -- eventually, you sort of stop needing to study vocabulary, because you can just read and passive understand most any word (which you'll eventually work into your active vocabulary). I talk about "The First 2000 Words" in #5, and basically, words give you diminishing returns -- they're a lot of bang for your buck at first.. but past 6,000, 10,000, 20,000 ... learning 10 or 100 or even 1,000 new words might not give you noticeable improvement.
   
   
5. This anki deck is Genki in Example Sentences; pace your daily reviews so that you'll be going in time with your progression through chapters in the book. I really, really wanted to link you The Core 2k(the first 2000 most frequent words of Japanese) because I really liked it and the first 2000 words make up a significant majority of daily conversations (we repeat a lot of the same things over and over, the same bread and butter structures, laced and spiced with more rare nouns, then descriptive words, and the occasional verb)......... but I also think that context is the biggest key when it comes to language learning, and the 2k doesn't have that for you right now. It's eventually going to outpace your Kanji studies (if I'm recalling how I studied accurately), and more importantly, the word order does not follow Genki. You're going to be spending a lot of time with Genki for 6 months, the pace that I want you to complete these words in. You're already going to be stretched thin, so I guess I'm going to recommend you take that Genki deck and use it as a supplement to help you get more out of Genki -- it looks like it's going to take, on average, ~25 cards per day. I don't know if that's ideal, but then again, I stuck with Genki until I finished Genki (no other resources, began Hesig - also below - about 2/3 of the way through), and I began watching Shirokuma Cafe (below) immediately after Genki II, able to (at first, painfully) understand it... and I think I'm just a normal dude, if you're also a normal dude -- or, better, a better than average dude -- I guess Shirokuma should be good for you, too, after Genki II and this Genki Deck.

OP, I would recommend the following assuming he will have access to a computer and the Internet and is somewhat comfortable using those things:

1. Duolingo is a good starting point. It is free and easy to use and will provide some early confidence.
   
   
2. Have him write down the reasons he wants to learn English and what would be the common settings for its use. This is important for motivation purposes to remind him down the line but it also lets you adjust his training to vocabulary in those settings.
   
   
3. Have him buy a small journal which he can take with him where he can write down all his thoughts during the day. For example, what words and phrases he wants to know in English or a new word he learned that he wants to add to his vocabulary lists. This is also a place where he can put together common scripts for the scenarios he wants to be able to converse in. For example, checking in at a hotel, going to a restaurant, talking to a client about business, etc.
   
   
4. Early on, I suggest avoid focusing on grammar. He can always learn grammar later and it is IMO the most tedious form. You want to get him some early wins in his language learning so he will be motivated to keep going. If you must talk about grammar, just focus on the present tense and the very basics early on.
   
   
5. Instead, focus his attention on vocabulary building that will require flash cards and spaced repetition. There are a number of different ways you can do this. One way is to use a tool like memrise but another is to simply find a list of the most common words used and the ones he wants to learn and put those into an anki deck. If he is old school, and wants to physically write flash cards that is fine too but you will want to give him some information on how to use spaced repitition with physical flash cards. For making flash cards, I would look at books like Fluent Forever (https://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Forever-Learn-Language-Forget/dp/0385348118/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517635406&sr=8-1&keywords=fluent+forever) for advice on how to make flash cards. But basically they should be created by adding in pronounciation, sound files, pictures and word phrases to trigger your memory.
   
   
6. He needs to start reading in English. I like dual language books where they have the English on one side of the page and Spanish on the other. These are great because you can take them with you to the barbershop, on the train, flights, etc. and doesn't require you to have to look anything up on a computer as all the words are translated for you. I like the Stories from... books. They are easy to read and have stories about folklore and history from various countries. I have seen ones from Spain, Puerto Rico, Latin America, and Mexico. Also, a few of these have audio files online where you can get access to listen to these stories with audio as well.
   Here, is a link to a couple of them:
   https://www.amazon.com/dp/1260011275/ref=sxbs_sxwds-stvp_1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=3341940462&pd_rd_wg=QhY2X&pf_rd_r=SNZ6KJ9YGJ9B3SS71HE8&pf_rd_s=desktop-sx-bottom-slot&pf_rd_t=301&pd_rd_i=1260011275&pd_rd_w=UvgyL&pf_rd_i=null&pd_rd_r=db451c8e-32db-4684-9246-6602f8168da5&ie=UTF8&qid=1517635806&sr=1
   https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Mexico-Historias-M%C3%A9xico-Premium/dp/1260011046/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1260011046&pd_rd_r=QJRX7JC2P82FPT7PRKE3&pd_rd_w=we8to&pd_rd_wg=V7DKJ&psc=1&refRID=QJRX7JC2P82FPT7PRKE3&dpID=51aR236tnML&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=detail
   
   
7. Once he gets beyond these books, I would have him look at a service like LingQ. This is great for working on reading and listening skills. One challenge I find is it is hard to find content that has the language in audio and written form together and this is a great solution for this problem. I have started using this service a couple of weeks ago and really like it. It basically has written stories on various topics in the foreign language. These stories also have a recording of the story being read so you can listen to the story while reading it. Plus, you can click on any words in the story and it will bring up a defintion and then you can add that word to your vocabulary list. They have a feature where you can then be quizzed on these vocabulary words in close sentence form but I recommend taking the extra step of adding these words to your anki file or other vocabulary flash cards. The only downside is it costs about $10 USD a month for this service. But they do offer a free trial for a week or so and you can get a little cheaper rate by ordering for a year. When you consider the cost of buying a bunch of dual language books and the time spent trying to find them, this is a small cost.
   
   
8. He needs to start talking in English too with a teacher. Until he has an intermediate level, I would not recommend a language exchange partner. Instead, you will need to have sessions with him or get him a teacher on a service like Italki.com or something similar. There may also be some offline options in your area that others can recommend. He may prefer a group/classroom setting initially but as he progresses he should opt for 1 on 1 teaching instead.
   
   
9. After a couple of months, he can start doing some writing as well. One resource that I like for this is lang-8.com. It works where you write a submission in your target language and people will give corrections to you. In return, you correct their submissions. So it is free but costs you a little time.
   
   Whatever you do, you just want to make sure he is spending some time consistently on the big four: reading, talking, listening and writing. Obviously, a lot of time will also be spent on building his vocabulary as well.

I went to one AA meeting when I first got clean and never went back. I understand people have found support and success in it but to me, personally, I felt it only increased the stigma of drug addicts as these broken hopeless people barely hanging on by a thread. It's an outdated system that relies on little science or attempting to progress the participants and relies more on holding people in place and focusing on the past. Instead I just worked towards becoming a normal person. Here are some of the resources I used:

r/Fitness - Getting Started: Exercise is probably the #1 thing that will aid you in recovering. It can help your brain learn to produce normal quantities of dopamine again as well as improve your heath, mood, well being and confidence.

Meetup: You can use this site to find people in your area with similar interests. I found a hiking group and a D&D group on here which I still regularly join.

Craigslist: Same as above - look for groups, activities, volunteer work, whatever.

Diet

This will be the other major player in your recovery. Understanding your diet will allow you to improve your health,mood, energy, and help recover whatever damage the drugs may have done to your body.

How Not To Die Cookbook

Life Changing Foods

The Plant Paradox

Power Foods For The Brain

Mental Health

Understand whats going on inside your head and how to deal with it is also an important step to not only recovery but enjoying life as a whole.

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

The Emotional Life Of Your Brain

Furiously Happy

The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works

Educational

If you are like me you probably felt like a dumbass when you first got clean. I think retraining your brain on learning, relearning things you may have forgot after long term drug use, and just learning new things in general will all help you in recovery. Knowledge is power and the more you learn the more confident in yourself and future learning tasks you become.

Illegal Drugs: A Complete Guide to their History, Chemistry, Use, and Abuse

Why Nations Fails

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

Thinking, Fast and Slow

The Financial Peace Planner: A Step-by-Step Guide to Restoring Your Family's Financial Health

Continued Education / Skills Development

EdX: Take tons of free college courses.

Udemy: Tons of onine courses ranging from writing to marketing to design, all kinds of stuff.

Cybrary: Teach yourself everything from IT to Network Security skills

Khan Academy: Refresh on pretty much anything from highschool/early college.

There are many more resources available these are just ones I myself have used over the past couple years of fixing my life. Remember you don't have to let your past be a monkey on your back throughout the future. There are plenty of resources available now-a-days to take matters into your own hands.

*Disclaimer: I am not here to argue about anyone's personal feelings on AA**

It's great you are getting such a great headstart. By the time you reach 4 years you're going to have tried so many things! You should totally come back to this thread and see how much progress you'll have made :D.

---

I started with Duolingo, and loved it. It's what brought me joy when I was first learning a language and had no clue what to do when learning a language! As others have mentioned, it's not enough, and to use other tools.

I would suggest that you stop using Duolingo and find a tool that is more efficient and that teaches you material that is RELEVANT to your life. Duolingo doesn't teach you to speak and that's the one of the 4 skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) that people often put off for a long time.

Next, accept and be prepared for your interest to come and go. You can start with a bundle of energy and intend to do it an hour a day, and 5 hours on weekends. That PROBABLY won't last. Building a habit takes time (of which thankfully you have a lot!), and being consistent is the MOST IMPORTANT THING. So, when your motivation wanes (it's inevitable) in a few weeks, months, whatever, don't stop completely. Reduce it down. Half an hour a day, but keep it every day, for example. Keep it going until it's just something you naturally do. Mix it up too: make sure you're keeping time for speaking practice, and don't keep yourself on apps learning vocab for example.

---

Personally, having taught myself French to C1 level over the last few YEARS, I've tried a lot of techniques (Duolingo, Memrise, Anki, Quizlet, italki, in person language exchanges...), and I would now recommend you follow something like Benny Lewis' Language Hacking method for a good starting point. I'm not an extrovert like him, but I've realised the importance of getting over a fear of speaking ASAP. It teaches you to speak from the start, and only learn the grammar and vocab YOU need, that is relevant to YOUR life. Most importantly, it shows you you can have a conversation with only a few words. Duolingo teaches you a bunch of useless vocab that you're not gonna use for ages or ever. Why put that in your brain?

Look into the book Fluent Forever, for which an app is in the process of being made. It's a wonderful language learning method based on the science of how the memory works. HOWEVER, it might only be right for you in a few months when you've tried a few things as it's for serious learners.

Drops is the latest craze that is fun and colourful like Duolingo and Memrise but allows you to dismiss words you don't want to learn right now. Again, this is great because you only learn what's relevant to you.

Taking classes on italki changed my life. Often cheaper than a 1 on 1 class in person, and you can do it from the comfort of your own home. I've used it for both structured classes and conversation practice. Now I just do it for fun!

Meetup.com to find language exchange meetups in your area.

---

Language Hacking book: https://www.amazon.com/Language-Hacking-French-Conversation-Beginners/dp/1473633095/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=language+hacking+french&qid=1554480276&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Fluent Forever: https://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Forever-Learn-Language-Forget/dp/0385348118/ref=sr_1_1?crid=25PI7CK0RP4UH&keywords=fluent+forever&qid=1554480298&s=gateway&sprefix=fluent+forever%2Caps%2C216&sr=8-1

Fluent Forever Creator's TED Talk which is basically the first chapter of the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBMfg4WkKL8

Here's hyperpolyglot Luca Lampariello's guide to how to learn a language from scratch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yexczOMlTwI

Drops: https://languagedrops.com/

Italki: https://www.italki.com/i/BE6aA6?hl=en_us

---

It probably won't be relevant to you yet but I have a YouTube channel where I talk about the real language that the French use. Once you have a good foundation from your studies my videos could be interesting for you. Plugging myself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm8ZJnHy0zY.

---

Good luck and don't worry if this is a lot. You will try a few things and find some that work for you and some that don't. Good idea to reach out to those more experienced. Don't hesitate to ask me any more questions you have. I love this topic.

All these are really great and all, but I think your best bet would be to take a class in Psychology. Psychology Professors are really great, and their mannerisms and nuances will really help you get a grasp of whatever you're learning, as you want to be able to know each concept inside and out, not just memorize them. If you think you can do that with a book, then do your best! Psychology is fun to learn, but don't try to memorize everything when you read.

If you're looking for a great light book on the capacity of the human mind, please, try out Moonwalking With Einstein, a book about the science behind memory and techniques for learning how to memorize things the way people did before people could even write. Even better, is the plot, which covers the author's journey from a science reporter reporting on a Memory Championship one year and winning the U.S. Memory Championship the next. A very light, fun, and entertaining read. I recommend it to everyone.

If I were you, I would approach this in a practical way. I'm assuming that you are a monoglot English speaker with maybe the equivalent of a US High School introduction to Spanish or French. You number one problem right now is that you don't know how to learn a language on your own. It doesn't matter if it's Spanish or Mandarin, it is most likely that what you will do is what you know: get some books, sit down an hour each day studying like you did in school, maybe use an app and after 6 weeks you'll start to question the process you are making. At first the voice will be small and in the back of your mind. And then one day, you'll come home form a bad day at work or school and you won't feel like studying so you'll skip a day. And your downward spiral to giving up will have started. By your 12th week you might still make token efforts to study, maybe you'll use an app (Duolingo, Memrise) for 15 minutes or reread one of the chapters in the book you bought (a chapter you've already read, so you should review it). At this point you are all but done as a language learner. Plug in your Chrome Cast and fire up Netflix because you aren't making the progress you thought that you would. You'll conclude that learning a language is hard, or Arabic was too hard, or that you are not good at languages, and you'll start binging on Supernatural because if you start now, you might be done with seasons 1 - 9 just in time for season 10 to be released on Netflix.

>A poor craftsman blames the tool for what his hand cannot do.

If you don't want to follow the cycle I described above, you should take some time out to learn how to learn and to understand that there are certain tricks and traps that your mind is going to use in an attempt to get you to put in minimal effort while making you think you are making maximum progress. Before I go on, I want you to understand that there is a reason why the first paragraph seems strangely specific. It was my story with a number of languages (Russian, Welsh, etc). I think the best advice that I can give you is to get Make it Stick and read it before you pick a language. Then buy Fluent Forever and read it. Then pick your language and start studying and remember this: value people over process, process over goals, and goals over material. What I mean is that the course or books that you use are the least important factor in your success and that people with whom you surround yourself are the most important factor. Too many people emphasize finding the "right course". It just doesn't exist. Find some decent material and be done.

1. Spend more time forming relationships with native speakers of your target language and do this from the beginning. If you feel reluctant to do that or you immediately start making excuses about wanting to learn the basics before you do this, stop beeing a whiny little brat and do it any way. ;-) Look at the people who are the most successful language learners. They all have relationships with people that they pursue through the target language.
   
2. Develop a study process and integrate it into your day. For example, do the parts of learning that you like least in the morning so that you won't be too tired or stressed at the end of the day. Make friends and pursue interests in your target language. This way learning is not so subject to your emotions. Always keep in mind that your learning process is far more important to your success than the material that you use. Use techniques like spaced repetition, interleaving, and -most importantly- remember that you have to practice what you learn in a real way. Meaning you need to increase your output. Write summaries of grammatical rules in the target language and get feedback. These things are hard and frustrating but you will get far more out of learning this way (see 3rd link at the bottom of this post).
   
3. Set SMART goals and use quizzes and testing to help measure and evaluate your goals. Use services like iTalki to chat with random tutors or exchange partners to put yourself in uncomfortable situations that mimic real world conversations. If you can, and it's OK with the other person, record the sessions and give them to a friend or your primary tutor to help evaluate your progress.
   
4. Get some good material to use but don't allow this to take up too much of your time. It's just not as important as many people seem to make it out to be.
   
   And now for the science so you know I'm not just making this all up:
   Learning Painting Styles: Spacing is Advantageous when it Promotes Discriminative Contrast
   LEARNING VERSUS PERFORMANCE
   Learning Concepts and Categories from Examples: How Learner's Beliefs Match and Mismatch the Empirical Evidence
   HOW STIMULUS SIMILARITY IMPACTS SPACING AND INTERLEAVING EFFECTS IN LONG-TERM MEMORY
   Spacing enhances the learning of natural concepts: an investigation of mechanisms, metacognition, and aging

So I guess for me the first step was just sort of coming to an understanding that drinking really isn't adding anything, but that it is taking so much away... and just listing all of those things, like verbally or in pen or something, because what happens is you realize how often you are making the same stupid mistakes... Like once you have said it allowed or written it down, every time it happens you have to acknowledge that it also happened yesterday, and the day before, and it was really bad the time before that... It was just getting exhausting.

So I just was getting so tired of it, like it sounds like you are, so I set a date. Didn't make any changes in the mean time, was still drinking, still saying yes every time somebody asked me if I wanted to go out, still kept doing the "just one more" dance, carried on with the daily hangovers etc... but I had my date set and for a full month it got to the point where I just couldn't wait to reach the date, I was so ready for it.

In the interim, I read a couple of books about neuroplasticity and habit formation that I found really helpful. If you only read one book, my suggestion would be The Power of Habit, but I also read Rewire Your Brain which was also super helpful, and I just ordered "The easy way to stop drinking" which is linked in the sidebar at /r/stopdrinking, so we'll see what that has to say.

So I guess what I have been doing is really just focusing on the positives, because I was just getting so so tired of the bullshit and I had this image in my head of what I want my life to be like when I get to a point where the urge to drink isn't constantly in my head. So, with a several page long list in hand of all the little triggers, and a really really really long list of reasons why I wanted to do this in case I forget, the day finally came and so I told my family what I was doing, and decided to start working on all the things I was excited about, like books and hobbies and stuff. Apart from the hangover that day I was pretty excited...

Unfortunately, it didn't go well to start because I didn't sleep a wink for days, so I was in really, reeeeally bad shape, but truthfully I had prepped my head for enough time that the desire to go back just so I could get some sleep wasn't unmanageable, especially because I know that if I drank I'd just have to go through the bullshit all over again... So now it's been almost a week, I'm kinda starting to function again normally, and I'm feeling so much better than I have in a very long time already, even though I still haven't slept well still... I also went to buy coffee yesterday and I thought "I better check my checking account balance, I don't want my card to get declined here AGAIN..." and I was pretty shocked to see I had $80 in there, that never happens by this time of month... So I'm just focusing on these awesome little changes as much as I can, every positive little change or occurrence I make a point of paying attention to so that I don't lose momentum...

Also, posting at /r/stopdrinking every day has been super helpful because my brain is running like 1000 miles per hour faster than usual, so it is super helpful just unload there, and somebody responds every time within minutes.

Yeah beane is correct. There is only one case in medical history of photographic memory but the person was only tested once, the scientist who tested her later married her, and then she refused to ever be tested again. So it's probably crap.

Photographic memory is really something popularized by the media, movies, tv shows, and novels. It's not uncommon for an intellectual protagonist or antagonist to have a photographic memory. Unfortunately the popular conception of photographic memory is no where near realistic.

Even news reporting is inaccurate. The news often cites autistic savant Stephen Wiltshire as having a photographic memory. But if you compare his drawings to a real photograph they are different.

London Skyline (look carefully and you will see significant differences in scale, proportion, shape, texture, number of buildings, etc... Don't get me wrong it's phenomenal but it's not photographic)

People can remember what they know about really well. Better than amateurs. So chess master's can remember hundreds of games move by move. But put a chess board in front of them with the pieces in a nonsensical order and they do no better than the average person.

With Stephen Wiltshire he has a strong interest and knowledge of architecture and cityscapes. So when he sees a city from above his mind is able to consolidate it better than yours or mine. But he is consolidating. His mind is doing what all minds do with memory but at an advanced level because he's been drawing nonstop since being a kid (for which he did start with a natural drawing talent). Another savant Kim Peak also made mistakes in remembering but he too was often touted by the media as having a photographic memory.

Also note that in recent years there have been lots of stories about people with autobiographic memory. It's impressive but not photographic. They can remember events of their lives very well but not information(such as a text). 60 minutes did a story about it recently that is really fascinating.

All hope is not lost though. Nearly everyone can develop extraordinary memory powers by practicing mnemonics.

Your Memory by Kenneth Higbee is excellent. Kenneth Higbee is both an mnemonics enthusiast and a brain scientist. His book is full of techniques and the science behind them.

In the book Moon Walking with Einstein science reporter Josh Foer chronicles his accent from having no special memory talents at all to being the US Champsion in the course of a year.

So like I said most anyone can do it but it takes practice.

The Stanford Algorithm book is complete overkill in my opinion do NOT read that book. That's insane. Read it when you've been doing programming for a while and have a grasp of how it even applies.

Here's my list, it's a "wanna be a decent junior" list:

• Computer Science Distilled
  
• Java/ C# / PHP/ JS (pick one)
  
• Do some Programming Challenges
  
• SQL
  
• Maybe build a small web app. Don't worry about structure so much, just build something simple.
  
• Applying UML: and Patterns: An Introduction to Object Oriented Anaysis and Design Iterative Development
  
• Head First Design Patterns
  
• Clean Architecture
  
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
  
• If you're interested in Web
  
• Soft Skills: Power of Habit , A Mind for Numbers , Productivity Project
  
  ​
  
  Reasoning: So, the first book is to give you a sense of all that's out there. It's short and sweet and primes you for what's ahead. It helps you understand most of the basic industry buzz words and whatnot. It answers a lot of unknown unknowns for a newbie.
  
  Next is just a list languages off the top of my head. But you can pick anything, seriously it's not a big deal. I did put Java first because that's the most popular and you'll like find a mountain of resources.
  
  Then after some focused practice, I suggest grabbing some SQL. You don't need to be an expert but you gotta know about DBs to some degree.
  
  Then I put an analysis book that's OOP focused. The nifty thing about that book, is it breaks into design patterns nicely with some very simple design patters to introduce you to design patterns and GRASP.
  
  Then I put in a legit Design Patterns book that explains and explores design patterns and principles associated with many of them.
  
  Now that you know how code is structured, you're ready for a conversation about Architecture. Clean architecture is a simple primer on the topic. Nothing too crazy, just preps you for the idea of architecture and dealing with it.
  
  Finally, refactoring is great for working devs. Often your early work will be focused on working with legacy code. Then knowing how to deal with those problems can be helpful.
  
  FINAL NOTE: Read the soft skills books first.
  
  The reason for reading the soft skills books first is it helps develop a mental framework for learning all the stuff.
  
  Good luck! I get this isn't strictly computer science and it's likely focused more toward Software Development. But I hope it helps. If it doesn't. My apologies.

I’m sorry love; it totally sucks to be alone. I don’t even live in a foreign country and I have only made one “friend” in the last 14 years of living where I am (not where I’m from). And she turned out to be a mistake. I have really gotten more out of this Reddit alone than I thought was possible; I don’t know where any of you ladies live, but we all hold each other up when shit goes down and virtually high five each other when it goes right. Yes, I would love to have physical friends, and DH has suggested I try to find a knitting group or book club at the library or whatnot to potentially make a friend in person.

TBH, i never had to make friends before - I was born and grew up in the same place, had best buddies since kindergarten, etc. so making new friends is odd for me. It’s like I instantly want to be someone’s BFF, but I know that’s bizarre. So, I’m embracing all the ladies on here right now. If I get in-person friends, that’s awesome too. But I’m so so SO thankful I found this subreddit and all the awesome ladies here.

Don’t know where you are, but perhaps there is a military base nearby? Tons of families from all over, dropped in a foreign country too. Additionally, you could download Duolingo or a similar app and learn the language! If you decide to go that route, consider reading Fluent Forever — it’s an amazing book. I actually have a digital copy I can send you if you Wamt; just PM me.

I studied in Nagoya myself around 18 years ago and am only a few years younger than you. I definitely relate to how we had far fewer resources back then! I also hadn't studied it since for ~15 years. Around 3.5 years ago I picked up the book Fluent Forever and it gave me renewed interest in studying again. Mostly because it made it seem so much more systematic & accessible! Like I felt like high proficiency, maybe even fluency was actually possible even if I can't live in Japan. It wasn't the easiest, but I created my own Anki deck drawing from the principles from that book and have been studying ever since. It took some time, but I feel like my Japanese level has caught up to where it was 15 years ago and surpassed it in every area (grammar, vocab, pronunciation, kanji). It's a great feeling :)

I mention the book Fluent Forever also because while I know on this sub and many other Japanese studying circles, Anki cards like Core 2K/6K and RTK are really popular (don't sweat it if you've never heard of them), but outside of that there's not a lot of guidance on the principles of creating your own Anki deck for language acquisition and I found the book profoundly helpful in that area.

I do think listening is more important than speaking. The idea of input being more important than production is also echoed in the really helpful site Antimoon. So I wouldn't sweat it too much. Maybe try mimicking what you hear and creating Anki cards out of TV shows? I supplement my studies by taking classes once a week and that gives me an opportunity to practice my speaking. Not sure if you live in a major city that offers something like that?

I’m in medical school - use Anki. /r/Anki for the main subreddit and /r/medicalschoolanki for the folks who have 30k+ flash cards to manage; the main anki subreddit can be a little like “how do I learn these 50 Spanish vocabulary words for my 8th grade test?” which is great but not frequently helpful for folks in grad programs.

“How We Learn” is a super useful book to read before starting a curriculum, too. I read it before starting and am super glad I did. You can read the whole thing (it’s very readable and not dense for what it is) or just flip to the summary chapter in the back. https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Learn-Surprising-Happens/dp/0812984293

Edit: also there might be med school resources that overlap with nutrition coursework; uncertain what the overlap looks like but med students have notoriously detailed licensing boards and also tend to have a lot of money so there’s a fair amount of “high yield,” third-party resources developed for them. YouTube videos aimed towards the USMLE (med school licensing exam) will succinctly cover topics related to nutrition and biochemistry, and I’m sure there’s relevant portions of the giant anki decks published by med students, which can save you a ton of time since they’re already made.

Otherwise, try not to cram! Remember that everyone struggles at points, even if they don’t publicly show it. C’s get degrees so focusing on what you actually need to know to best serve your clients over nitpicky details is worth it. (Ignore that if you’re going into research, lol.) Best of luck :^)

oh ya sure! This book will do 10x better than what I can do.

The general idea is to create these vivid imageries of things that you would like to remember, and let those images interact with a location that you're very familiar with.

For example, I have this memory palace to motivate myself when I feel tired.

I wanted to remember these few concepts at all times:

1. difficult times are good, because they're chances for you to get better at something
   
2. always be grateful for being born in a good family, and have loving friends.
   
3. change your physiology to change your mentality. Take coldshower, do jumping jacks, or run to release endorphine.
   
4. always be patient with people, it's one of my weaknesses.
   
   ​
   
   The way I rememebr it, is by imaginig the entrance to my house. Immediately on the stairs, Jocko Wilink(this navy seal commander) is sitting there repeatedly scratching and wispering the word "good" onto the wall, filling up the entire leftside of my wall. Then next to him, by my laundry machine, is a huge pile of human bloody hearts. There's blood everywhere! and I relate this to being grateful. Next to the laundry machine, is a little room to keep books. The entire room is raining, and all the books are getting wet. And this will remind me of changing my physiology during depressing times. And to the right of that room, is my friend John with his big stack of cameras. This is more of a personal story of how I was very rude to him when we went to a neibouring province together, so I never want to do that again.
   
   So, if I imagine my basement, I can "see" all of those elements that I listed above, and in turn remind myself of what I want to remember. There's no way I can forget it, because everything is soooo vivid.
   
   I don't think my app can replace memory palace techniques like one above, but it can be useful for memorizing higher level things like: which book did I read, what chapters are in the book, approximately how many notes do I have, etc etc.
   
   This turned out to be much longer than I had imagined, but I hope it helps you understand better. If you're interested, I really recommend the book above. I try to make myself read an hour per day, and that book was one of the easiest for me. It's about how the author became the US memorization champion after merely 1 year of training!

A great way of improving your memory is with the use of mnemonic devices. Mnemonics, if you’re not familiar with the term, refers to using associations or recognizing patterns to remember information. As you experienced yourself, the human mind has an incredible ability to remember visual information. Visual memory seems easiest for most, and can pack a tremendous amount of information relative to other forms of memory.

One example of a mnemonic device that takes advantage of our innate ability to remember visually is the method of loci. People have used this device to remember the order of items, such as decks of cards. The device requires the user to use a familiar path in their memory (such as a walk through a park, or through your house). Then by starting at the beginning of this "memory path", the user places objects along the path. The order of the items coincides with the path. The objects are exaggerated in memory to make them more memorable. For example, in memorizing a grocery list you could imagine the food items as appearing massive or animated in some strange way. There are strategies that build on this method and make it more efficient; such as a the Dominic system and the PAO.

I recently read the book Moonwalking with Einstein, which I found very inspiring. It will show you a few simple techniques, but more importantly it will likely encourage you to take mnemonics more seriously. The book is mostly centered on the author, who is a journalist. He visits the US memory competition, and after interviewing several people, realizes the participants didn't possess a unique innate ability for memorization. Instead, they were all using mnemonic devices. He meets a spectator at the event who participates in the world memory competition. After some discussion, he is encouraged by the professional to train and compete in next US memory competition. The author sees this as an opportunity for a story, and agrees. With the help of professionals and a year of training, he enters the US competition and manages first place.

There is lot of great information in the book which is cited by a lot of reputable sources. The author is quick to point out from the beginning what can be expected and not expected. Mnemonic devices still require effort to apply, but they have a pretty good return. The book description can be found here.

I'm afraid I haven't gotten too far into the field of mnemonics, so I can't recommend a more comprehensive book. I hope that once I get the time I can practice more on applying these methods.

Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance. I read it in my IB Bio class and I absolutely loved it. It will not only provide methods to better your mind but also ways to improve your overall health and well being. It really got me interested in neuroscience and gave me a great deal of respect for the field of medicine and science. Its actually amazing how many diseases that afflict the brain, that are not genetic, can be prevented with proper nutrition and exercise . Also, videogames, alcohol and coffee are great for the brain! In moderation of course. The author is fun, upbeat and kept me interested throughout. The book also includes a variety of puzzles and methods for practicing your brain exercises.

Having tried armodafinil and finding it extremely uncomfortable, I started taking a more negative view of nootropics. Vaniver (LW admin) told me in person that he recalls someone taking an *afinil and thinking "This must be what Elon Musk feels like all the time". Well, I doubt that he feels like I did! It was probably the most nervous I've ever been. Someone on LessWrong said I'm drug naive, which is true, but they seemed to imply that I'd think more positively of nootropics if I took more and got used to them.

After that, my impression did change. My view is that people tend to use nootropics instead of other more effective things because taking a pill is easy. If you want cognitive enhancement or wakefulness, get enough sleep, get cardiovascular exercise, and eat right. (Strength training is highly overrated in my opinion and seems to me to be more popular for reasons similar to nootropics: it's easier than cardiovascular exercise. But cardiovascular capacity is generally what people want to feel less tired and live longer, so why not train that directly?)

If you want to improve your memory, you'd do a lot better using spaced repetition software and learning about how memory works. No amount of stimulants or memory enhancement drugs will make you understand something that you never learned right in the first place, and most people don't know how to learn correctly!

If you want to sleep better and fall asleep faster, practicing good sleep hygiene will probably work better than anything else. If you have chronic insomnia, the "Bootzin technique" seems well supported by the evidence, but can be hard to maintain as a habit. (Again, taking a pill tends to be easy, but not the best approach!) I've suggested these approaches to several rationalists over the years and all I can recall seemed remarkably dismissive. Many claim flat out that they tried this and it "doesn't work". Well, the studies disagree from what I understand. (I haven't read any in particular about sleep hygiene, however, but the expert consensus is that sleep hygiene helps.) Anecdotes unfortunately seem to trump science, even for people who claim to be rationalists.

For what it's worth, the only meds I take are for allergies. Some folks have called me "straight edge", but I'm not a punk so I don't think that's right. I don't drink coffee or take any stimulants on a daily basis. Any caffeine I ingest is purely accidental. I might take a 1 mg melatonin pill if I'm changing my sleep schedule to be earlier, but usually not. (By the way, it does not appear that the common, very large, melatonin doses seem to be more effective than a small dose from what I recall. 1 mg is still more than I'd like.)

рпивет! I've been learning Russian for the last while too, it's been an interesting language. There's a lot of approaches to starting a new language actually... you should check out Fluent Forever if you're looking for ideas. The basic gist, start with learning a good-enough version of the pronunciation, then learn the most common 700 words (or so) and then build on that from there. He's a big fan of Anki. If you have low tolerance for frustration and seeing unknown stuff, Anki's absolutely the way to go (or another SRS system like Memrise). It lets you expand the boundaries of your language ability by a bite sized chunk every day, and review everything you've learned in an efficient enough way that you don't need to spend a million hours, even if you've got 5,000 cards in your deck.

I've got two problems with Anki though. First, I burned out... I did it for years with a number of languages, and I just don't enjoy it all that much, I'd rather be using the language for something in my ability range and learn naturally as I go. I also found that with Anki, I was able to get stuff to where I 'kind of sort of knew it' but it wasn't mastered. It wasn't good enough to use reliably in conversation or recognize reliably while reading/listening. It was just enough that if I sat and thought about it, I could maybe pull it out. Do that enough and it'll stick though, so I think of Anki as a bridge to the destination, not so much the destination itself.

I don't recommend this, but I learned Russian to where I'm at mostly just with reading, even from day 1. I believe that unless you fully understand what you're reading, you're not learning, so to make sure it doesn't take a million years to get through a page, you need a good tool. Readlang's brilliant for that. You can look up individual phrases, individual words, you can even hook it up to a dictionary of your choice to see additional information on words you still don't understand. For Russian, declension/conjugation info is really important, so I made that my priority. As Grammar finishes settling in, I suppose I'll switch to Reverso, or something else with example sentences. At first I was looking up 2 out of every 3 words... now I'm just about done with my sixth book (the first five Narnia books + Harry Potter) and I'm feeling pretty comfortable. Still nowhere near reading paperback books without a truly obnoxious amount of lookup, but I'm reading very comfortably with assistance now it feels like. A fair number of sentences go by without any unknown words, which is cool... especially since there's a lot of bullshit words in what I'm reading that I don't actually need to know (archers, horseback riding, quiver, 'that place on a horse's lower neck right in front of where riders sit') but... yeah, making headway.

The only outside work I've done from reading is a few hours of grammar drills. Take your time, don't try and choke it all down at once, but a little of that when you feel like it really helps out. Russian grammar is huge compared to any other language I've ever gotten this far in (Lithuanian's arguably more complex, but I passed my old mark in that language a while ago) so... yeah. Just take your time, you'll get there. удачи!

Sounds to me like you are studying a fuckton, and that work ethic is not your problem. There are lots of hacks, like the pomodoro technique, or studying in a public place, or making schedules, etc, if you're having trouble with motivation or focus, but if you're studying as much as you say you are, I don't think that's the problem.

You don't need to study more, you need to study smarter.

"Studying" encompasses a lot of things. Reading. Re-reading. Looking over notes. Highlighting. Flash cards. Doing exercises. Etc. Not all studying is created equal. Not even close. As a general heuristic, you want to study in ways that are Active and Challenging as much as possible. If you aren't frequently getting things wrong, you're not doing it right. If you're reading or looking over notes, then you can't be wrong because "being wrong" doesn't even apply to that situation. Those are passive activities. You need to be putting yourself out there, taking a stab, and then checking if it's right. And you want to always be working at the edge of your abilities. If you aren't failing, you aren't learning. If you're getting everything right, move to something harder. De-stigmatize failure. Provided that you find out why/how you were wrong, and work to improve it and do better next time, failure is good. Fail often. Fail fast. Fail as fast as possible.

Think of it like physical exercise. You don't get strong by hanging around a gym. Or by reading about lifting. Or watching. Or thinking. You have to do work. And the work has to be hard. If you aren't struggling, you aren't building muscle. Being unable to do the last rep and needing a spot is a good thing. It means you are working at your limit. The brain is not a muscle, but it works an awful lot like one.

And on the topic of physical exercise, are you getting enough? A healthy/active body goes a long way towards a healthy/active mind.

Feynman Technique:
Basically, if you can't teach it, you don't know it. You need to be able to explain what you are doing from the ground up. Pretend you are talking to someone who has no familiarity with what you are doing, and you have to make them understand it completely. Or don't pretend, get a friend in a different major and take turns helping each other out. You'll uncover a lot of holes in your thinking that you didn't realize were there until you thought about how to communicate it to someone else. (this technique it's well known and there's a million articles/videos about it so look it up if you want more)

Also, why are you asking here? I mean, good for you , you're asking, you are actively seeking help, you are doing the right thing. But with the world wide web full of information at your fingertips, did you really think the people the best study tips were going to happen to attend your university? Sorry, I feel like I sound mean. I'm trying to help you, this is important. If you're trying to learn something, do so in the most effective way possible. Right now you are trying to learn how to learn. Seeking the advice of locals on reddit is not the best way to do that. There are probably subreddits dedicated to this topic that are repositories of years worth of accumulated advice from thousands of people. There are experts who have written books. Etc. It's not bad that you asked here. You just failed. Which is good. Next time you'll know there are probably more effective ways to find knowledge.


Further reading:

A Mind for Numbers- Barbara Oakley
Excellent book on how to learn. I've read a lot of books on this/related topics and this is the one I recommend the most. It focuses on how to learn Math/Science, but the knowledge is definitely applicable to any subject. I have a digital copy, if you have an eReader(or just want to read it on your computer screen I guess). Let me know if you want me to send it to you. .epub or .mobi. Also there are hard copies available from the Long Beach Public Library system.

Thomas Frank- youtuber
He has a million videos on study tips. Lots of really good advice. But be careful not to fall into watching hours of his videos instead of actually studying. Not that I've ever done that...
Here's a relevant few to start with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f-qkGJBPts
https://youtu.be/5ad6grll-ak?t=50s
https://youtu.be/23Xqu0jXlfs?t=38s

I've been learning about a year and a half. On Monday I just came back from 5 weeks in China.

I'm actually currently writing software to help people learn Chinese but I have not yet released it. I started writing it in part due to how awful duolingo is for Chinese.

My recommendations are:

1. Read Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner it's a truly fantastic book that teaches you how humans fundamentally learn before turning towards language learning.
   
   
2. Use spaced repetition be that through anki/pleco/skritter it will help enormously
   
   
3. The Chinese grammar wiki is your friend. It is a better resource for grammar than any and all books I've bought.
   
   
4. Read graded Mandarin books, I personally love Mandarin Companion it's written by the authors of the grammar wiki. Reading books in Chinese is a fantastic way to reinforce the characters and make learning fun. Personally I would recommend Country of the Blind.
   
   
5. Use hellotalk or a similar app to practice speaking Chinese. Alternatively your local university might have a Confucius Institute. They offer cheap lessons (the quality varies) but my local one (I live in Manchester) runs Mandarin Corner, a mix of native Chinese students and those learning Mandarin.
   
   If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.

I literally read this passage this morning

>An important, and often overlooked part of both learning disabilities and ADD is the social consequence of having them. ADD can interfere with one's interpersonal life just as dramatically as it does with one's academic or job performance. To make friends, you have to be able to pay attention. To get along in a group, you have to be able to follow what is being said in the group. Social cues are often subtle: the narrowing of eyes, the raising of eyebrows, a slight change in tone of voice, a tilting of the head. Often the person with ADD doesn't pick up on these cues. This can lead to real social gaffes or a general sense of being out of it. Particularly in childhood, where social transactions happen so rapidly and the transgressor of norms is dealt with so pitilessly, a lapse in social awareness due to the distractibility or impulsivity of ADD can preclude acceptance by a group or deny understanding from a friend.^1

You're in high school right? high school is a difficult time to be introverted, because everyone demands you live your life a certain way and act a certain way, and anything else makes you an outcast. Get through it. It is difficult, but life isn't like high school. In the real world you won't be interacting only with people within 2 years of your age. you won't be interacting only with people who want to go do things or judge people all the time. There are lots of types of people out there and high school is not a good slice of them. Get through high school, and head to the rest of your life.

It took me a while to realize that being an introvert is fine. Mostly because my fiance is one too. We sat down one day and both said "It's annoying that everyone wants to do things with us, why can't we just be alone with ourselves?". we are both introverts, and we enjoy it this way. Other people may not understand it, but we have fun, we enjoy life, and we have friends. we just don't need to jump every time someone mentions a movie or thing. We just don't need people the way other people do. It is hard to accept, but we came to understand it and are happy with it. It is hard for other people to accept, but we don't really care about that anymore. WE are happy, and that's all that matters.


^1 Driven to Distraction by Edward M. Hallowell, MD and John J Ratey MD^2: i'm only a chapter in and its a great book. find it and read it.^3

^2 The authors are psychologists and also live with ADD (at least one does, I haven't gotten very far). But they are considered the defining accessible sources on living with ADD.

^3 If you can't focus on a book like this very well, get Answers to Distraction this one is made in a FAQ format in smaller pieces.

>And how on earth do you think that saves you time?

It would save me time because I would be learning only comprehension, while not spending any time focusing on developing the ability to speak. You disagree that ignoring the speaking component of language acquisition would be an effective way to save time, but that's of course the fundamental issue that we're talking about here. It doesn't help to repeat your position without any support, as if it's a new point you're making.

Iterating the process I mentioned for several years sounds like a large time investment, but there's no getting around that when trying to learn a language to a standard that I personally would find useful in my life. If not learning how to speak would cut the nevertheless lengthy process to about half of what it would have otherwise been, that would be useful to me. I'm basically trying to solve the problem of, "How could I learn French to a decently high standard for the specific objectives I have, namely gaining a reasonably deep understanding of the politics, science, and literature of the modern and historical French-speaking world, while cutting every other corner as much as possible, since my time is limited?" Learning to comprehend without practicing speaking seemed like a possibility, since I've heard of plenty of people who can understand a language without being able to speak it.

>If you spent the very small amount of time time just learning how to speak French - the FSI Phonology Course is a very good base, takes 10 hours - you'd understand what I'm talking about. You can finish that in 2 weeks rather than spending years of iteration.

I don't think you understand what my goals are here. It will take years of iteration no matter what to learn what I want to learn. I'm trying to be efficient, not spend a small amount of time as if it's going to just be a hobby that I play around with here and there.

>In German you half the time you have spaces between words in writing and the other half you don't, and whether you get a space in speech will depend on whether the word starts with a vowel or not. That's not particularly straightforward either, it's just different.

Why did you say that learning to understand without learning how to speak would possibly be doable in German, and that French in particular is the issue here? The only way I'm able to make sense of that claim is to assume that it's easier to take knowledge of the written language in German and translate it into listening comprehension, than it is in French.

When you were having trouble with listening comprehension in French, were you at a level where you could understand a lot more in writing than in speech? If so, was that because you spent a while memorizing vocabulary and grammar in writing? The main difficulty I'm having with your claims is that everything you're saying could be explained by something I've seen an almost endless supply of: language learners picking up a lot of vocabulary and grammar in writing, and then having trouble translating it into listening comprehension. Methods like what's explained in this book solve that problem entirely, and I can't tell why French couldn't be addressed with similar methods, though tailored to its peculiarities.

I see that you're native in English and Swiss German, and that you're C1 in German. That sounds like a result of your upbringing. It also seems that you're A2 in French, which I imagine is a language you've intentionally decided to study as an adult. Are there any other languages that you've studied as an adult to a decent level?

>No. There aren't a huge number of speakers who are literally native in more than one language regardless of the pair. It's fairly uncommon. Especially so with French - you won't even find it that often in Quebec.

It's incredible the degree to which you just seem to want to quibble. Look, there's not going to be an issue finding people who know about French politics who would be happy to speak in English. Some of them will be individuals who are native in both languages (since such people surely exist in high enough numbers that I could readily meet them), and some of them will be people from other backgrounds.

I don't have as much first-hand data on this topic as you, so it's easy for you to quibble with my relatively imprecise statements. But my goal here isn't to see who's able to be more technically correct within the realm of interpretation strained for the purpose of tribal argumentation. My goal is to figure out what may or may not be a good idea to pursue, and you're giving me little confidence that your statements are optimized for that purpose; you seem above all concerned with winning arguments.

Meditation may help you, but memory and memory improvement have been well studied by psychologists, so you can improve memory independently of your meditation practice.

I recently read "Moonwalking with Einstein" : https://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-Everything/dp/0143120530 which is an excellent introduction to the topic.

Its a non-fiction book by a journalist who goes to cover a memory championship, gets intrigued, learns all the techniques himself and goes back to enter the US Memory Championship himself.

I'd also recommend Anki ( http://ankisrs.net ) which is a free program which uses Spaced Repetition to help you remember what you learn longterm, using a variant of the process covered in this article Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

I haven't read all of it and I'm sure it's probably a simplification of more nuanced ideas, but check out Josh Kaufman's The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast. It seems to be about how to maximize certain skills and habits to create an ideal brain environment for processing new information. Other books that may relate to the goal you described include How We Learn, Make It Stick: The Science of Successfully Learning, or perhaps even something like Robert Greene's Mastery. There's even a Coursera course out called "Learning How to Learn" that probably delves into a lot of the ideas explored in the aforementioned books, and a guy named Cal Newport has a whole blog that investigates what study habits are actually useful and which are not.

Also, I don't think the idea should be to obtain knowledge as much as have a solid foundation in thinking critically and learning how to learn. Your original post implies that you seem to view learning as stuffing your brain full of (hopefully factual) ideas to produce something recognizable as "knowledge"; a better way to conceptualize this process is that you develop skills in learning, processing information, and thinking in general with the hopes that it will enable you to draw on a wider range of knowledge and ideas when they crop up. Hence why I suggested books that are about learning and information processing; if you can end up making learning, studying, and reflecting a habit that you naturally come to do, perhaps you can begin a fuller mental life in general instead of simply becoming a walking encyclopedia.

Giving up won't help, especially with math. So your first order of business is not letting yourself off the hook. Keep working on it, even when it seems hard and confusing. Sometimes it takes many attempts before a concept finally 'clicks.'

Khan Academy is good, but you're going to need to do additional problems to really get the work to sink in. I recommend clicking through on the hints after you've done a problem to see how they explain it. A lot of times I've found those hints to be better explanations than what is in the video.

If you can't retain the concepts, you're going to have a hard time doing CS. You might also want to look into memory aids, like Anki flashcards, to practice and reinforce ideas as you go.

I started a small notebook where I write in concept outlines so I can come back and re-read them and reinforce them as I go.

I would recommend a YouTuber named James Tanton. He has an Exploding Dots series that is really basic, but is visually very helpful. There are loads of other people uploading info on YouTube, so you can pretty much always find someone explaining what you're learning. Watch different people to see how they approach things differently, until the ideas make sense to you.

Another online resource that will provide some help as you go along is the website Better Explained, though you'll need to poke around to find what you need.

I also read a book called A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley. It's not a math textbook, but it's full of advice for how to train your brain to be better at math.

Those are the things I've been using that have helped. Good luck!

I highly recommend the book A Mind for Numbers especially if you'll be taking any type of math courses. It's a really great book that gives you tools about learning HOW to learn. Read this before the semester starts. Once you start school, definitely take advantage of any campus resources you can. A lot of times schools will offer study groups for lower level classes that students commonly struggle in. Go to those every week. Make friends with other students. You can compare homeworks with them or study together. Never skip class (not even once). Once you skip for the first time it ALWAYS snowballs into skipping more often. Get a good planner/agenda. The first week of class write down all your midterm, final, and homework due dates. Use your planner to keep a to-do list of what needs to be done. Each day, sit down and complete at least one thing on the list. After a while, getting things done off of your to do list will become addicting and it will feel good to get things done early vs procrastinating and waiting until the last minute. Try to start off your semester with good habits. Once you get that first good exam grade back, that feeling of good grades will help push you to keep it up for the remainder of the semester. Good luck!

First you need to start off making sure you're in good health. Make sure you're eating a good diet, especially one that contains foods that improve cognition (e.g. foods with choline, lecithin, omega-3s, etc.). Make sure you're getting enough quality sleep and exercise (20 min. of aerobic exercise has been shown to improve memory). And stay adequately hydrated (I usually drink 2 1/2 liters of water a day).

Now for digesting and assimilating what you read, look into close reading techniques; taking notes while you read and jotting down questions you have while reading; marking-up text; and, echoing what /u/Firetaffer suggested, reading "How to Read A Book" by Mortimer Adler.
I've also heard good things about "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer.

Also, SuperMemo and Anki might be of interest of you.

Here are some links that might help:

• An overview of "How to read a Book" by Mortimer Adler part one and two
  
• Marking-up text link one and two
  
• How to write beautiful visual notes
  
  
  Edit: /r/Nootropics might also be of interest to you.

Currently I'm learning German for my language requirements, and have never taken a German class in my life. You can definitely try to teach yourself if you'd like, and when you do you will be able to focus on what's most important for grad school (i.e. reading comprehension.) If you're interested I'd recommend reading this book to learn about the best and most efficient ways to teach yourself a foreign language: Forever Fluent

Otherwise, you can see if there are any online or local classes which provide courses on the language(s) you are hoping to learn.

You may also be able to get funded traveling opportunities through your school (to take a language immersion program, or to actually study abroad in a place that speaks the language you are hoping to learn, though this may be more difficult with languages such as Latin!)

If you decide to go the self-taught route, I can provide advice or resources if you'd like. Good luck!

I have two whiteboards as well, i find them more useful for scheduling with upcoming social events, parties, coffee dates, practical classes.

So the reason why i have a flashcard system with multiple draws is to improve my spaced repetition (see Rate of Forgetting)

I've never really had any trouble remembering daily news, but then again i don't pay that much attention to it, but for scientific journal articles i print them out and highlight sections i find useful to review later on in the same day - then put them into a filing cabinet, it's unlikely i'll need to know that information for everyday purposes, but if something sparks my memory related to that subject i'll review it as soon as i can.

If you want to start developing a better memory - there is this book which can teach you some wonderful ways to use your memory.

edit: I prefer real paper flashcards over programs like Anki because writing it by hand has been proven to increase retention more so than typing them out. The link for the paper seems to be broken but here is an article explaining it.

Also reading on paper is better than digital

Since you're into programming and think very logically, I recommend as the stickied post on this sub 'How to Learn Math', specifically the sources from Art of Problem Solving AoPS.

If you don't mind spending a little then I think they're a great source for building up to pre-calculus and calculus. I started with their books and then build up enough confidence to read works from Serge Lang (like 'Basic Mathematics' and 'Geometry: a High School Course') and there's something so compelling in Lang's writing that make his reading enjoyable (mind you the basic math books from Lang and not the more advanced books that some people might consider a mess).

You can check also the free videos from AoPS on youtube Link, the way Richard Rusczyk teaches math makes me want to learn math everyday. Mind you, that although AoPS advertises itself for math competition students or gifted students, older students (including adults) can also benefit greatly from this.
Their approach is to let the student think and try to come up with a solution before teaching you the theory behind, I find their teaching ideal for people with interest in programming (like their problem solving books).

Since you mentioned pre-algebra using Khan Academy, if you're also interested in some examples from AoPS pre-algebra book just message me.
I know sometimes using Khan can also be confusing, I had those feelings at first too, before diversifying into more sources to learn from.

Edit: Also don't worry and cheer up! Whether you have dyscalculia or not, I don't think it changes the fact that you want to understand math and by asking here you're also proving that fact. When I was younger, dumber and more immature I also thought I had dyscalculia, no matter how I tried to understand and do math, I just couldn't do it. Eventually finding sources like AoPS, gave me the little push I needed, giving me another perspective and made me realize how terrible my fundamentals were. Don't be afraid to start from the most basics, also Barbara's Oakley book is great too link, math is a lot about practice, having your fundamentals well set and looking from multiple perspectives.

Third year Microbio major here! Just picked this book up but could have been much more helpful earlier. Quick, easy read with lots of good insight on many common errors students make when studying or learning topics and is backed by a lot of recent, well supported studies. Can bring to light a lot of things you know should happen when studying but just don't. Has a lot of good tips and strategies and can overall motivate you to get better at learning! I recommend it!
http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417378070&sr=8-1&keywords=a+mind+for+numbers

There is this one book by Josh Kaufman which you might find helpful

The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! https://www.amazon.in/dp/1591846943/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_GbjTDb8RNVJRT

Then there is a another book which is also said to be pretty good

The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance https://www.amazon.in/dp/0743277465/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_TgjTDb2W9TWFD


You can also check the art of deliberate learning where you improve yourself constantly through examination.

You can find good chunks of this in the book - Grit by Angela Duckworth


Others things that help me learn anything quickly is by learning from my mistakes and asking these 3 questions

1. What did I do well?
   
   
2. What did I not do well?
   
   
3. What could I have done better?
   
   Also make sure once you learn these things you can constantly put them into practice.
   
   For example with the books... a person who learns 10 books and applies whatever he learns is hella lot powerful than a person who just skims through a 1000..
   
   See what works for you and get started on this amazing journey
   
   Cheers

I can't recommend much for Thai specifically, but as a general language learning method, Anki (Android, iOS) is approximately the best thing ever. It's a Spaced Repetition System which helps a lot over regular flash cards.

The book Fluent Forever is also a great resource for general language learning tips. I highly recommend checking it out.

And don't forget to come visit us at /r/languagelearning. Happy studies!

When learning a language it is useful to use a spaced repetition system like Anki or the Leitner system (if you'd rather have physical flashcards) to commit vocabulary and grammatical concepts to your long-term memory. The idea is to practice recalling the concept after ever-increasing time intervals, which allows you to remember large amounts of information effectively. I'd recommend a book called Fluent Forever if you want to read more about SRSs and how they can be used in language learning. The author has a lot of fascinating ideas about how to go about learning a language.

Latin and Ancient Greek will be interesting cases due to the sheer amount of grammar involved; traditionally you learn these by copying and memorizing huge conjugation and declension charts. But using Anki for vocabulary will help you nonetheless. You might also be interested in Lingua Latina per se Illustrata for learning Latin; its approach is to have you start reading simple sentences immediately and builds up more complex grammar naturally.

But short answer: Anki will help you memorize vocabulary solidly over the long-term.

Awesome that you are following your dreams!

I'm in process of doing the same as you, going to college after loitering in the armed forces for half a decade. To be honest though, I haven't been totally idle, I have spent my time on "Learning how to learn" since school got in the way of my education.

I like philosphy and especially history of ideas, I find that it provides a nice overview and structure to different ideas which makes it easier to grasp new ideas, put them into context and categorize them. I think philosophy is the most underestimated subject today, philosophy provides a bridge between the social and natural sciences. http://qz.com/635002/teaching-kids-philosophy-makes-them-smarter-in-math-and-english/
Even though that study is about children, I think that the results can be transferred to adults.

But learning stuff is all about method and exploiting how your brain works. This book is about mindset https://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Journey-Optimal-Performance/dp/0743277465
And this book is all about method https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X

Hope this helps some, and good luck with your education :)

• they want someone with an associates degree in IT or a certification or significant work experience. So I think you could finish the associates degree at CC and apply and have no issues in getting accepted or you can do an IT certification that is part of the SWD program and get accepted that way.
  
  
• learning how to learn is one of the best things you can do on your journey to becoming a good developer. Unfortunately almost no places teach you to learn how to learn, so taking initiative would be very wise to do. for me - I learn well reading a tech book as opposed to watching videos as I feel I get a deeper understanding of the subject matter although almost always reading tends to go deeper into concepts. So check out a book at your library something like this:
  
• http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Learn-Surprising-Happens/dp/0812984293/ref=pd_sim_14_4?ie=UTF8&dpID=51HJ9jVJxUL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR105%2C160_&refRID=03SAKKNQZJXGAT81XTDZ
  
  
• I've only started web development this year and this program in September, but this is my 2 cents. I feel you more prepared than other programs for working as this program takes a very practical approach - learning very essential skills such as HTML/CSS, Java, SQL, etc. You should have a very good understanding of java because passing the java cert requires a very good understanding of java (tho I haven't taken yet)
  
• I did some interview mock trials and have a few interviews with recruiters, a company owner, and Charles Schwab (which I got to the second interview with IT manager). Most experienced engineers asked me a bit about the school (as I put on my resume that I've graduating in 1-2 years) and how do I plan on working and going to school. But the dealbreaker for me was that I did not have any work experience on my resume so this is what usually made them pass me up although I did then create 2 websites but the IT manager wanted me to have deep javascript experience and AngularJS. Which are things that NO school teaches.
  So my bottom line is: choosing this school is great because Whichever school I end up going to, there's so much learning I will have to do outside of school to become the person companies want badly. Good luck =]
  

Sooo many lol, here are some of my favorites.

ADHD

Smart But Stuck: Emotions in Teens and Adults with ADHD https://www.amazon.com/dp/111827928X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_1.Y9ybCSGW7GF

General Brain Stuff
You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, an d 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself https://www.amazon.com/dp/1592407366/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_abZ9ybEHGSMEK

You are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself https://www.amazon.com/dp/1592408796/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_vbZ9ybKY1636G

School/Study Help
A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) https://www.amazon.com/dp/039916524X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_gcZ9ybCDM8Q6K

Social/Relationship skills
What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061438294/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_1cZ9ybQJXS3BK

The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591846617/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_OdZ9ybBFRG9R4

Cosmology

Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400033721/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_GeZ9ybHP9J2J5

Each one of these books has had a big impact on me, as a side note I'm have become a big fan of audible since I normally have a hard time sitting still to read, so I'd recommend giving it a try if you never have. You'll be surprised how much of a book you can comprehend while listening to it as do you other random chores and stuff throughout the day.

Here are some things that have been helpful for me while learning new languages:

• Anki: There a lot behind how it works, but it's a flashcard program/App that uses an algorithm that is very good for retaining new information (I originally read about it while reading Fluent Forever, by Gabriel Wyner.
  
• Duolingo: You've probably already heard of this one, it's a quasi-Rosetta Stone (but free).
  
• Rosetta Stone: Opinions may differ, but imo I learned and retained more with Rosetta Stone than using Duolingo (there's also Memrise but I haven't used that one much, so I can't offer a good opinion on it). Maybe the pictures or more natural audio, not sure. I used the free trial.
  
• Labels: Putting labels on everything around your house. This is good for learning nouns [unfortunately, we can't put labels on verbs :( ]. Different nouns have different genders (female/male/neutral) and it's important to know which one is which gender.
  
• Keeping a daily journal/diary in the specific language (Greek, in your case): This is really helpful if you do it carefully and go over what you've written correcting your mistakes or clearing-up doubts. It forces you to use the language and think.
  
• Traveling: this is obviously not as accessible as the previous ones, but full immersion is by far the best approach. If you have the time/resources, get on a plane and spend some time in Greece :)
  
  Edit: Also, this sub's wiki has a bunch of resources.
  

Piggybacking this comment for "how to learn", which I see other people are curious about.

2 books that I've found helpful in terms of learning how to learn, and would recommend to others:

• Benedict Carey - How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens
  
  
  
• Josh Waitzkin - The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance
  
  You might recognise the last author's name - Josh became a bit of a sensation when he won his first national chess championship at age 9, proceeded with an illustrious career for the next 10 years, until he decided he wanted to learn martial arts - and became the world champion of Tai Chi Chuan.
  
  Both are good reads (neither are exceptional), and will give a good understanding of how to go about acquiring a new skill set with the least amount of wasted time and effort.
  
  

Good and Real by Gary Drescher. Covers a similar philosophical stance to that of Yudkowsky in the Sequences, but with more academic rigor. A fun read that goes over computation, decision theory, morality, and Newcomb's Problem (among other things.)

Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman's lifetime of research in heuristics and cognitive biases condensed into one epic volume. Highly engaging and 100% recommended if you aren't well-versed in this area.

A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley. A scientific approach to studying, looking at good memory tricks, ways to learn better, and some interesting ideas on procrastination (including characterizing it as a malign reward loop).

Alrighty, if you want to learn Spanish, this is the method that I have been using so far... First off, I have to plug this book:

Fluent Forever by Grabiel Wyner - Amazon.com

I have read and tried a lot of different books on learning languages before I finally found this one, which I consider to be the holy grail. Nothing else has stuck before I read this book. The method is basically this:

1. Using Anki, a spaced-repitition learning (SRS) flashcard program, you start to learn the minimal pairs of your target language (words that differ by one sounds like "cat" and "cut"). This will help you later one when listening and learning words and will help you develop a better accent.
   
   
2. Using Anki, start to learn the most commonly used words in your language by gathering your own images and pronunciations to go along with them. Learn the base forms of verbs, you will learn to conjugate them in the next step. Here is the top 1000 words on a frequency list from Wiktionary and here is the 625 word list provided in the book. I suggest using the alphabetical word list rather than the thematic word list because if you start learning words thematically it can be harder to retain, explained within the book. Grab images from Google Images by typing in your target word after translating with SpanishDict and insert into Anki. Grab audio translations from Forvo.com if available.
   
   
3. Once you have plowed your way through 500-1000 words, you are ready to start learning to conjugate verbs and making sentences. He explains a great method for this in the book using mnemonics for different conjugations and provides a model deck you can install to use with Anki at this website. Also take a look at StudySpanish.com - Grammar Tutorial and start working your way through that at the same time. The reason you learn vocabulary first is so you have words to actually make sentences with, rather than using a smaller limited vocabulary to make the same sentences over and over.
   I suggest focusing on Linguasorb.com - Top 100 Spanish Verbs to start with conjugations that will be most commonly used.
   
   
4. Once you are able to construct basic sentences and have a decent vocabulary, you are ready to start really practicing. Find language partners or tutors on iTalki.com, write some short stories and stuff on Lang-8.com and get them translated by native speakers, practice whenever and wherever you can.
   
   
5. Start to acquire as much exposure to the language as possible. Watch TV Shows, read CNN en Español, listen to radio, watch movies, read books, whatever you can at this point to break through that intermediate fluency level.
   
   Other useful things:
   
   Books:
   
   

• Lonely Planet - Latin American Spanish Phrasebook
  
  
• Lonely Planet - Spanish Phrasebook
  
  
• Practical Spanish Grammar - A Self Teaching Guide
  
  Websites:
  
  
• 60 Insanely Useful Resources for Learning Spanish
  
  
• Spanish Linking Words - SpanishWithJudith.com
  
  
• Spanish Transition Words - TheSpanishBlog.com
  
  
• Palabras de Transicion
  
  
• Graaahh's Awesome Spanish Study Guide (for this one you have to make a free account, then go back to the page, click on "Share", then a download link will appear)
  
  This is all I can write for the moment, I am by no means fluent in Spanish but I am working on it. I have done a TON of research and this is some of the best stuff I have found, but my bookmarks folder is completely full of other resources if there is something in particular you are looking for.

I'm in a similar process with software development, I've always had the passion, but mathematics always stopped me, now I'm very motivated!

​

These are the resources that have helped me, I hope and work for you

​

https://www.youtube.com/user/professorleonard57

The best teacher!

​

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X/ref=sr_1_2?crid=16HTDVAQL50FX&keywords=barbara+oakley&qid=1572824841&s=books&sprefix=barbara+o%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C210&sr=1-2

The best book

​

http://www.math-aids.com/

Exercise page

​

And of course

Khan Academy!

> I don’t know why people have to bring each other down like that.

I've found this to be a thing at Western. There is a big crab bucket mentality at Western and in London, Ontario in general. People love to pull each other down and talk behind peoples backs.

​

Also, I'll add that academic success isn't always forward a forward-looking indicator of having a successful life (in terms of profession and income). Some of the most book smart people I knew who received great marks in uni struggled to find career-type employment after university and some are working service type jobs close to minimum wage (and shackled to lots of loan debt)

​

I received pretty mediocre marks (high 60s, low 70s), yet I've succeeded professionally in my mid/late 20s (working for a great firm, take-home pay just over six figures, working internationally) because I focused on networking, marketing myself, and honing my soft skills.

​

/u/DizzyNeedleworker, your worth as a person isn't determined by a number on a piece of paper, so don't stress out too much. Do your best and focus on Learning how to Learn.

​

A great book I'd recommend reading is A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley. Math wasn't my strong suit either, but this book really helped me and it might be of value to you as well.

Hmm, you probably won't get a real taste of a chemical engineering course until sophomore year of college.

I'm not sure of any books on general information about chemical engineering, however here is a good link.

If you want to get a good advantage over other students I would recommend learning how to study in college.

These two are pretty good. One Two

Best of luck!

> “Do YOU take the effort to try and understand the reasons why people disagree with you and regularly use critical thinking to refine your own opinions, even entertaining ideas you strongly disagree on in your gut in order to evaluate if part of them connects to your existing knowledge?”

I’m fairly confident I do a better job of that than most average people (not saying I’m perfect at it, and its some I try to keep in my mind on a daily basis and something I try to practice in a daily basis).

I have an entire bookshelf at home that has all sorts of “brain” and psychology books on it (again, not saying that to brag, because I’m definitely not perfect at it). I just try to build up a wide enough variety of resources so any time I’m struggling with something I can use the resources I have to brainstorm innovative or alternative approaches or different understandings of an issue.

Books like:

• Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain https://www.amazon.com/dp/0596007795/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_GV4pDb7B8X8YB
  
  
• What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite https://www.amazon.com/dp/1616144831/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_a14pDbWT2RD5V
  
  
• The Little Blue Reasoning Book: 50 Powerful Principles for Clear and Effective Thinking https://www.amazon.com/dp/1897393601/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_814pDb5B9J61X
  
  (theres alot more but to be honest I’m already in bed and its been a long day and I’m to lazy to get up and skim across my bookshelf).
  
  > “Listening to people we disagree with is HARD. “
  
  Its not hard if the person is respectful and can back up their different opinion or preference with good legit factual evidence and common sense reasoning. Its one thing to say:
  
  
• “I prefer 4x4 vehicles,.. but thats because I live up a country road that the County doesnt plow and I also do construction as a side job, so having a 4x4 often helps me get to remote job sites”.
  
  Thats a completely logical and purpose-driven choice that makes sense.
  
  But if a person says:...
  
  
• “4x4 are just supierior vehicles and only libtard morons drive anything else!!”
  
  I’m not going to waste my time “trying to understand” that persons point of view. Sorry, I’m just not. Its not worth my time.
  
  > “ something as trivial as if you prefer dogs or cats or neither.”
  
  I generaly try to completely avoid those conversations. People can have different preferences. That typically doesnt effect me. So I dont care. Whether someone prefers chocolate ice cream or sunny days over rainy days,.. is entirely irrelevant to me.
  
  > “Maybe it's just plain time to retire the idea of "us vs them" and recognize that there's just "us" in a wide range of configurations.”
  
  Totally agree. Although I’m not sure thats an issue of “not understanding each other”. Thats certainly 1 aspect of it,.. but I can help other people without understanding them. (Hell, I can help complete strangers without even knowing a single thing about them).
  
  Societies problems these days have a lot more to do with narrowmindedness, selfishness and laziness. “Whats in it for me?” is heard a lot more often than “What can I do to help?”

Beginner:

1. Use this with Anki to learn Hangeul/Pronuncation: http://fluent-forever.com/pronunciation-trainers/korean/#.Vn_f1_l96Ul
   
2. Do TTMIK Levels 1-3 with this Memrise course: http://www.memrise.com/course/534607/every-ttmik-lesson-levels-1-9/
   
3. Learn 1000 high frequency words. Use this book to make a word list: https://www.amazon.com/Korean-Essential-Vocabulary-6000-Foreigners/dp/8955184891/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485063386&sr=8-1&keywords=6000+korean, and then look up example sentences on Naver Translate: http://endic.naver.com/search_example.nhn?sLn=en&query=%EA%B0%80%EB%8B%A4&preQuery=&searchOption=example&forceRedirect=N, and then learn the words in Anki, using the methodology described in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Forever-Learn-Language-Forget/dp/0385348118/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485065753&sr=8-1&keywords=fluent+forever
   
4. Do TTMIK's Korean Verbs Books: http://mykoreanstore.com/collections/featured-items/products/the-korean-verbs-book
   
5. Do KGIU Beginner: https://www.amazon.com/Korean-Grammar-Use-Beginning-Intermediate/dp/8959951986/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485063504&sr=8-1&keywords=korean+grammar+in+use
   
6. Use this Youtube channel to start developing fluency: https://www.youtube.com/user/11newcon/videos
   
7. Sprinkle in other TTMIK products that you might be interested in. "My Daily Routine In Korean", "Korean In Action", and "Real Life Conversations" are all pretty good options.
   
8. Sprinkle in other Youtube channels that you might be interested in. GoBillyKorean: https://www.youtube.com/user/GoBillyKorean/videos, SweetAndTastyTV: https://www.youtube.com/user/sweetandtasty/videos, Margarita: https://www.youtube.com/user/DAenvgiell6/videos, FnE Korean: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3VVK5qeHT1DbzqYlzo64iQ/videos and PinkPong: https://www.youtube.com/user/pinkfongko/videos are all good.
   
   Intermediate:
   
   
9. Do TTMIK Levels 4-6 (links above)
   
10. Learn 2000 high frequency words (total of 3000 words) (links above)
    
11. Do Glossika: https://glossika.com/courses/?target=kr
    
12. Do TTMIK's "My Weekly Korean Vocabulary" set: http://mykoreanstore.com/collections/e-books/products/48-weeks
    
13. Do KGIU Intermediate: https://www.amazon.com/Korean-Grammar-Use-Intermediate/dp/892773078X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1485063504&sr=8-2&keywords=korean+grammar+in+use
    
14. Start getting corrections from native speakers. Italki for speaking: https://www.italki.com/home, Lang8 for writing: http://lang-8.com/, and HelloTalk for casual speech: https://www.hellotalk.com/
    
15. Sprinkle in other TTMIK products that you might be interested in. "IYAGI Translations", "Situational Dialogs In Korean", "Korean Slang Expressions", and "Everyday Korean Idiomatic Expressions" are all pretty good options.
    
16. Sprinkle in other Youtube channels that you might be interested in. SKCouple: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoUDrzyCl1IwU602xdTsM-g, EveSojin: https://www.youtube.com/user/evesojin/videos, DeevaJessica: https://www.youtube.com/user/deevajessica/videos, Yumcast: https://www.youtube.com/user/yumcast11/videos HoneyTV: https://www.youtube.com/user/honeyTV2/videos, HeoSam: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnCeDIkExSpULGqmpj5oafg/videos Sadly there's a lack of male Korean youtubers that use Korean subs.

The recording is mostly for helping my pronounciation, I try to pronounce the word & then play the recording to see how I did. It does take discipline to read the word, but I like to have an associated (similar) image for forming the memory as well.

As for the image on the same side of the card as the foreign word, I suppose one could make the same argument if one was to place the picture on the opposite side of the card - that you might just skip over it and read the English translation. And if you see the picture and pronounce the word and spell it in your head without ever reading the word isn't that what one would want to do when learning a language? Associate the word with a visual image of that thing or action - not the English translation.

As for the typing, you do you, man. But here's the link to the research I mentioned.

Anki retention algorithms are programmed to give the general user a ~90% retention on the cards, but you can change the retention interval multiplier to shift that number. My current stats put me at ~94% of reviews marked correct - that's all cards, learning, young and mature. For reference, I have 7000+ notes & 13782 cards. I guess I just have a freakishly good memory /s. But on a more serious note, I get most of my contextual review and from reading the news, etc, so YMMV.

The book Fluent Forever also has some learning methods which I have found to be very useful in language learning. I have found the author's method for using textbooks while self-learning a language. Generally, he states that placing a few grammatical examples from the textbook is best, and relying on other sources for further language immersion (like radio, TV, internet). The final reason I don't have 5 sentences for everything is because I don't have the time to do all of that input, and would rather spend it learning new vocabulary/grammar structures.

I've read a lot of posts on here where individuals state that you will get "real-life" experience on the job, once you're an accountant.

I agree with your sentiments, book-learning is different from "on the job" learning. Perhaps, a lot of this theoretical knowledge that you pick up from the books will be solidified once you begin working in accounting. I'm not sure, because I haven't started working yet, but this is what I assume and what many others have said.

However, I tend to agree with your method of learning. At the end of the day, after reading: [Make it Stick] (https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013), A Mind for Numbers and several other similar books, you are learning properly. Reading a textbook gives you more of a baseline knowledge/framework to then apply to practice questions. Practice questions then reaffirm your framework constructs or let you know where you need to fill in knowledge gaps. Then, you must fill those gaps. The Feynman technique is excellent for this. Just make sure you are not wasting tons of time on anything that isn't "Active Learning." Active learning is the basis of all true learning, at least as far as doing well on exams go and in life.

Edit: Check out this video featuring Cal Newport on "Active Learning." Skip to time stamp 19:20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppvVsSQa9gc

Two books that really helped me with this are Moonwalking with Einstein, which lays out a good narrative and overview of how various memory devices works and How to Develop a Brilliant memory. The authors, Joshua Foer and Dominic O'Brien both competed in memory competitions, doing rather well using techniques used here.


For lists and such I particularly like the Memory Palace method.




For more specific and complex things like passwords I like the Dominic System.


There are several other methods mentioned in these books, some help linking names to faces (very helpful and very easy). Alot of the things they suggest seem ridiculous, and take practice, but the strangeness is part of what helps you remember.

Anyway, hope that gives you a good starting point!

Hey if you truly feel this way and want to improve, I’ve got a recommendation for you:

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra-ebook/dp/B00G3L19ZU

Give it an earnest try and it’ll at the very least change how you view math. Good luck friend :)

this is normal. You must get used to frustration. It's just normal and is the way the brain learns.

I have been programming for more or less 4 months and at the beginning the most simple problems where very diffucult for me. like for loops, then I mastered that, then came 2 level for-loops, and I was like damn, then I mastered. Then came for-each loop, diffucult at beginning easier with time.

When I first learned about arrays I was like what is this shit and why it's so difficult, now I get em, then arraylist, then hashmap, etc...

Just focus on baby steps. Don't try to shove in a million things at the same time. Exercise, eat well and your brain will be at 100% capacity.

D

Something that has also helped me is learn to learn (or metacognition).

a mind for numbers really good book.

Learning to learn will really help you understand the brain learns and how to hack it.

Also consider programming is as likely an art as it's a science, and in order to excel in any art you must practice, in this case code and code and code. Everyday a lil bit at least that my mantra.

EDIT: Also never consider yourself dumb because of a book, some book are just terrible at explaining and teaching stuff, its like if this Ph.D. guys that write this books know so much that they somehow forgot how it was not knowing about the stuff they are teaching! Look headfirst series they are pretty good and easy to understand.

I wonder if this is related to why the "memory palace" technique works? That's a technique used by many in memory competitions.

Yes, there are memory competitions, with national events in many nations, and a world championship. Here are some examples of the events and current world records:

1. Memorizing a 52 card deck of shuffled cards. You get to look at it as long as you wish, and then you have to recall the exact order. Whoever spends the least time in the "look at it" phase wins. The world record is 21.19 seconds.

2. Memorizing names and faces. Names and faces are presented in a certain order for 15 minutes. Then competitors are presented the faces and have to recall the names. Record is 201.

3. Memorizing historical dates. Contestants are given a list of fictional historical events and dates, and have 5 minutes to memorize them. Record is 120.

4. Memorizing several decks of cards. Competitors are given several decks, and have one hour to memorize them. Record is around 1400 cards memorized.

The really interesting thing in these events is that the people who compete claim that they do not have any better memories than the rest of us. They just, they claim, have learned some mnemonic aids. One of them is the "memory palace".

That involves constructing an imaginary place with many different rooms (although I suppose you could use a real place you are familiar with). When you have to memorize something, you imagine it in a particular room and visualize it there. You lay out the things you are memorizing in the rooms in some standard order of rooms. Then to recall them, you imagine taking a walk through your memory palace, looking in each room to see what item is there.

The fact that this clearly ridiculous sounding technique works indicates that our memory system is probably designed to be good at memorizing locations of things and memorizing what is in familiar locations, and the memory palace exploits that. In computer terminology, location is probably a primary key for memory look up (yes, I know we don't work like computers--I'm just borrowing terminology).

Given that, it makes a lot of sense that if you have learned something new in location X, but before it has moved from short term to long term memory you change locations, it won't get that internal location tagging, and thus might be harder to recall. When you walk through a door, your brain could be taking that as a signal that you've moved on to a new location--time to stop processing stuff from the old location and move on memorizing the important features of the new location.

For completeness, the other technique the memory competitors say they use is to make up stories. They might have memorized a code that associates letters of the alphabet with digits, and then when they need to memorize numbers they convert them to letters, map those letters to words in a reversible way, and then turn the words into a story. So some sting of digits might turn into a girl carrying a blue cat is running in the rain and steps into a puddle, splashing President Obama who is holding hands with Ron Paul. Apparently we are good at remembering stories, even ridiculous stories, so they exploit that.

There's some evidence that these people are right when they claim that they are just ordinary people who have learned some mnemonic aids. There's a book by a journalist who was not at all good with memory, but who had an assignment to write a story about memory competitions. As part of that, he was trained by one of the champions, and a year later was in the finals of the US Memory Championship, where he set a national record for speed memorization of a pack of cards.

He wrote a a book about that, which has received good reviews. I've not read it so can't give a first hand account.

There's so many more points I want to make to this, but the character limit prevents me from doing that. I'll keep it simple and make just one more recommendation.

For the love of god, please try your best to read this book, its literally life changing. It's how I've learnt how to learn and it will change your life too. Read it, apply it.

I was in the same position when I started. I actually had to take a college algebra course before I took trig (which i took instead of precal).

The best thing I can say is develop an interest in math. During high school I thought that I hated math and that I wasn't any good at it. But I found when I applied myself to it that I was I actually interested in it and that I enjoyed it. It is far easier to learn something you are interested in. Lookup youtube videos and Wikipedia articles about applications of math.

Don't try to rush into it. It is very important to get your fundamentals solid. Math seems complicated but it really boils down to a few concrete rules. I would actually suggest to take the precal course instead trying to test out of it. You do not want to get in a class you are not prepared for.

I found that the vast majority of my learning was outside of class. Think of each class as just guidance on what you need to study in your own time. There were many times that I had no idea what the professor was talking about, while all the kids around me were nodding the heads and asking/answering questions like they understood everything. I didn't actually learn anything until I went home and studied it myself. You have to put in the work. Read the textbook in detail, work through ALL of the home/practice problems, watch youtube / Kahn Academy videos, google stuff you don't understand, ask questions on forums/reddit, go to office hours and ask your professor/TA questions.

It is a lot of work. But it will pay off in the end. You might find that you enjoy it. I actually miss it, and I am seriously thinking about graduate school.

Also check out A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra). It is pretty much geared towards people exactly like you. I recently started reading it, and I wish it had been available when I started college. It contains lots of techniques to help maximize your learning. I have actually found that I have unconsciously been using a lot of the techniques described in the book.

There is one more suggestion I can offer, which is at the level of learning habits and psychology: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X

It's written for a much more popular audience than the earlier suggestions, but I still found it helpful.

The instinct for a lot of people is that when they get stuck, they think that the way forward is to isolate oneself to that problem and batter themselves at it until they solve it. The author does a good job explaining why this is almost always the wrong approach, and offers some psych-ish suggestions on better approaches. For example, she describes the difference between "diffuse" vs "focused" thinking, and how important it is to learn to switch between the two modes, so you don't get stuck performing focused thinking in the wrong area. Or how memory needs to be allowed to "chunk" so that it can form larger mental maps.

Good luck!

Edit to say, as for where homomorphisms are used, one cool application is that linear transformations (vector space homomorphisms) are a close analog of group homomorphisms. Having taken your group theory class, you may find something like this interesting? https://www.amazon.com/Linear-Algebra-Introduction-Mathematics-Undergraduate/dp/0387940995

If any of you need to up your memorization game this book is amazing for that, it literally changed my life.

https://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-Everything/dp/0143120530

the author went from knowing nothing about the techniques he would use, to eventually winning memory competitons

it goes over this concept ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci ) but with extra details from "memory competitors" that helped

An example of this concept in action can be seen with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiKg08WoKPM

A version of teaching the techniques by guy I know of (a med school who also won 2 memory world competitions) can be found here https://mullenmemory.com/memory-palace-basics. The author can memorize 80 digits in 17.65 seconds.

Other than that, teaching/explaining concepts in your own words and integrating information into previously acquired knowledge will help you remember things better as well.

I have a memory of a golden fish too. one of the reasons I decided to learn a language is to fix my brain cells.

I found about the mnemonics and I followed RTK method the lazy way ( kanji--> keyword) and found it a blast. memorized all the kanji became easy and I finished all the 2200 kanji over the course of 3 and a half month ( 25 kanji a day ). The hard part was consistency but I made it in the end. now learning vocabulary became much much easier. Honestly very worth it.

There is another methods RTK, such wanikani, Kanji Damage and others, find what works for you.

but if you are interested in RTK, this blog helped me to set up my RTK journey
https://nihongoshark.com/learn-kanji/

and I recommend this book:
https://www.amazon.com/You-Have-Amazing-Memory-Life-Changing/dp/1907486976
I have no finished it yet, but it did helped me with the mnemonics.

Good luck

The book Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer is a good place to start. It combines Joshua's personal story of how he became the 2006 U.S.A. Memory Champion, with plenty of background information on the history and science of the art of memory.

It will give you a clear view of the possibilities and limitations of the method of loci (memory palace). Although strictly it is not a self help book or an instruction manual, it will explain the basics of what you need to know and it discusses some more advanced techniques as well. As a bonus it is very well written and easy to read.

There are several free online recources available as well:

• on Archive.org you can download a copy of the Rhetorica ad Herennium for free. I haven't read it but it is one of the most famous books on the art of memory
  
• http://artofmemory.com/ and the artofmemory wiki offer plenty of information
  
• There is apperently a subreddit dedicated to nmemorics reddit.com/r/Mnemonics/ they might be able to give you more information.

If you're interested in learning more about memory, I highly reccomend Moonwalking with Einstein.
It's a fantastic book written by a journalist Joshua Foer who enters the US Memory Championships - easy and exciting to read and is very detailed regarding memory and how to improve it.

Your Memory: How it works, and how to improve it

Excellent book, it explains what memory is, debunks common memory myths, and gives you several very useful mnemonic techniques to do things like remembering lists of facts.

You're welcome :)

I (and every student ever) had the exact same problem, with needing to remember pointless terms and facts for a stupidly short amount of time. If the issue is purely to do with memorisation, I can suggest some methods I used to get through an insanely vapid last year of high school.

In Business Studies for example, there were a whole bunch of operational influences we needed to remember. By simply shortening the words into one random phrase I made up, I managed to remember it all - actually I still remember it 7 months on: GloTech QuaLeg CorpGov CostEnv; which was Globalisation, Technology, Quality Assurance, Legal, Corporate Social Responsibility, Government, Cost-Based Competition and Environment. For something so asinine, I simply would not have been able to remember those 8 words in exam conditions without this method. And I applied this to about 8 different sections of 6-8 terms, it all worked for me. The key is to make it something which you yourself made up and thus something you yourself will remember. If it's something sexual or offensive, doubles your chance of retaining the knowledge.

Similarly, just stringing terms/numbers together is a good way to save some mental memory. I remember one weekend learning Pi to 100 digits. It always impresses people, and is a guaranteed method to get any lady/man you want. Seriously, I have dropped so many wet panties by simply uttering that string of numbers. Anyway, so people are like 'What?! How do you do it?!'. The trick which got me to 100, is to simply remember them in stings. I don't know Pi as 3 then point then 1 then 4 then 1 then 5 then 9 then 2 then etc. - I know it as 3.141 - 592 - 65358 - 9793 - 2384 - 6264 - 3383 - 2795 and so on. So instead of 100 individual numbers, it's more like 25 strings, which is a lot easier.

There was also the memory palace technique, which you can learn more about here. But basically, since humans are predominately visual, creating a visual image of what you need to remember is incredibly effective. The idea is that you visualise a place, say a building or a road which you are incredibly familiar with. And in this 'palace', you mentally place certain 'objects' which are intended to trigger certain terms, eg. if I needed to remember the date 1776 and relate it to America, I would place a scantily clad George Bush with 1776 written across his bare chest. That is an image I will definitely not forget. And the idea is to have an imagined route through your 'palace' full of these 'objects', and if you are able to recall this absurd creation, you should be able to recall all the facts and terms which are enclosed therein.

All this basic information is coming from a book I read a few years back called Moonwalking with Einstein; great read if you or anyone else are curious to learn more about memory, mnemonics and whatnot. Hopefully some of this is of help to you.

Tl;dr: No, but here are some ways of making it less painful.

There's a pretty awesome book about people who seem to have extraordinary memory and whether it's actually innate or if they are just well practiced. It's a pretty cool read touching on various things related to remembering, from cultural history to modern memory championships and eventually the authors own path to do it himself. Joshua Foer: Moonwalking with Einstein.

The Feynman Technqiue can be a good place to start. Basically entails learning a concept and then writing it down (or explaining it in your head) in a way that would be understandable to a class of 3rd graders. That way if there's any gap in your understanding you can figure out where you need to improve your understanding. Makes the ideas very strong in your mind like you are looking for.

You could also check out Moonwalking with Einstein. It sounds like that's more the sort of thing you're looking for. It goes into teaching the reader how to use the memory palace technique to develop a near perfect memory.

EDIT: Added the second paragraph.

Have you read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell? I love his books and it sounds like it would be up your alley. Also, it's not exactly psychology, but I loved this book and it is non-fiction. Moonwalking with Einstein.

edit 2: Ok, just one more I thought of: Why We Lie was a quick, interesting non-fiction read I thought.

edit: another suggestion - this is definitely a psychology book that will make you think deeply - The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo.

I highly recommend Kenneth Higbee's "Your Memory: How It Works And How To Improve it" http://www.amazon.com/Your-Memory-How-Works-Improve/dp/1569246297.

It is the absolute perfect blend between textbook understanding and popular mnemonic text. It provides one with just enough understanding of the inner workings of memory so that one may make adjustments and experiments with their memory as necessary. The principles laid out are the foundation for all mnemonic techniques, therefore by learning the principles you'll also be able to create your own methods. It becomes a perfect diagnostic tool when you hit dead ends.

It's BY FAR the best book on memory I've ever read, and the only one you'll ever need to read.

Something is not right about him. A few years ago I read a book about memory that precisely describes his "savant" abilities. The book called "Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything," and it's about about memory training. The book describes a technique which enables someone with an average IQ to memorize competitively. It follows the author through his journey from average journalists to participation in the U.S. Memory Championship. Having Aspergers doesn't automatically mean someone is smart. Many people with Aspergers have an average IQ and many people without Aspergers have an above average IQ. The distribution is irrelevant. He is right all people are capable of becoming a genius but that's not a novel idea. Einstein said stuff like that, motivational speakers say stuff like this and ancient and modern philosophers discussed this topic ad nauseam. Perhaps those of us who have Aspergers are hyper focused on things we learn and practice more. It's definitely a discussion worth having among all autistic people. Either way I am not convinced this person is a savant. I feel a bit insulted for autistic people that this guy is claiming to be uniquely self-aware compared to the group and that sound very narcissistic. Often Aspergers and narcissistic personality is interchangeably misdiagnosed. Autistic people can tell you how they think and feel. And by the way he isn't explaining how brains works. He is describing his own personal thoughts anecdotally. For those that agree with his description of the autistic mind because you can relate to the descriptions: there are a litany of qualitative data published in journals and on the Internet that anyone can access and MEMORIZE.

I don't think the way he described and I have diagnosed Aspergers, so it's not relevant to all people who are diagnosed with autism.


www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143120530/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1413748024&sr=1-1&pi=SY200_QL40

I recommend Moonwalking With Einstein. The author trains with memory champions from around the world in hopes of becoming a memory champion himself. Great read.

In my mind, exercising will help. It gives your brain a rest, lets you get your blood moving. Being fit can help you process information better. Depending on your exercise, you can turn it into a moving meditation, so it can have other benefits also.

There have been a few studies that show that exercise helps the brain learn better by creating new neurons and signaling pathways. 'A Mind for Numbers' briefly covers the information, but I don't have the studies immediately available.

As long as you are not using it as a procrastination tool, exercise is a great thing to do during breaks!

O sa-ti explic ce cred si eu, dar mai ales in cazul Frantei. ( deci o sa fie putin unrelated cu educatia romana deci despre ce o sa vorbesc trebuie sa fie vazut ca o comparare )
Am facut colegiul si liceul in Franta de astfel si primul an de medicina in Franta, si care e pararea mea:

La colegiu in Romania se invata mult mai mult si tot la avans, sa spunem ca in clasa a 6-a la francezi aveam nivelul de clasa a 8-a, le faceam teme la copi la mate mai ales fiind ca era singura materie unde nu aveam nevoie sa vorbesc franceza, la un moment dat am repetat un an pentru ca nu vorbeam bine franceza si mi-am dat seama de fapt ca in Franta se invata sa " intelegem un continut " si sa facem sinteza pe acest continut. Dar si noi am avut nu stiu cate chesti de invatat, orice razboi/orice discours de De Gaule/ orice autor francez posibil/ citate. Adica as spune ca orice copil am avut multe chesti de invatat pana la urma. Nu am avut niciodata cursuri de cum trebuie sa INVATAM.

Ajung la Liceu, si acuma incepe catastrofa pentru foarte multi copi francezi, toate mediile cad de cel putin 2-3 puncte de unde aveam noi in colegiu, continutul e mult mai dens si vag si schimbarea a fost drastica, la mate nivelul era ca in romania, la fizica/chimie la fel. Trebuie luat in cont faptul ca aici trebuie sa stai de la ora 8 pana la 17-18 la liceu dar nu avem prea multe teme, ma rog cateva exerciti la mate care se fac in maxim o ora si de invatat la geo/isto timp de 40 de minute pe zi.

Clasa a 12-a, ca am trebuit sa invatam 7 scheme si harti, detaliu pe detaliu pentru bacalaureat, daca nu stiai asta la geografie, putem spune ca erai intr-un mare bullshit, la franceza trebuia sa cunosti 30 de carti pe de rost, pagina cu pagina, mate de astfel foarte multe chesti de invatat.

Ajungem la facultate, yay fortza steaua hey hey ce fain 85% din elevi au bacalaureatul fara nici-o problema in Franta.
Oops, 50% din Francezi la facultate fac dropout dupa primi 4 luni de facultate si cauta deja o alta meserie/formare profesionala. De astfel pentru ca nu se stie cum sa invatam, schimbare drastica de educatie, cum spun francezi " des cours magistraux ". Deci care e treaba aici, eu cred ca e o problema din tarile cu o influenta francofona ( in afara de Canada unde acolo e ca in SUA ), nu e chiar o problema special unificata a Romaniei.

Oricum eu am supravietuit putin invatamuntul, dar am invatat foarte recent chiar cum trebuia sa fi invatat de la inceput, pot sa recomandez mai multe carti ( poate mai trece aici un student nu stiu ) care pe mine m-au ajutat foarte mult:

Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and be More Productive
Bine nu trebuie chiar sa iei promisiunile lui Tony Buzan ca un Arsenie Boca a invatamantului
and:
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

A dou-a carte e mai mult ca un studiu, dar iti da niste idei despre cum ar merge creierul

that's all folks

I recommend you look up the book "How to develop a super power memory" by Harry Lorayne. If you want a physical copy you can get it cheaply from amazon or you can easily find a free pdf copy online. The book teaches mnemonic techniques to teach people how to remember names, remember long strings of digits, remember long lists, and learning foreign words. Using the techniques in the book I was able to easily memorize a whole of deck of cards in an hour and be able to recall exactly which card was in each position a week later without reviewing it.

I'm not too sure why the others are saying what they're saying. If you want to be able to memorize things quickly and easily you need to fundamentally change the way you memorize things and stop using rote memorization. Believe me, this book is worth the investment.

I'll share my reading list for the next 12 months as it's how I plan to become a better learner:


 

Learning

• Learning How To Learn - Free online course
  
• Become a Straight-A Student - Book
  
• Make it Stick - Book
  
  
  Improving Maths
  
• A Mind for Numbers - Book
  
• Secrets of Mental Math - Book
  
• Vedic Mathematics- Book
  
  
  Improving Reading Speed
  
• Breakthrough Rapid Reading - Book
  
  
  Algorithmic thinking
  
• Algorithms to Live By - Book
  
  
  Understanding the Mind
  
• How the Mind Works - Book
  
• Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow - Book
  
• The Owner's Manual for the Brain - Book
  
  
  Productivity
  
• Getting Things Done - Book
  
• The Willpower Instinct - Book
  
• Willpower Doesn't Work - Book
  
• The Chimp Paradox - Book
  
  
  
  It's an ambitious reading list for the next 12 months as there is some heavy reading in there but hopefully you can get one or two useful suggestions from it!

Here is Harry Lorayne on Johnny Carson performing an incredible feat of remembering several hundred audience members names who he met earlier before the show. He's over 90 years old now and was interviewed last year and talked about how the beatings from his father for poor grades were the reason why he needed to improve his memory. He also discussed how he does it.

I must say that listening to that interview, he sounds just as sharp and quick as when he was on the Johnny Carson show so there may be something to health and longevity in conditioning your mind.

I'm in the same boat as you as I want to improve my memory because it's holding me back at work due to the necessity of remembering several table numbers (I work in a restaurant). So far I've come across Mega Memory by Kevin Trudeau. The reviews leave a mixed impression. Some state his methods work, others state that his book is based on the books by Harry Lorayne such as The Memory Book and others state that he's a fraud. Not sure what to make of it yet but wishing you the best of luck!

For thinking like a mathematician, try this book. May be a bit simplistic in the beginning, but it is clear and may offer you a different perspective.

Another issue may be with your study or practice habits. Try this course on Learning How to Learn (or this book, which is by the teacher of that course and essentially the same material).

Finally, this dude's site has some good descriptions of difficult concepts.

Good luck. You can do it with effort.

1. Use This
   
2. Use This
   
3. Change how much you eat based on how much your weight changes per month, assuming the change is large enough or consistent enough for you feel reasonably confident.
   
4. You are now following a dieting model that matches what scientists do in science land.
   
   Fitness is, at its core, a huge fucking pile of "science and math shit." The fitness products that are sold to consumers aren't intended to make it easier or do the thinking for you; they're built to make people think they're working hard and making progress by introducing game-like systems (gamification) that feel rewarding. The easiest way to cut through the bullshit that's made to make money is to embrace the science.
   
   *
   
   Tangent time:
   
   You're in your fucking 30s. You're young. Your ability to learn new things can be developed and rehabbed up until your mid 70s.** The old studies about language and skill acquisition limits past age 25 had multiple design flaws and their results aren't supported by modern research. You're the only obstacle you're dealing with.
   
   Take this course (here's a summary on reddit) that's based on this book. If you complete it with certification and send me verification I'll personally cover the certification fee.

Just posted this elsewhere but http://www.amazon.com/Rewire-Your-Brain-Think-Better/dp/0470487291. A lifetime of reading self-help and this is hands down the best. Not all rah-rah motivational, just straight up instructions of empirically verified methods. Not entirely focused on just the thinking process directly, but also what habits to cultivate to promote positive thinking. Seriously, I cannot recommend this book enough.

Thank you for the tip. Do you have a favorite article that supports learning most frequent words in particular when learning language? I'm planning to do so for French but I'm not sure if this is a good idea.

Also, do you have any good article/book on science-based language learning, like this article on study technique, but focused on study languages instead. For some reasons all the language learning resources online are mostly based on "here's what works for me", even the famous "Fluent Forever" approach.

Yup, works very well when you have to memorize something in a short period of time and long-term retention seems to work better than any other method I know of.

Personally, I just use places I know well (e.g. my house). Much easier than constructing an imaginary place.

If you're interested, Moonwalking with Einstein is an entertaining book about memory and memorization technique that deals a lot with memory palaces.

Study smarter, not harder.

May I direct you to: "How to become a Straight-A Student" by Cal Newport. In this book are a lot of strategies to help you learn more while not burning out at the same time.

Also there are smarter ways to study for math and science courses than just chugging at the material again and again until hopefully some of it sticks in your head. "A Mind for Numbers" by Barbara Oakley is a good read for math/science courses.

I didn’t have such a great memory until I started meditating regularly and practicing mnemonics. Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein was where I started. Pretty life changing for me.

Good luck to you!

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Foods-Brain-Effective-Strengthen/dp/1455512206/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=38VJGKT3NVQ9G&keywords=power+food+for+the+brain&qid=1555539359&s=gateway&sprefix=power+food+f&sr=8-1


Power foods for brain

This book has changed my lifestyle. It is not about how to adopt plant based diet but rather why to adopt plant based diet.
To protect your body & especially brain.
Highly recommended. It's on audible as well.

Edit - this book will for sure covers every aspect of nutrition. You will be highly informed about your nutrition through out the book.

Hi, Aimless_Wonderer!

Well, IMO there's a couple of ways to approach it.

1. You said it yourself: the memory is "often something insignificant enough". You have to recognize that good and significant are two different things. Just because the memory is pleasant to recall doesn't mean it's significant enough to keep that item (or those several items, as the case may be) around cluttering up your house. If your brain has shuffled the memory over to the "Not Important" side of your brain, then that's a good indication that you can let the item(s) go.
   
   
2. If you just can't bring yourself to get rid of the item, because you still want to recall the memory you've associated with it, you have some options:
   
   

• If it's multiple items, whittle it down to one or two key things. For example, I made the decision a while back to keep my mom's airplane ticket stubs. I did NOT keep the gift bag that we used to give them to her, or the Fed-Ex envelope that they were delivered to me in. What for? The important item was the airplane ticket stub.
  
• Take a picture of the item in question, and store it on your hard drive and/or in the cloud (via Dropbox or Box.com or something). That takes up a lot less room, and you still have the item in digital form.
  
  And while you're doing exploring those options, you can do exercises to improve your recall of that memory, maybe even try to associate it with another object that you have to keep.
  
  One of the things that Randy Frost and Gail Skeketee talked about in their book Stuff is that compulsive hoarders actually have extremely good memories. They're just convinced (for assorted emotional and psychological reasons) that they don't, and that they'll lose memories if they get rid of the items that trigger them. So before you get rid of the item in question, see what you can do to recall the memory without it. You're already capable of recalling the memeory, you just need to take control of what triggers it.
  
  When I was feeling blue, I would say to myself, "Let me try to remember something that made me very happy", and then consciously focus on recalling Ma's trip to Dallas. I would set aside a certain time everyday (the time spent walking the dogs after I got home) and not do anything except focus on happy memories to try to lift my mood. After a while, whenever my mantle clock dinged 7pm (time for walkies!), I would have all sort of happy memories just start bubbling up. Maybe that will work for you.
  
  There's some good books about memory improvement out there (I have not read this one, but it's on my To-Buy list) that you might want to look into, to understand how memory works and how you can get yours to do what you need.

For an entertaining summary of how these methods, along with a great story of how a regular guy became the US Memory champion, I strongly suggest picking up Moonwalking With Einstein by Josh Foer.

I did a year of a physics degree. That shit is hard....

I had the textbook Fundamentals of Physics by Wiley. It gives pretty good explanations. With physics and maths you just have to do loads and loads of problems to get good. It's like going to the gym or something.

I also recommend this book which is all about how to study math and science subjects.

Good luck!

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1541404216&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=a+mind+for+numbers&dpPl=1&dpID=41WK-w2fOlL&ref=plSrch

This book became famous a couple years ago and is so well regarded its essencially been pushed aspart of the American federal k-12 education curriculum.

She was an English major with zero math ability or interest and at age 25 decided to learn how to be good at math for fun if I recall because she was so terrible and it bothered her. Well she became a chemical engineer and is now is a fellow of the royal college of engineers and she's some poly math genuis now.

She also has a ted talk. Anyway you might like to read this.

Cool, lets start with something simple, REMEMBER baby steps is key with anxiety otherwise things will just escalate in your head and you won't be able to do much. I'd recommend buying a kindle (like amazon's paperwhite) and reading a self help book to start the ball rolling as it will make you understand how the mind works etc which is crucial to fixing it, I'd recommended a book by John Arden called How to rewire your brain! http://www.amazon.com/Rewire-Your-Brain-Think-Better/dp/0470487291
Also, do you watch any comedy shows at all on a daily basis Cheers

Honestly man, I’m sorta in the same boat. Doing engineering and calc is killing me, but if engineering is really what you want to do you should stick with it.

Failure sucks, and if you’re younger maybe this is the first time you’ve really been really challenged by school or life. Sometimes when things get tough its easy to look for an easy exit. But thats quitting on yourself, even if you dress it up all nice to fool yourself and your friends. At the end of the day you should be looking to push yourself at college, and breezing through your coursework is not that. You should be challenged. Embrace the suck.

That being said, if you’re just doing engineering just because its “prestigious” or for the eventual high pay then yeah go ahead and reevaluate. But if you want it, I can guarantee you can do it. Even if you have to retake a class or two.

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra-ebook/dp/B00G3L19ZU

This book has helped a lot of people improve their math abilities, it might be worth looking into.

Yep. This method has been used apparently for millennia, and is still considered the best way. ("Memory Palace" is a more common name, but it has many less common names.)

See "Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything"

> ...follows Joshua Foer's compelling journey as a participant in the U.S. Memory Championship.

> The techniques he mastered made it easier to remember information, and Foer's story demonstrates that the tricks of the masters are accessible to anyone.

http://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-Everything-ebook/dp/B004H4XI5O/

Or lots of other books...I see "The Memory Palace":

http://www.amazon.com/The-Memory-Palace-Everything-Shakespeare-ebook/dp/B007V3FLTE

Edit: here's the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

You should try reading a book called When A Sheep Falls Out Of A Tree

It's an excellent book on improving your memory through different means like lists, stories, and whole text recall. I read it in highschool and it did wonders for me :)

> Take baby steps. Yeah, once upon a time studying would come naturally to you and now you're worried because it doesn't. But you've got to deal with that. Break all the tasks you have to do down into simple little chunks. Tick boxes. Lists. Whatever. Something small and tangible.

This. Get a pomodoro app or a kitchen timer or use your phone and sit down and tell yourself you're going to study for 20 minutes, no distractions. Just 20 minutes! That's a do-able amount of time for anyone, don't worry about finishing the assignment. Then you get to take a 5 min break. Rinse and repeat. If you're only able to do one round, great, you still got work done. If you do three or four or five rounds that's even better.

I'm a terrible procrastinator too (in fact, even now I should be studying instead of doing who knows what on reddit) and timing myself like this has been a total breakthrough. I often find that once I sit down and commit to that 20 minutes I end up spending a few hours at it.

I read this book over the summer and it's been incredibly helpful with the studying side of depression/motivation/etc. It's geared for high schoolers going into STEM fields in college, but it has great advice for anyone in school, regardless of age or field of study.

I read "Moonwalking with Einstein", a book about mnemonics (techniques that help you memorize large amount of information), last year. One of the major mnemonics technique is visualizing and building a large building in your mind, and then store things in its rooms. This uses your spatial memory, which is supposedly better at remembering things.

Because of that, I'm curious if remembering things in sign languages comes more easily than with spoken languages. I think it would explain a few curious things about Deaf culture.

Then I cannot recommend this enough
https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

And the book by the author of the course
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra-ebook/dp/B00G3L19ZU

Really invaluable and easy to follow. Works great for me and I hope for you as well.

I strongly recommend that you get this book, Mind for Numbers, which contains excellent tips for excelling at math.

For a preview, watch this video

Your brain is like a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it becomes. I picked up this book a few years ago and put it to use, I recommend it. http://www.amazon.com/Your-Memory-How-Works-Improve/dp/1569246297/ref=la_B000APPDT8_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408713761&sr=1-1

If you want to memorize a list of song look up the peg system, online or in the book. If you want to have a better memory in general start trying to recall things. Get short numerical sequence or 3 song names and write them on a piece of paper. Look at the information than put it aside. Try to recall the information without looking on the paper. That's very important, making your brain learn to store the info is half of it and the hard part is making it find the information and pull it back out. That's the recall.

Man, I feel like I'm pimping this book all over the place lately, but seriously everyone struggling in math (or science) should check out "A Mind For Numbers" by Barbara Oakley. She addresses the common reasons people fail at math and also teaches how to use your diffuse and focused modes of thinking (very similar, imo, to the comment /u/The_White_Baron made about math requiring both creative and critical thinking). Diffuse mode thinking is where your brain takes the ideas you've taken in during focused mode and makes the intuitive connections to other topics and areas of knowledge, setting up more diverse connections to that concept, which makes retrieval easier. I implemented the ideas presented in the book in my statistics course and went from a 79% (just below class average) on the first exam to a 97.5% (highest in the class) on the next exam. It is absolutely one of the most valuable books I've read in years.

​

Link for anyone who is interested: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra-ebook/dp/B00G3L19ZU

For language learning methods in general, I recommend you read Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner. I'm following pretty much all that he recommends[] for my Norwegian study, and I've found it to be great so far. I only started about a month ago, however, so take that for what it's worth.

 

[] His method boils down to:

1. Learn pronunciation.
   
2. Don't translate.
   
3. Use spaced repetition systems.
   
    
   
   edit: formatting

Video games provide dopamine responses. So they are addictive. Good studying can provide this too if you structure it right. When you boot up a game, music plays, an intro video rolls, and you can start to feel your physical response system kick in. Anticipation starts dumping dope in. The quest and mechanics are clear. You could create this kind of environment for study time. Also check out, A Mind for Numbers , it's an excellent guidebook for keeping your study habits in line. It's not just about math.

Keep at It!

This is a pretty great book that outlines how to use free internet resources to learn a language of your choosing. It relies heavily on google images and the spaced repetition program called Anki.

Yeah, you'll definitely remember better if you stop. Have you joined any clubs in college, have social activities that would help you get your mind off of porn?

For a better memory, you might want to check out this link. I've had the book and from what I've read so far, it has helped me. You could check it out at your local library.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Develop-Super-Power-Memory/dp/0811901815

Check out a book called Fluent Forever. The author goes into detail about various techniques to make the language learning process more efficient.

If you don't want to read the whole book I guess you could just note down the key points at the end of each chapter and then skip to the practical techniques part at the end. However, I found it an easy and informative read and highly recommend it to any beginner or improving language learners.

You can, also, still learn to be good at math, it is never too late and not as hard as you might think. Just time consuming.

Never believe it is some built in 'I'm just bad at math' thing. That is just silly.

I am not sure what your level is but just hunt down a High School Algebra book and get started. Just read a section and practice 4 or 5 problems an evening until you think you got that section down. You would be amazed at how it starts to come together after a month or two of that. Then build on it and you will be amazed that how, if you set the foundation, the rest builds easily.


I recomend the book I linked to a few people as well.
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra-ebook/dp/B00G3L19ZU#nav-subnav

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004H4XI5O/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

This is something that I've been working on and it's a work in progress so I make no claim to being an expert. This book was offered to me as a way of learning a new paradigm for how memory works and i'm giving it a shot. It's something that I already did at a smaller level to remember things. It's given me a deeper understanding and more tools for the toolbox. Good luck!

I can't remember where I first heard it, so I use it liberaly. I think it was from a book on brain plasticity, but I know there are specific books about it and how to hack your brain so that it is with less frequency the scumbag brain meme.
http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Hacks-Tools-Using-Brain/dp/0596007795/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1324358518&sr=8-3

and

http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Performance-Hacks-Tools-Overclocking/dp/0596101538/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324358518&sr=8-1

I haven't read any of these ones yet, but if you are interested in one with great citations that I think is one of the best collections of what could be called brain hacks: 'Your Brain At Work.' by David Rock.
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Brain-Work-Strategies-Distraction/dp/0061771295/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324358628&sr=1-1
I can say nothing but good things about this book.

Figured this would be a good start for people who want to do something but are using the “I don’t know how to start” excuse. I saw this about a year ago and got his book, started it, never finished it. Now seems as good a time as ever to finish it and get to doing things for myself.

Hope this helps.

The Book on Amazon

I don’t have any practical suggestions; I’d say take a look at how long you’re studying and if you begin to “check out”, get up and do something else for a bit.

Also read A Mind for Numbers (A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) https://www.amazon.com/dp/039916524X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_43L4Bb5DTHGTY)

Best book on studying habits ever. It’s helped me a ton.

Best wishes!

This book is absolutely amazing, and I think it would help you!
It says Numbers and seems like its for math only. Nope! It teaches learning skills!

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X

I'm an embedded software engineer and I don't do much calculus. I do mess around with polynomials (which is just simple algebra) quite frequently. Polynomials are great ways to represent a nonlinear set of values for modeling analog sensors. My background is in electrical engineering so understanding Fourier analysis is really useful too but I haven't used it much which reminds me I probably should do a quick refresher on that soon.

I recommend this book to any software engineer no matter their level. It was an amazing read and gives you some insight on core methodologies to problem solving and just learning in general

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?adgrpid=57601891578&gclid=CjwKCAiAqqTuBRBAEiwA7B66hQSRttqQ90P0z_Eir5lDL0JXaHGw9w8HIcB-ePqxeHtD6LJffZe-MxoC7GYQAvD_BwE&hvadid=274722315593&hvdev=m&hvlocphy=1014452&hvnetw=g&hvpos=1t2&hvqmt=e&hvrand=13061966951674896290&hvtargid=kwd-295392791902&hydadcr=15176_9602975&keywords=a+mind+for+numbers&qid=1573500656&sr=8-3

I've given this answer multiple times but it always gets buried. Not that I expect a sentence or two to really get upvoted that much.

More important OP is for YOU to pay attention to it.

I am one of those people who has read hundreds of self-improvement books, and tried a lot of different things. It's been pretty much a hobby of mine for close to 20 years now.

Go buy this book. [Rewire Your Brain] by John B. Arden. This is your new bible. You will get better

Yeah, I think so. Religious devotion might help quite a bit.

I just recently finished reading Moonwalking with Einstein which somewhat addresses this question. I recommend the book to anyone interested in memory and what an ordinary person can pull off in a relatively short period of time. It made me really want to try to memorize a deck of cards; the world records in that event are astounding.

Yeah I wish there was any actual detail about exactly the study method they used in that article RE language (edit: see bottom of post).

>When native English speakers used the technique to learn an entirely unfamiliar language, such as to generate English-to-Swahili translations, the results were better, the same, or worse than after blocking.

I could be wrong but this sounds like just dumping translations (words or sentences) into Anki and then studying them? If you do that even without interleaving, you're going to have a bad time. Although I agree that interleaving would make the problem even worse.

Language learning (and all learning) works best when you are learning the word in some context, this is why just memorizing raw vocabulary lists is the worst sight unseen. I'm just a beginner in Italian, but in the other languages I'm not terrible at (Japanese, Chinese) my best results have come from first firming up the word in some context.

I used to go to pretty crazy lengths to do this, I had a Chinese language partner that I would drill different verbs at me, and I would act them out on objects in the room (OPEN the box, <I open the box>, now PUSH the box <I push the box>). That's just the total physical response method, but it's an example of manufacturing a context.

Right now for Italian my context is mostly just Coffee Break Italian podcast. If I just dumped all the content from coffee break Italian into Anki, even lesson by lessons, without first listening to the podcast it would be baaaaad news. I think that's what the linked article is suggesting. (I actually listen to each episode twice, initial listen, drill in anki for a few days, re-listen).

But there could still be times where blocking review method is useful for an initial pass to continue firming up what you learned in context. The nice thing now with Anki, that's doable, just select your sub-deck with say "parts of the body" or whatever it is you are studying first in your review session. Review those, and then later once you are feeling more comfortable, then you can review at the meta deck level.

I'm not claiming to be some language learning expert, just relaying my hodgepodge approach...a lot of my study beliefs come from the book A Mind for Numbers which is really about general study habits, not just STEM study, and the work of Stephen Krashen.

Edit:

I just noticed the blurb I copied in included links to the studies, however only the last one is readable in full ("worse after blocking"). I read through the experiment design and it is terrible/exactly what I said. They had people with no prior experience with French, and who were given no context/study information, to just memorize a list of french words.

Certainly in this case blocking will be better than interleaving, because it's the only thing giving you some way of making your own connections between the words. But a real test would be to have a student take a lesson of some kind where they learned these words in a meaningful context, then have some review blocked and some review interleaved.

1. Moonwalking with Einstein - Joshua Foer
   
2. 9/10
   
3. Science/Memoir
   
4. A remarkable exploration of our relationship with memory as it has changed and transformed throughout history. It's fantastic.
   
5. Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Indiebound, Goodreads

Reading helps me relax and I enjoy learning amazon has a lot of books
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00IBZ405W/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=1M0QWUA771N76&coliid=I25OHMDSSQO9UQ

Moonwalking with Einstein is one book that explores and teaches this method. I personally haven't read, but a friend of mine said it was great and the techniques taught are like that of the above comment.

EDIT: Posted this comment before reading the others, which also talk about Moonwalking with Einstein. Give the karma to them :)

EDIT2: Damn, I didn't even finish reading your post before posting my comment. This should just be deleted now.

I am currently learning Croatian and I have used several books in the process.

This book is by far the best and most straightforward, "Complete Croatian": https://www.bol.com/nl/p/complete-croatian-teach-yourself/9200000030747470/

You may also want to take a look at "Fluent Forever". I would follow and use all of the strategies in there. The book was created by an engineer who became a multilingual opera singer. Engineers are highly efficient at learning extremely complex subjects, due to their training in solving complex problems: https://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Forever-Learn-Language-Forget/dp/0385348118/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521216233&sr=1-1&keywords=fluent+forever

I'm so sorry! I was in the same situation with my parents and family members.

I have read a ton of books on the subject, and I would recommend reading [Rewire Your Brain] (https://www.amazon.com/Rewire-Your-Brain-Think-Better/dp/0470487291). It's very practical, and has really helped me with my fight with anxiety.
Also try the OCD workbook. You may not be diagnosed with OCD, but this book helps you battle the intrusive and ruminating thoughts.

Also, try meditation and Mindfulness Exercises. I thought it was a bunch of malarky before I tried it. It has made a world of difference. [This website] (http://www.mindful.org/meditation/mindfulness-getting-started/) will help you get started.

Please don't be afraid to hop onto reddit and chat with the rest of us. We really want to help!

The brain needs down-time to process information and move it into long term memory - trying to focus continually for long periods while learning can be counter-productive. Try using the Pomodoro Technique: set a timer for 25 minutes and focus completely on learning your subject. When that goes off set another timer for 5 minutes and take a break during that time, avoiding thinking about the subject. Ideally get up and do something physical rather than browse the web. When the 5 minutes is up start another 25 minutes of focused concentration. Take a longer break every couple of hours.

Coursera have an online course called Learning To Learn which is pretty good. It is based on the book A Mind For Numbers.

The distraction series by Dr. Edward M. Hallowell M.D. The first one is driven by distraction. I am going to list the amazon links and the order they were written in.

Driven to Distraction (Revised): Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder

Answers to Distraction

Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder

I highly recommend those books

----

I even more recommend listening to Dr Russel Barkley on youtube. He is a doctor who has been studying ADHD for over 30 years now, and he is a gifted public speaker and explainer of ADHD. You can watch the videos on your computer or media device. You will find more than a dozen of these videos on youtube, some a couple mins some 3 hours long. The essential idea for parents is the best one, it deals with 30 different parts about adhd such as what causes it and how best to treat it, and all the science behind it. It is not just for parents but anybody that wants to learn about adhd...Linky

Now I use a website called clipconvert cc Without using any software you can give this website a link and it will give you an option to download a youtube video as a video, or a music file of many various file types. All the work is done on their computers and servers. They do have software you can download that does the same thing, but please do not bother with this. Note if you do not read the directions they will automatically download (but not open) the software that allows you to do this on your computer, there's a checkbox you uncheck to make them do it on their computers. [b]They also do have a lot of pop ups on their website, close them and do not click on them.[/b] I do not know how safe the pop ups are but the website itself is safe.


Thus you can have a mp3 to listen to while driving, on the bus, exercising, cleaning up the house, etc.

These are a few resources that you may find helpful:

http://www.productivity501.com/how-to-memorize-verbatim-text/294/

http://headinside.blogspot.com/2011/07/verbatim-2-free-web-app.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2YDkfgLtPA

as well as using techinques from Memory Champions:

http://www.amazon.com/You-Can-Have-Amazing-Memory/dp/1907486976/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1358441646&sr=8-2&keywords=you+can+have+an+amazing+memory

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tiea5ftMZVA

http://www.peakperformancetraining.org/sitefiles/index.htm


http://joshuafoer.com/moonwalking-with-einstein/

makeup brushes

or

Moonwalking With Einstein (can be a kindle version if it helps!)

Thanks for the contest and happy cake day!!

Some of it is specifying what protocols should be in place for the rendering of the text (in this case UTF-8), another part is keeping track of what search query was used (in this case "fluent forever"). There are other segments of the URL that signify other things, but you get the idea. Nothing out of the ordinary here.

If you want the best possible looking URL then you want:

http://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Forever-Learn-Language-Forget-ebook/dp/B00IBZ405W

I took that class online with Loy. My guess is it's exactly the same as the one you took; just doing a bunch of MyMathLab questions. The class is difficult because the amount of content it goes through and the pace at which it does so, I doubt you're horrible at math or anything like that. Careful about selling yourself short.

My suggestion is to watch the videos put out there by ProfRobBob on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFwRPH0JrFY&list=PL4FB17E5C77DCCE69) and just keep drilling the MyMathLab practice tests you're given. If you can ace the those practice tests you will ace the class, the final and midterm are the same problems with different numbers. Get a tutor to help out if you're really stumped. I ended up getting an A+ in that class, not because I'm gifted a math but because I studied a ton. I imagine you're taking the course as a prerequisite for Calculus, best to establish the good habits now because the difficulty of material and the pace will ratchet up even more in subsequent courses. You've gotta put in time for math and science courses, no good way around it. Check out this book if you need study tips: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra-ebook/dp/B00G3L19ZU

Check the “Learn to Learn” course I’m Coursera. One of the instructors is an author of books that are related to improve learning of science subjects. The course link is: Learn to Learn. One of the books is A mind for Numbers. I really recommend you to do this course or read the book. If it makes it easier, get the audiobook. Audible has 1 month trial that you can use.

I also recommend a book called Fluent Forever. It teaches you how to use Anki to make grammar flash cards. Good luck in your studies.

As I mentioned before: pills aren't skills. You still have to put it the work even when you don't feel like it. THIS IS KEY. You won't always feel like following through. But the difference between failing and passing is putting in the work.

Here are a couple guides that I heartedly recommend: A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley. This book will give you the basis for effective learning, and not just for science or math students.

How to Become a Straight A Student by Cal Newport This book defines the genre of what an effective student guide really is. Study tips abound, but the real lesson here is about effective time management and scheduling.

This process (called the diffused mode of the brain) is discussed in depth in a book I read a few years ago called A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra).

Would highly recommend if anyone is interested in how your brain learns things - especially abstract concepts like mathematics and programming.

While you're working on the math itself, it might not be a bad idea to incorporate some of the material from A Mind for Numbers and Mindshift; the author undertook a liberal arts-to-engineering shift in grad school and her insights into learning maths could help make your students more comfortable with studying and thinking about maths in general.

Thanks a lot! That's exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for.

Any chance this is the book? http://www.amazon.com/How-Twice-Smart-Brainpower-Unleashing/dp/0134023390

One way is to use memory palace technique.

Here is a book my a memory champion who used this technique to train himself and improve his average memory.

https://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-Everything/dp/0143120530

Give Moonwalking with Einstein a read. Branch out from there. There are a ton of methods to help with memorization. MWE is a great place to start.

>Why maths? You were struggling with Bank PO level maths...

Well this kind of changed my mind on it and I just tried to cram for IBPS PO in the last 5 days.

Math was always the subject that I failed , 112/200 in board exams but as I get to know about more programming, Banking , even philosophy I saw how integral math is and how fascinating it must be for someone to have good knowledge of it.




>That said, why are you averse to working for your dad? Second, try to understand him, you said neither of them had the opportunity to finish school and your mum has mental illness as well. I assume you are the only son? Imagine having to deal with wife being ill, you son not agreeing to join the business yet not getting a govt job either.


My father and I don't get along, he has always put me down , called me worthless , that I won't amount to anything compared to other kids ever since I can remember(yes he telling me this even before 5th standard or something). I just wanted to prove I am good.


One of the reasons my mother went is probably because she never went along with my father. She ran away from home 7-8 times before finally having a accident(when my uncle was bringing her back from one such incidents) which kind of completely fucked her up.


If I am being totally honest with myself, I want to learn math because many of my friends are in tech field and I am very insecure about that myself.




>To be honest. I would recommend you join his business. Not to appease him, but to learn the amount of crap one has to deal with on a job. When you get into the civil services, there will be times when you will be forced to do things you don't want to, you will have to put in hours and deal with incompetence and get blamed for it all. Can you handle it? Some job xp will help you build a scab against this world. Join his business, get therapy, get a thorough grounding of your situation.


Thank you , I am back on my medications. Trying to change my daily routine. Learn in a slower pace than before.




>What's with this subs fixation with age? UPSC's cutoff is 32 with 6 attempts assuming you are general category. State's are 35. You practically have 7-10 years on your hands. What's 2-3 yrs of business, if anything it will make you cannier in dealing with future shitheads.


It's not my obsession per say but my fathers. I know not everyone succeeds at a young age but my father feels people won't take me seriously if don't get a high paying Job by 27 or 28.





>Civil services will open up opportunities for you, you can't even imagine. I am a grad from one of the ICAR universities and the forestry ranks are filled with our folks. My senior is an IFS, he's working on his PhD in parallel on himalayan hydrology. Imagine that. Stay away from IGNOU, shit material copied from books. Might as well buy Kreyszig and practice from it.


I think I will prepare for UPSC 2019 along with joining my father like you suggested.


I really appreciate your honest replies. I'll put hardcore math in the back burner right now.

There was recently a show on NPR where a reporter won the world championship memory competition. He wrote a book on how he went from being there to report, to being there to compete and breaking world records.

Here's the story

His book is called Moonwalking with Einstein: The art of remembering everything

I recommend checking out the book Fluent Forever, which has a number of useful tips to get the most out of any flashcard system.

Frequency lists have a place, but ideally you would make your own cards which complement your way of thinking and your personal goals in the language.

I'm not sure if you can call it a pure self-help book but Moonwalking with Einstein was a great book that helped me with my studies, especially when studying for term based examinations.

Actually, while it doesn't make his feats any less incredible, it's been suggested that his claim of naturally having these abilities is a false. He's using age old memory techniques known as Method of loci. I suggest anyone interested in this to check out Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer.

What this all means? That you can do this too, surprisingly easily!

Some others have already said it but the trick is there is no trick. You just get up and do it, not think about it, when you start to think about it you are already stuck. Wake up, get up. Not wake up and start thinking about how hard it is to get up or how much you don't want to get up yet etc. Just wake up and do it, eventually you will start to build a routine and it will be easier or you may even start to look forward to it. Take some sort of positive action, do anything even if it is minor. But do it regularly, stick with it for a set amount of time even if you aren't seeing immediate results just give yourself a chance to build some momentum, like maybe 30 or 60 days. You did not become the way you are overnight and you will not break those habits overnight either.

I would suggest exercise being one of those things, proper diet is a big one too, meditation can also have a major impact. In addition to doing something regularly I personally found cbt helpful. It may take a little time to get into the swing of it but start noticing and reframing negative thoughts add much at possible. Look into therapy if you can, if you can't afford it lots of areas have free or reduced rate therapy available for those with financial troubles and even though some people demonize the idea medication can may be worth looking into if making lifestyle changes isn't helping you may have a brain chemistry that is slightly out of the normal range.

Remember life is made up of experiences, you take those experiences to be "you" but they are not, they are just experiences, thoughts, feelings, etc. if you change them you will change your "self" in the process. I recommend this http://www.amazon.com/Rewire-Your-Brain-Think-Better/dp/0470487291 book to anyone who wants or feels they need a deeper understanding, but remember to just do something without overthinking it, so don't start reading the book and then not do anything. I like that book in particular because it is not really self help per se although it does have those elements to it, the ideas in it are practical and backed by science. If you do it, it WILL work.

I suggest looking into the techniques that memorization champions utilize. They focus less on repetition and more on how they digest information. You can check out some books like Unlimited Memory or Moonwalking with Einstein.

Khan Academy is a good resource - I would also recommend the book A Mind For Numbers. The fact that math makes you anxious, while perfectly normal, is going to be a mental block when it comes to learning it. Math is like any other skill - you keep practicing, you get it wrong a bunch of times, and gradually your brain retrains a small portion of itself to do it. This process can be interfered with - you'll never learn a sport if you don't eat or sleep enough, and you won't learn a mental skill if your brain is subjected to enough stress.

You absolutely are capable of grasping the math. I do hope you believe this, and if there is any doubt I hope the book will give you some mental tools for managing that anxiety, as well as some high-level approaches on how to approach mathematical problems.

You should check out Barbara Oakley's A Mind for Numbers - it's a whole book dedicated to study techniques for engineering students. One of the big ones is pomodoro technique, but another big suggestion is testing yourself.

So for example: rather than going through practice problems with the solutions manual next to you at all times, write out 10 practice problems and treat it as a test. No looking at solutions, no wolfram alpha, etc. Just work through it like any other test, and when you finish, check the solutions and grade yourself. Whatever you get wrong, that's what you need to practice more.

As for actual study techniques, using the "recall" method of note taking works pretty well. Instead of taking notes simultaneously while you read through a text, read a paragraph/section/page and then close the book. Summarize what you just read by recalling the information, and write it down. If you can't do this without opening the book back up, that tells you right away that you don't understand the material yet. If you just write notes or highlight while you read, it gives you an "illusion of competence" (term used in the book mentioned above) such that you think that you understand something that you really don't yet.

I just read Moonwalking With Einstein which covers some memory techniques and is a pretty good story.

>Best book on language learning?

>Are there any books about how languages are learned for adults?

Yeah, plenty. I think /u/gwyner has the best book on language learning, but I'm a bit biased, since:

• I learned about it from Reddit when he posted about his book here.
  
  
• The techniques he proposed are very similar to the ones that my teachers in school have used in the past to teach me a language successfully.
  
  >How much do scientists even know about it? Do people know how we learn languages on a technical level? Or is it all unconfirmed hypotheses?
  
  Linguists do know quite a bit about it. They've applied psychology, neuroscience and a whole bunch of other disciplines to try to understand language learning. The book that I've mentioned above has cited many studies to justify the techniques described in it.

Check out the book A mind for numbers. Despite the title it is a book about learning efficiently. The authors also put a free course on Coursera that covers the same topics.

I'd like to get the Muse myself, but the only program they have released doesn't actually show the EEG info, they have released something (the SDK) which one can get that info from, if they know code. In demonstrations they have the EEG shown and people can type words with their thoughts.

I recently got the books Your Memory: how it works and how to improve it which has a ton of memory citations, and Moonwalking with Einstein: the art and science of remembering everything which I have yet to read

I really enjoyed this book which touches on pomodoro and many other study/work techniques. Well sourced with too!

The practice itself is basically brain maintenance is just something that happens when you have decent meditation sessions. Vipassana / TM stuff is good at this and pretty accessible, it allows you to do most of the stuff you can do with meditation and is aimed at people just starting. Sam Harris honestly gets 90% of what you need to know about spirituality and meditation done in that video I linked, I really urge you to get all the way through, since he will cover most of your response to the material within the material.

Religious belief (or any all encompassing belief) can be extremely useful for meditation in the more advanced levels because you have an amazing source for humility, something that is really important when it comes to reflection on your own ego (spiritual ego definition, not Freudian definition).

As for books, they are typically written from a psychology perspective, a lot of it is just about a high level method for change, rather than investigations of actual volition mechanisms that choose one action over another as a function of your state-of-mind. Ie... trying to intellectually will yourself to do something when your brain as a whole is in a depressed state will often result in poor results as the volition mechanism will be overwhelmed by the depressed state, reason and intellect will be ignored. 'Rewire Your Brain' was fun, but hit and miss like most of the material due to the lack of consideration stated here (IMHO).

There is a book called moonwalking with einstein. The techniques described are supposedly from the roman era, and national memory champions use them for their memory contests. The idea is that you create a "memory palace" and assign things you want to remember to a visual idea, IE a room you are used to with objects in it. Each object is assigned a correlation. here is a link to the book
There might be an audiobook on piratebay, not that I would know such things.

The author of the book Fluent Forever found some research that pointed at minimal pairs as an excellent way to train your ear. Minimal pairs are pairs of words that sound similar to an untrained ear, e.g. ces/sais, vos/vo and deux/du in French. You can find the words and their correct pronunciation yourself and create an immediate feedback system to learn to distinguish the sounds, or you can buy the English->French pronunciation trainers the author created for Anki (spaced repetition/flash card software). (I'm not affiliated in any way)

Try this:
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X

Really helped me a lot. Great book not just for learning math, but how learning works in general.

If you can't buy it just find a PDF from a torrent site or something like that

Of course I'm fighting the urge to say "I noticed it! My brain is AWESOME!" It's the same urge that makes you want to squint extra-hard at the eye chart just in case they say "You saw the impossibly-small letters! You have SUPER-vision!" Or maybe that's just me.

I had read about this but it looked nothing like what I pictured. So I noticed that someone was added to the group, and noticed that they left, but while counting passes (14) I didn't notice that the black human-ish shape was different from the other black human-ish shapes.

A really fun book on this kind of thing is Mind Hacks

For anyone more interested in memory techniques, I highly recommend Moonwalking with Einstein as a start. Many techniques are discussed including this one.

There's a fantastic book called Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. This guy was assigned to report on people that trained their minds competitively. He soon found it to be so interesting that he ended up competing as well. I would check it out if I were you.

A Mind For Numbers by Barbara Oakley is the book to the MOOC on Coursera: Learning How To Learn. I believe that is the most important one. Take the free course, read the book - this changed everything for me, finally I have to knowledge and tools I was seeking!

It's not a real thing, but you can train your memory to some pretty ridiculous extremes.

Take a look at Moonwalking with Einstein if you're interested.

Secrets of Mental Math May be helpful for filling in some gaps. Also A Mind for Numbers gives helpful meta learning info: how to study, etc.

If you wanna learn languages with anki I would recommend reading fluent Forever

Really helped me make my language sudies with anki 100x more efficient. You could also check out his blog if you dont wanna buy the book.

A very comprehensive answer! I would only add that the book, Fluent Forever contains additional advice on maximising your use of spaced repetition and using dictionaries, phrase books and textbooks to their maximum potential.

I went through those textbooks at university, but skipped An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese. After Tobira, which we rushed through, we dealt with authentic materials - blog posts, excerpts from books, websites, and so on. Basically, after Tobira you will be very close to the level needed to use Japanese-Japanese dictionaries alongside Japanese-English and you'll really be able to fly on your own.

It's also definitely possible to self-teach, but do try to get a Japanese penpal or Skype partner. There are a ton of websites out there if you look.

Check out Joshua Foer's book, Moonwalking with Einstein (Foer was interviewed on the Colbert Report recently).

He talks about the various techniques for improving your memory, most of which are fairly standardized, but follow along the following lines:

1. NOBODY has a photographic memory. That is not how memory works.
   
   
2. Memory is an active process, and as such, the more active you make the items to be remembered, the more likely you will be able to recall them. This means imagery.
   
   
3. There are traditional methods, such as the Peg system and the Method of Loci, that can be used by anyone.
   
   
4. Practice.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn or you can read the book the class is based on.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00G3L19ZU/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Yes, it says math and science but really it's about how the brain learns and it could help you.

Could you tell me whether the book gives much useful information for applying the methods (or new methods), beyond what is generally known from articles like Method of loci and Art of memory (Wikipedia) or other books on the subject? I flipped through the book and from my (admittedly brief) survey it seemed to mostly be about the people rather than practical advice for would-be practitioners.

I've already read a book on the subject of memorization: A Sheep Falls out of the Tree by Christiane Stenger.

Read this book, it's great! https://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Forever-Learn-Language-Forget/dp/0385348118

If you are serious about learning Dutch, I recommend reading Fluent Forever before getting started. Usually in libraries. Really good ideas on how to pick up languages and make them stick.

There is always a tough learning curve in the beginning of learning any new skill. This book kind of touches on the difficulties https://www.amazon.com/First-20-Hours-Learn-Anything/dp/1591846943. The key is just to get organized, have a goal in mind, and set realistic expectations of what you can accomplish. I have always loved learning new skills so I have a massive 5 page list of things I eventually want to learn, and I pick 3 skills off the list every couple months to solely focus on.

Like /u/JoshMnem pointed out, the method of loci is exactly what you want. Basically you just imagine some place you know well and place (absurd) things in it. check out the link /u/JoshMnem provided and if you want something more in depth, Joshua Foer has written a book about it

Read Fluent Forever It has the best method in my view of how to use Anki for language learning.