<story><title>Ask HN: How Do You Learn?</title><text>Do you use techniques like spaced repetition?
Do you prefer to learn from books, articles or videos?&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s your process?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>stickfigure</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m 48 and have gone through this process countless times, it feels like familiar rote:&lt;p&gt;1. Explore the subject almost randomly. Neither depth-first nor breadth-first; just follow threads that seem most useful or most interesting. Books, articles, videos, classes, whatever - it doesn&amp;#x27;t matter as long as you don&amp;#x27;t get bored. Dabble in all of them. If there are any practical skills involved (motion, writing code, etc) start doing those immediately.&lt;p&gt;2. At some point you get the &lt;i&gt;ah-hah!&lt;/i&gt; moment. It is like the fog lifts and you can suddenly see the landscape. You don&amp;#x27;t know everything but now it seems like further knowledge is just a process of filling holes. You wield your knowledge to accomplish what you need by filling specific holes on-demand. Everything fits together like jigsaw puzzle pieces.&lt;p&gt;The time between #1 and #2 can be short or long depending on the complexity of the subject. But the experience of #2 is a massive dopamine rush. The main thing you need is patience; don&amp;#x27;t get frustrated and give up, you know that if you just keep poking around, eventually that dopamine rush will come.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nwatson</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m home-schooling my daughter in math because Zoom and it not agreeing with her.  She did great last semester and tests several years ahead and has a very intuitive sense of why things work the way they do, I&amp;#x27;d like to keep her interest.&lt;p&gt;However, we&amp;#x27;re now on to pre-algebra and using this book [0], &amp;quot;Prealgebra: The Art of Problem Solving&amp;quot;.  The first chapter is all about axioms, proofs of some sort, breaking down &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; conclusions back to their constituent proof-from-first-principles and it&amp;#x27;s not agreeing with her at all.  Since this is the first week I&amp;#x27;m struggling to find a way to have it all make sense, and I&amp;#x27;ve concluded we need to kind of skip much of this first chapter (we&amp;#x27;ll look at the summary) and get to the later content which is more intuitive and applies &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; principles, and come back periodically to revisit the more mechanistic content in the first chapter.  I think the parent post&amp;#x27;s description of exploring a topic matches how my daughter will come to understand the whole &amp;quot;algebra stack.&amp;quot;  (Wish me luck.)&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Prealgebra-Richard-Rusczyk&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;1934124214&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Prealgebra-Richard-Rusczyk&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;1934124...&lt;/a&gt; , Amazon: &amp;quot;Prealgebra: The Art of Problem Solving&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: How Do You Learn?</title><text>Do you use techniques like spaced repetition?
Do you prefer to learn from books, articles or videos?&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s your process?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>stickfigure</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m 48 and have gone through this process countless times, it feels like familiar rote:&lt;p&gt;1. Explore the subject almost randomly. Neither depth-first nor breadth-first; just follow threads that seem most useful or most interesting. Books, articles, videos, classes, whatever - it doesn&amp;#x27;t matter as long as you don&amp;#x27;t get bored. Dabble in all of them. If there are any practical skills involved (motion, writing code, etc) start doing those immediately.&lt;p&gt;2. At some point you get the &lt;i&gt;ah-hah!&lt;/i&gt; moment. It is like the fog lifts and you can suddenly see the landscape. You don&amp;#x27;t know everything but now it seems like further knowledge is just a process of filling holes. You wield your knowledge to accomplish what you need by filling specific holes on-demand. Everything fits together like jigsaw puzzle pieces.&lt;p&gt;The time between #1 and #2 can be short or long depending on the complexity of the subject. But the experience of #2 is a massive dopamine rush. The main thing you need is patience; don&amp;#x27;t get frustrated and give up, you know that if you just keep poking around, eventually that dopamine rush will come.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>FalconSensei</author><text>The don&amp;#x27;t get bored part is really important. If it&amp;#x27;s not something you are required to learn, but instead you want to, then keep being interested and passionate is the best thing. There&amp;#x27;s no use in trying to optimize your learning at the very beginning if you drop it entirely in a month</text></comment>