All the things I wish I knew about studying at school

My niece reached out to me a few days back asking about tips for studying at school. She was specifically interested in any ideas I had about how to excel in her maths studies. I wrote up my thoughts for her and it occurred to me yesterday that there might be some benefit from putting these notes online as well.

Without further ado, therefore…

Study Skills Advice

As I understand it, your question takes two parts:

1. how do I learn / study better
2. how do I specifically learn / study for my upcoming exams (in particular for mathematics)

I've split my response up into two parts since they're somehow related but also different. Part one ('how do I learn new things') is sort of required for part two ('what do I have to do to get good grades on my exams'), since it's pretty hard to try to cram ideas and concepts into your head if you don't first understand them.

1. Learning to Understand

Something you just have to 'learn'

First off, you'll want to learn the small tiny 'fact-like' things first. Some of this you just have to put in some work and learn them. It'll help you a LOT when it comes to getting a grasp on the bigger-picture concepts. To give an example, if there are certain equations or definitions of concepts, it can help to take a bit of time and just learn those by heart (in whatever way usually works for you for that). Note that this is limited to just small fact-like things. For sciences, maybe there are some facts or properties of something derived from the periodic table, etc, that are important. In the specific case of quadratics that you asked about, it might be simple things like:

• the usual form of a quadratic equation
• the quadratic formula
• 'what is a discriminant'
• what does the completed square form look like, and how do you solve it?
• what does this or that quadratic look like when you graph it out?

The key thing is to isolated and master those tiny morsels of information / facts early on, since a) it needs to be done anyway and b) it'll help you with the big-picture stuff. Sometimes textbooks help out by highlighting or bolding those key concepts. Just make sure you're not just trying to learn EVERYTHING by rote, since that advice is as good as no advice in my opinion!

Learning for understanding: foundations

Something else I'll say early on is that there are some core foundations that will serve you well:

• start with a / the problem — it will help to try to wrestle with the kinds of things you're expected to do with this particular topic you're studying. It can actually help you to do this at the very beginning of starting a new topic: before you even study things, take a look at the kinds of questions that you'll be tested on and expected to answer. Maybe even try to solve them. You'll learn a lot about the subject area just by rolling around in the mud and struggling a bit.
• curiosity — this almost goes without saying, but you should try to find a way to be curious about whatever you're meant to be studying. It'll help a LOT with your motivation and interest, which will in turn help you keep moving forward and give you energy at moments when things get hard. Sometimes the trick to this is just trying to ask questions about whatever it is you're studying: why is this important? how does it connect to topic X or Y we already studied? what is most surprising about this topic? Sometimes it can also help to know a tiny bit about the history of a topic. Calculus is a bit down the road in terms of your studies, but back in the day (late 19th century, early 20th century) there were really epic debates between the various people who were developing this new area of maths. Lots of drama and falling out between people. So sometimes just knowing a bit about the personalities behind things can help.
• growth mindset — I wrote a blog on this a while back but the core thing is just to believe that you have it in you to master this thing. Once you have that, and if you start from that place, then you'll have much of what you need to keep moving forward. And as one teacher once told me, as long as you never give up then you'll eventually master it. Sometimes you just have to be a bit patient. Most things come if you give them enough time :)

Retrieval Practice

This is sort of the core of most learning, in my opinion, and I have a lot of thoughts and practice around this. (Have read a LOT about what research recommends in this area, but I figure you're interested mostly in whatever is practical so I'll keep it mostly at that level.)

The core: if you want to learn something / master it, you have to retrieve it from your memory somehow. (Retrieve can mean lost of things: for German vocabulary it might mean knowing the gender or translation of a particular word. For Maths it might mean a particular formula, or even a high level understanding of how one concept relates to another.)

The important thing about this retrieval is that it will be and should be hard to do. (This is one reason why people don't necessarily enjoy doing this, and even fewer actually do it.) It's hard to struggle to put together a coherent explanation of topic x or y, but that struggle is what helps create neural pathways that cement the understanding going forward.

One possible way you could do this is to write short summaries of what you understood of a particular topic, then check your notes to see if you were correct. IMPORTANT: the key thing is to do this from memory / without notes. Otherwise you're not actually reinforcing materials in your head.

Another way of testing things (e.g. in your specific case of quadratics) is to do practice examples. Your school or textbook probably gives you some practice examples, but you shouldn't confine yourself just to doing those. Make up your own examples, or go online and find more examples (use Khan Academy or whatever).

It can also help to make distilled summary sheets at some point during your studies which gather together your understanding on a single piece of paper for the entire topic. Here actually you can see the one I made digitally for my own study of quadratics a few months ago:

The key thing with retrieval practice is to get a lot of it, and to try to make it the 'hard' / 'difficult' kind of retrieval. Mostly this starts with a blank sheet of paper and then you try to write down what you know about a topic, or a concept, or whatever specific thing you're trying to understand. Writing things down will help you realise (quickly! painfully!) which parts you don't actually understand. So it's as much to reveal to you which parts you need to work on as it is for anything else.

(There's a much-praised technique named after a well-known American scientist, Richard Feynman, and you can do something like this, too:

1. Write the title of a topic that you want to study / test yourself on
2. Write or map out an explanation of that subject intelligible / appropriate to a non-specialist. Do this from memory.
3. Identify any gaps in your explanation / understanding.
4. Relearn / restudy / interrogate to fill in the gaps.

You can use narrative / diagrams to condense and clarify your explanation. It's basically the same idea. And yes, bullet points or spider diagrams are all possible ways of doing this.)

Developing mental models

There's this idea that the whole thing you're doing when you learn something is developing 'mental models', which I personally find a bit hard to wrap my head around, but it is a thing… It's maybe the next layer up in what's happening when you try to learn something.

Mental models are, for me, about making a topic your own somehow. They're also about making the concepts of that topic manipulable somehow.

The 'making it your own' part has a lot to do with confidence, somehow, but it's also just feeling familiar and effective with the concepts that you feel comfortable solving problems in that area. If you see a problem, e.g., you know which techniques (or which subset of techniques) are needed to solve it. If there are multiple possible ways to solve something, you'll have a good feel for the tradeoffs: i.e. why this way is better than that way etc. In the case of quadratics, for example, we know that there is this amazing thing which is the quadratic formula, but you probably don't want to use that formula the whole time because it's easy to make a mistake with it and it's a bit cumbersome. Instead, we often use other simpler techniques that work for many (if not totally 100%) of the problems that you'll be exposed to.

One way to help develop mental models is to try to explain the topic to someone else. You already did a bit of this in the retrieval practice above: trying to explain it on paper is already some of this. But trying to explain a topic to people at different levels of understanding can be really clarifying. I.e. if you had to explain quadratics to a 5-year old it's probably different to how you'd explain it to a 40-year old. (Along with this, you can test out this approach by chatting with a chatbot about the topic. I'm sure you've heard of ChatGPT, but Claude is also another good option, esp for things like maths. The key thing is to start the conversation by saying something like "I would like to have a conversation about quadratics. I've been studying it and I'd like to test out my explanations of some core concepts with you. I would like you to tell me if things feel unclear about what I'm saying, or if you notice that there are some areas where I could improve my understanding.")

(While we're here, using things like ChatGPT to develop mental models can be useful. I will often have conversations that begin with something like "What is a good way to think about the discriminant in relation to quadratic equations? Please make your explanation simple to follow and use some concrete items in your reply, like only items that you'd find in a kitchen.")

Making mental models is hard! But the work you do to solidify things and make them your own is really worth it!

Anyway, the big point here is to reflect on what you're studying. Make sure to also give some time to connecting it to other things either in your maths studies or outside, or even life in general. It's not the best to just view everything completely isolated and disconnected from the other topics, so try to take a step back from time to time! (Unfortunately, most schools aren't built to encourage that process much, but it's important!)

Specific contexts

There are some other specific contexts that require different / more targeted advice, but you didn't mention them so I'll ignore them a bit. But language learning is one of them, and learning some kind of 'motor skill' is another (i.e. that requires coordination or physical movement like playing golf or the yoyo or whatever).

In Practice: Understanding Quadratics

To summarise the practical points listed above:

• learn the small fact-sized pieces early on
• get lots of retrieval practice (a mixture of examples of doing whatever the skill requires of you, and/or writing or explaining the topic at various levels)
• develop mental models where you can.

2. Studying for Exams

I'll take it for granted that you agree that you can't study for something without properly understanding it, so somehow the things in part 1 are sort of a prerequisite for this section; you can't get ready for an exam if you don't understand what's going on.

That said, there are some tactical things you can do to help your chances of success once you do have an understanding of a particular topic. Note that for all of this, it's a bit of a question of picking which parts seem doable / manageable. It's probably unwise / counterproductive to necessarily try to do EVERYTHING :)

Ground rules

You should understand the requirements of the exam. Take a bit of time to read through some previous exam papers. I'm sure your teachers have also given you clear guidelines on what kinds of things to expect. That will give you a map for how to prepare, so be sure to do this.

Foundations: Exam Study

There are some basic foundations here which for various reasons get forgotten when you're under exam pressure, but it's good to remind yourself of these, since if you neglect these it'll negatively affect your ability to study etc.

• sleep
• eating things that nourish your body instead of just feeding cravings
• taking breaks (every hour, ideally, get up and walk around for a minute or two)
• minimise distractions (put your phone in airplane mode or in a lock box while studying)
• movement in general / going out of the house for walks a few times a day is a good minimum.
• 'managing your energy' — this one's a bit hard to quantify / explain, but I'd say it's worth trying to embody the principle that you should only study as much today as allows you to keep studying tomorrow. I.e. if you overdo it and you study a lot today, but it's a bit too much and tomorrow then you can't do any study etc, then that was counterproductive. (Hope that was clear!)

Mnemonic / memory tricks

There are a TON of memory tricks out in the world. All of them are useful, but not all of them are equally useful for every situation :)

Things like the major system, the link system and the peg system are all useful, but they require a bit of time and probably also someone who knows how they work to explain them to you.

If you already have a bit of experience with these things, then I'd encourage you to use them in your studies, but if you don't have much experience then I'd say probably that it's not going to be the difference between an A and a B grade so probably it's a waste of your time to try to get into that in the run-up to exams.

That said, it would TOTALLY be a really useful investment to learn a few of these during summer holidays in a non-stress / fun way. You can play around with learning the order of decks of cards etc — I can explain all this if you're interested — and then you'll have that skill available to you if you need it next year or throughout your life.

There are some general memory principles that you can rely on in general terms:

• when trying to remember something, make it memorable in your mind! so maybe try to imagine the concepts as characters in some kind of image in your mind, and use all your senses and bring in some shock or drama etc etc. (LMK if you want more of these kinds of advice. I have a lot, but not sure how useful it is for you right now.)

Spaced Repetition

This is a really useful tool, but it requires a bit of upfront (time) investment and unless you're feeling super comfortable / not stressed at all, I might suggest to add it to the list of 'things to learn about over summer / winter (?) holidays'.

Basically this means testing yourself with (digital) flashcards, but the twist is that you only get shown the flashcard at exactly the optimum time / day when you need to be tested on it. (There's a whole science to this which I won't go into, but there's a TON of backing to the fact that this is the way to make things get into your memory.)

The best option for this is a piece of software called Anki. It runs on your laptop and phone etc, but it has a bit of a steep learning curve mainly because the defaults it comes with aren't great. So if you were interested I could help you set that up, but the key thing to know is that using this requires a bit of extra work.

The main idea is that you create (digital) flashcards for all the things you need to know, and then every day you check in with Anki to review whatever cards it says you need to know. There's an algorithm that calculates which cards you should review. It should mesh well with your intuitive sense of how memory works: i.e. over time you slowly forget things, so Anki will prompt you to recall a particular concept just at the point before you forget it, since that exact moment is the best time to review it. When you review it at that moment and you get it right, it'll really strengthen your memory for that thing. If you don't remember it, then it'll reset the status of that card and it'll know to show it more often for a few days etc.

There are more manual ways to get the same effect, but (for a lot of reasons) they're not as effective since humans don't work / behave like computers so really using a digital tool is the only way to go.

For quadratics, to use my experience, I have a bunch of cards relating to that that I get tested on. Writing a 'good flashcard' is a bit of an art, and we can get into that if you're interested, but I'll just lay it here as an option for now.

Interleaving

This is a fancy word for saying: 'don't study just one topic on its own'. When you're testing yourself on things that you'll need to know for exams, make sure to switch things up a lot. This means doing one problem from quadratics, then another relating to trigonometry, and another relating to topic z etc etc.

There is again quite a bit of evidence that this makes you much stronger in your understanding / learning, even though (or maybe because!) it's a bit harder to do.

If at least part of your review of topics / facts are handled by Anki it'll take care of giving you random flashcards anyway, so this more relates to things like solving maths problems by hand.

So don't just do 50 iterations of the same maths problem, in other words. Make sure you're switching topics etc.

3. Next Steps

• Check the practical suggestions above
• let me know if anything's unclear / or you want to know more about how to do thing x or y
• gather some problems to solve so you can make sure you're practicing the things you need to study
• get into some good habits around retrieval practice (i.e. writing things down to test whether you know them or not)

Getting Out of the Intermediate Language Plateau: Arabic Edition / Principles

[This is part of a series on getting out of a language-learning plateau at the intermediate-advanced level. Check out the other parts here.]

Seasoned language learners are familiar with the concept of the 'language plateau'. If you're learning a second language for the first time, you will inevitably reach a point in your studies where your progress seems to flatten. You will find this place and period extremely frustrating.

When you are in your plateau, it's hard to improve because you're already at a point of (some kind of) self-sufficiency. You can express yourself. You understand most of what is going on in a conversation or TV series you watch. You can write things and people will understand what you're saying. You could (and many do) stop your studies at this point and still be 'functional' in the language.

Getting out of this flat, dead zone is what I want to talk about today. It's hard, but it's by no means impossible, and making this kind of progress is possibly the most valuable work you'll do in your language studies, because all of it will be specifically tailored to your needs.

The starting point, though, is to identify your current status. What can you do? You don't (necessarily) need to take a formal language certification test to get a grade, though that can sometimes be useful. The kind of measurements you want to take are more subjective. You want to take stock of your capacity in certain situations, what level you are able to achieve in different contexts (your skills in reading will be different from writing vs listening or speaking, for example) and you want also to assess your experience on the cultural level as well -- i.e. how much experience do you have navigating all the unspoken parts of culture, whether that is body language, or behaviours and so on.

Principles of Skill Acquisition

Now a slight detour into some more general principles of skill acquisition. Some of this is derived from my own personal experience, other parts from interviews with experts in this field (such as my conversation with K. Anders Ericsson, who more or less invented the field of expert performance studies), and other parts still from reading a bunch of books on the subject.

Three things are relevant here:

1) Stretch

When you're learning a new skill, you want to step outside your comfort zone. This is usually difficult work, and work that is mentally (and possibly emotionally) taxing. Thus, if you want to get better at speaking in Arabic, you'll need to speak more, but at the beginning this practice (i.e. talking with other people) will feel pretty horrible, simply because you're not used to doing it. It's a paradox that you need to do the thing to get better at doing the thing. It is this difficulty, pushing yourself a little past what you're capable of doing, that allows for personal growth. (I wrote about this in an entirely different context a few weeks ago with respect to my attempts to get better at climbing.)

2) Lots of practice coupled with speedy feedback

These two parts (practice and feedback) go together. It isn't practice alone that will allow you to improve, but rather the combination of making efforts to use new skills alongside getting some kind of feedback that tells you when you're getting it wrong vs when you're not. An implication of this, too, is the reality that this kind of practice is going to involve you making lots of mistakes. This can feel crappy, especially when you're getting immediate feedback on exactly when this is happening. You need to adopt a flexible mindset, if possible, in which you see the mistakes as indicators of growth rather than as any kind of personal or intellectual failures on your part.

3) Know what you're practicing and focus on that

This is basically Ericsson's principle of "deliberate practice":

"Rather than chilling out in the comfort of skills you've already acquired, as an expert-to-be, you're relentless about heading to the frontier of your abilities. The practice shouldn't be so difficult that it overwhelms you—that would be depressingly demotivating, but not so easy that you're unconsciously languishing. In other words, you're arranging for flow, that space where you're right at the boundary of your abilities."

See also this summary of the routines that 'experts' tend to have around deliberate practice:

They can only engage in practice without rest for around an hour.
They practice in the morning with a fresh mind.
They practice the same amount every day, including on weekends.
They only have four to five hours of deliberate practice a day.
If they don't get enough rest, they can get overtraining injuries or burnout.

If you're hoping that 'using the language' in a general and non-specific way will get you out of your plateau, you'll be disappointed. It's perfectly possible to exist in the plateau zone without improvement ad infinitum. If you want to improve at a certain skill, you'll need to isolate that element and focus on it in a targeted way. This can be vocabulary, or speaking about a certain topic, or even something as small as 'using conditional sentences'. Whatever it is, you'll only get better if you concentrate your efforts.

Customisation & Your Individual Needs

Learning languages at the post-intermediate level will be a different experience from what you are used to in the early stages. Early on, you're doing a great deal of necessary-but-boring work to learn basic patterns, vocabulary and grammar.

Once you have mastered that, and you can explain yourself in most basic contexts, you reach the point where you have to customise. There's a great deal of science and research behind this claim. Check out this talk, by the always stimulating Alexander Arguelles, for an overview of some of that research.

You'll need to pick which areas you're most interested in. This is the hard work of advanced language studies -- you pick one area or context, conquer it, and then pick another area and repeat. This fulfils the princicle of focus that I mentioned above.

To give an example from my own studies. My current big push for Arabic is to be able to read serious fiction (i.e. short stories and novels written for native speakers). I've written previously that this was a personal goal, but various realities of how modern literature is written really make it hard to take the leap into complex native-reader-level fiction (especially novels). Arab writers like to use many synonyms (for poetic effect, or perhaps as an attempt at pretension?) for words, so when reading I often find myself stuck referring to dictionaries the whole time. Fortunately, a new textbook offering graded literature at just that 'stretch' level was released recently, which is allowing me an entry point into that world. None of the texts are simplified, and the language is hard and the number of unknown words is pretty large, but it's not too far down the scale of difficulty.

On Making a Self-Study Plan

My next post will cover and offer a host of suggestions for resources you can use to get out of this plateau / dead zone. Before you start reading through and diving into things that seem interesting, I'd strongly advise you take the time to figure out your specific goals. "Improve my Arabic" is not a useful goal. It's too unspecific. Even "improve my spoken Arabic" may not be particularly useful at the intermediate-advanced level. Once you figure out your goal, write it down somewhere. Maybe stick it to your wall or on the inside of your notebook. It's good to be reminded why we're doing the work.

Once you have your goal, then you want to set yourself small targeted bursts or challenges to push out into your stretch zone. You don't want these challenges to feel like you're straining against the limits of what you are capable. You want it to be just challenging enough that you feel uncomfortable, but not so much that you are constantly questioning yourself and your abilities in any kind of fundamental sense.

The scale of these challenges will be pretty variable, so examples will span a range of tasks from taking a week to learn and read deeply in a niche topic, to something more longer-term (over six months, perhaps) like my modern literature challenge. The characteristic that you need to look for, however, is that you'll be able to tell when you're finished with the challenge. Part of defining the goal is finding a specific (and somewhat measurable) definition of what it means to have achieved what you want.

Then the rest of the trick is basically keeping moving, tracking your progress and achievements along the way. There are various ways of doing this, some of which will depend on what else you have done in this regard. You can add in things like Beeminder to encourage compliance and regularity, or you can do that in other ways.

When I work with people 1-on-1 to learn a language, a lot of what we do is figuring out this kind of ongoing goal setting and progress assessment. (If you want to learn more about this, click here and read through what I offer).

The next posts will offer a roadmap to the different resources available to the intermediate student of Arabic and some of the ways you can utilise these resources. It won't be exhaustive, but I'm pretty sure that most will find something of use in them. Feel free to get in touch if you have specific things you want me to tackle in terms of skill development in Arabic.

The Inner Game: How a Perspective Shift Can Radically Improve Your Performance

I’ve recently become interested in mental models, or different types of lenses you can bring to view a particular situation or reality. We all have an immense flexibility in how we can view the world; sometimes changing our approach in this way can change how we experience our reality.

I found the process of realising and accepting this reality — that how we choose to respond to things changes how we experience them — incredibly empowering and liberating. It gives you options and choices in situations that may have seemed oppressive or challenging in the past. It opens you up to new approaches, new possibilities. I’ve written about my struggles with various parts of climbing, but one of the places I often return to is this idea that I can choose how I respond to that difficult. Similarly, I can reframe how I decide to view that reality: I can see it through the lens of fear, or I can view it through the lens of opportunity and growth. I can see it through my default hesitant-cum-reluctant perspective or I can try to imagine how someone else sees it (a friend, perhaps, who doesn’t struggle with the same mental blocks, or even someone much further along in the sport).

I recently read a fantastic book that introduces some of these ideas as they relate to the sport of tennis. The book, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance, was written by W. Timothy Gallwey and was originally published in 1972. Back then, it made quite a splash (selling over a million copies to date) and the book is rightly well-read as a classic of sports psychology literature. Gallwey has since published a number of spin-off books applying his principles to other domains (work, stress, music, golf, skiing) but you needn’t be a tennis player at all to get a lot from the original version.

The core idea that Gallwey introduces is that the mind has “two selves”, Self 1 and Self 2. I’m not entirely sure about the full extent to which these overlap with Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2, but there is some common ground.

Self 1 (also known as the ‘teller’) is the voice in your head which tries to actively manage how you do certain things. It is responsible for efforts to ‘try hard’, and is often quite critical. Self 2, in contrast, is the ‘doer’, the part of you that (in the end) ends up doing things but that is sensitive to the attitude and comments made by Self 1. The book is about the relationship between these two voices, since Self 1 doesn’t trust Self 2 to be able to deliver. Gallwey argues that in order to be effective and do our best work (or play our best match of tennis), we need a better way of translating our knowledge into effective action, and thus a better way for the two selves to communicate and interact.

Some of the details of the book are specific to movement-based skills. I think that anyone doing any kind of sport would benefit from reading this book. Gallwey outlines four key skills that go into effective movement: - letting go of judgement — once you stop allowing self 1 to dictate the terms of the conversation, you can rely much more on the instinctual learning capacity of self 2. This also hooks into the idea of ’seeing clearly’, which pretty much immediately improves your ability to respond and react to the reality of the present moment. - creating images — visualising movement, really noticing what’s going on (when viewing others do it) and working from imitation and from feeling your way into the movements. - ‘letting it happen’ — getting out of the way. This has a lot to do with the first skill. You have to trust Self 2’s ability to deliver, and you just need to let it happen, or let whatever happens happen. The important thing here is the nonjudgemental observation of change and the results. - concentration — this is the final stage, since just ‘letting go’ is not quite enough. The relaxed, nonjudgemental mind needs focusing. For movement, this means focusing your observation and sensitivity to sensations in the body (for example) or an increased consciousness of the senses. (“Focus intensifies the light of consciousness”).

He ends the book by addressing the idea of games — games that people play, the meaning of competition, and the broader implications of the way we approach this ‘inner game’ (balancing self 1 and self 2) in our life. (I was really impressed how so many of the ideas presented presage current trends and predilections: the importance of mindfulness, the value of play, and so on).

If the first part of the book was less applicable to things outside the domain of movement skills and practical learning, the second half is much more relevant to the problems I think most of us face. There’s a certain amount of pop psychology that probably hasn’t lasted the test of time, but mostly it is really solid perspectives on: - finding games where the score doesn’t matter - the debate in Western society as to the value of competition as compared with cooperation. - issues that result when ‘success’ is equated to value and self-worth (which can in turn lead to various compulsions to succeed, or, paradoxically, to rebel)

Gallwey ends the book with the paradox that is at the core of the ‘inner game’, that in order to allow Self 2 the freedom to learn and act naturally, this requires a level of abandonment. So it is a matter of “caring, yet not caring […] effort, but effortless.” He ties it in to all sorts of other areas outside tennis that really convinced me as to the applicability beyond purely motor / movement skills.

There was a lot to unpack about this book, and I may return to some of the specific points in the future. For anyone working on their movement skills or finding ways to enjoy that part of their life, I’d put this on the list of essential books. For anyone else, maybe give the first few chapters a read; I think you’ll be surprised what Gallwey brings to the table.

Learning a Language? Try a New Approach

Aside from my mother tongue (English, sort of), I’ve been studying and thinking about studying languages for twenty-five years. Back at school, I studied Ancient Greek, Latin, French and German. Since leaving, I’ve tackled (to varying degrees) Arabic, Dutch, Farsi / Dari, Pashto, Russian, Toki Pona, Turkish, Urdu and Japanese. If there’s one thread that connects it all, it is this: variety.

Each language brings its own challenges, and each language is learnt amidst a unique set of circumstances. The way I studied Latin — in a classroom, two or three times a week, with tests and homework over a period of several years — is probably irreproducible for me. Each language that I’ve studied came, therefore, with its own context.

Ignore your own particular context at your peril.

Here are some of the approaches I’ve tried:

• vocabulary-heavy approach — learning lots of words first, usually from a list of most frequent terms
• grammar-heavy approach — skipping the vocabulary and focusing on adding words later on once the main structures are present and solid
• speak from day one — I tried this with Japanese, where the emphasis is on talking to people (in my case, various iTalki teachers) even though it’s still too early to be having long conversations
• university-degree — I have a BA in Arabic and Farsi from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (UK)
• intensive immersion-heavy language schools — I’ve done this for Arabic and German, both summer programmes
• learning from textbooks
• learning without any textbooks — when I started Pashto, there were no decent learning materials available, so I mostly learned through speaking to Afghan friends in Kandahar
• learning online via a computer-driven course — I’ve studied French, German and Turkish via Duolingo
• writing lots — I use Lang-8 to get corrections on materials
• speaking lots — iTalki is the best option for this (cheap lessons, usually great teachers / conversation partners)
• listening to lots / watching lots — I’ve used Beeminder to set myself input / consumption goals for most of my recent languages
• learning lists of key phrases — this helped a lot with Japanese at the beginning
• learning using listen-and-repeat audio courses — Michel Thomas and Pimsleur are the best known and gold-standard for this kind of thing. If the language you’re learning is available for either of those, it’s probably worth just doing the entire course before you start your formal study.
• learning from friends — just talking to people with whom you share interests or activities is often a great way to pick things up along the way. You’ll usually find that (especially with obscure languages) people are enthusiastic to help when they learn you are interested in their language.
• learning through music — in a previous life, I was heavily invested in a career in music(ology) and I mostly learned German as a way of being able to read more about Wagner.
• travel — there’s nothing like the motivation that comes from knowing you’re travelling to a new country. For many years I would even try not to travel to countries where I didn’t at least speak the basics of their language.
• meta-study — I’ve studied language learning techniques for a little over ten years. I wish I’d come to read more about these things much earlier. It can seem like a waste of time, especially if you’re only studying one language, but taking a bit of time to read about the most efficient techniques and, increasingly, technologies is time well spent.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some. (I’ll update as and when I remember more). And note that not all of these were successes. The more I’ve tried, the more I’ve realised what does and doesn’t work for me. That last bit is important. There is no one method that works for everyone. You have to figure out what works for you.

I’ve had the opportunity to try so many things out because I’ve been studying languages for a decent number of years, but also because my circumstances have been changing as I’ve grown older, left school and so on.

If you’re learning a language at the moment, make sure you don’t allow yourself to stagnate. Sticking to things that worked in the past may mean you’re missing out. So try something new. (Let me know how it works out for you.)

Different Kinds of Climbing

This past week I went with my niece to a climbing hall (and trampolining centre) in Kuwait. You can see photos of the walls here and here. The whole experience was designed to encourage play and fun, naturally, rather than for some kind of skill-building. There weren’t any other adults climbing; just children with a throw-yourself-at-it mentality that was infectious.

The routes themselves weren’t particularly difficult, but it was harder trying to ascend without climbing shoes and hindered by the world’s most uncomfortable harness. The walls weren’t that high, and this seemed to reward a sprint-like style of climbing. Speed was more important than technique or form. This was climbing as challenge, as a way to enjoy scrambling up and leaping off the top, rather than anything else. (The centre uses auto-belay devices that stop you from falling all the way down to the bottom).

The experience — mine, and watching that of the children 10–20 years younger than me — reinforced the conclusion that has been steadily growing in my mind over time. Climbing is not really about strength; fear and the mental battles are the biggest things holding the beginner climbing back.

I’ll have to still bash my head against the wall for a while longer before I fully absorb and believe this lesson, but the sooner I do, the sooner I’ll be able to advance onwards to the next level of challenge.

Scratching Below the Surface with David Heinemeier Hansson

I’m part-way through listening to a podcast interview with David “DHH” Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, author of Rework and Remote and co-founder of Basecamp. I wanted to write down some brief notes on what came up so far before I forget. I may return to this thread after I’ve finished listening to the rest. These are just some of the points that stood out for me from the conversation; I’d strongly recommend you give it a listen yourself, especially if you’re interested in coding, systems thinking, improving and learning new skills and so on.

• Curiosity — this is a skill worth cultivating. There are various metaphors often used for curiosity, but in the podcast DHH talks about the need to ‘dig / scratch below the surface’. He talks about how finding the thing in the topic / skill / domain that interests him is often a case of just keeping burrowing down until you find it.
• Learn What You Need — DHH talks about learning to code as a way of solving a particular problem, and about learning only just enough rather than diving into that learning as a pure pursuit needing you to learn everything.
• Systems Improvement — this isn’t explored that deeply in the part I listened, but it was a good reminder that there is a way of thinking about improvement that sees improving the system as the way to improve the skill.
• Time / Flow — DHH talks about driving racing cars and how time really flies when he does this. This is an observation that this, for him, is a skill he is enjoying learning, and one that gives him a great sense of that satisfaction that comes from doing a rewarding activity at just the right level of difficulty.

More on this to follow (maybe).

On Completing Udacity's Intro to Programming Nanodegree

Add this one to the drawer of semi-meaningless certificates!

This took me several months longer than I had expected, but it’s done now: I graduated from Udacity’s Introduction to Programming Nano-degree or IPND. I’ve always liked Udacity’s free courses ever since I did their very first offering, “Intro to Computer Science” or CS101. They make sure to intersperse lots (and lots) of practice with the fun bite-size videos explaining concepts or techniques.

The IPND (estimated to take around 190 hours to complete) takes you on a tour of a variety of languages, programming tools as well as ways of thinking about coding. You learn basic HTML and CSS (for making standalone websites), Python to do more tricky computational things, and some ways to use Python and HTML/CSS combined together. Each unit is divided into a learning stage and then a practical project that you have to build on your own. This is where you prove you’ve mastered the skills that were taught, and you get lots of useful feedback from the examiners / reviewers of the projects.

At the end of the project you get to choose an ‘elective’, a specific area of programming that takes your interest. Current options include:

• Front-end developer
• Back-end developer
• iOS developer
• Android developer
• Data analyst

I wrote earlier that I had chosen the data analyst elective, but this turned out to be far harder than I’d expected so I changed to the back-end developer part. As part of this elective, I learnt about databases, SQL and how to code so that my databases were interacting with Python code.

The course as a whole was — with the exception of the data analysis elective — pitched at just the right level: not too hard but also not too easy. I enjoyed pretty much the entirety of the materials and I really felt like I was growing my skill and capacity as I went through the course.

Of course, spending a few months doing a nano-degree for an hour or two every day does not make a functional programmer. I have a small project I want to code with what I learnt so far, so I’m taking time to do that. I’m also trying to keep my Python fresh by tackling a challenge problem each day over on Codewars.

When learning a skill like coding, there’s a strong temptation to just keep doing more courses. It’s a little like riding a bike with training wheels. It feels safe, protected from the ‘real world’ somehow. But ultimately that’s not going to help me grow, so I’m forcing myself to actually do something practical with my skill before I take another course.

Udacity’s IPND is not cheap at $200 / month, though if you finish the course within 12 months they give you 50% of the tuition money back. That means that you’re actually paying $100 / month for the course, and it’s a strong incentive towards completion. I took a little longer than three months to complete, but you could probably get it all done in two months if you didn’t have a lot of other things going on at the same time. You can do all of the courses they offer for free, though you miss out on the practical side of the tuition, the interactions with one-on-one mentors and the forum support. I used all of that stuff a lot, so all in all it was worth it for me.

There are lots of ‘intro-to-programming’-type courses and materials available, so you should do your research first depending on what you want to do with it later. I really want to do the data analysis nano-degree; this is a full degree requiring an average/estimated 380 hours of study time. It made sense for me to do my initial studies within the Udacity ecosystem, though in this interim period I’m making sure that I’m getting exposure to other resources:

• DataCamp has a great set of Python and R tutorials which I’m looking forward to exploring
• Codewars (mentioned earlier) offers many challenges which test my command of code as well as of maths, logic and reasoning.
• FreeCodeCamp’s excellent (free) course will help me become more comfortable with coding web-facing projects, with the added bonus of connecting coders to non-profits along the way who could benefit from my skills.

For the moment, that’s enough to be getting on with before I start the next nano-degree…

Letting Go

Over the past week, I have felt the progress I’ve been making on the climbing wall is in jeopardy somehow. My energy levels have fluctuated quite a bit. I can never be sure how much I’ll be able to climb when I get to the wall, and old fears have started to raise their heads again.

I thought I was over my fear of falling. But it has returned in a new guise. Part of the improvement in skill and strength that I’ve made has allowed me to try new walls and new routes. Some of these are on an inclined wall. The wall leans over you rather than just going straight up, which places more strain on your arms.

It also, I have discovered, is somehow a trigger straight to the core of my fear of falling. Gravity pulls straight down, so when you let go on an inclined wall (either in a fall or while taking a rest break) you’re pulled away from the wall into free space behind you. There’s nothing different about the experience. Either way, the rope, your harness and the knots you tied will hold you. But the experience is visceral. I’ll be fine all the way up the wall, but when I let go and pull out into open space behind me, I feel like falling is inevitable.

It’s a hard feeling to describe, and there must be something (at least on some level) hard-wired about it. The feeling comes about so instantly and with such force.

Today I did some exercises to try to become more comfortable with the feeling. I did some intentional falls (basically just leaping backwards and trying to stay mindful of the experience of having the rope catch me). I climbed up the inclined wall, every so often turning round and allowing myself to rest on the rope while I turned my body backwards, looking out into the main hall of the centre. 

I won’t claim to have had any breakthroughs. If anything, I feel like I’m back where I started. But I’ll keep going back, and I’ll keep climbing those walls. After all, feelings are just that: feelings. I no more have to follow the beat of their drum than I have to buy a can of Coca Cola every time I see their advertisement on a wall. But I do have to acknowledge they exist, and, maybe, to get comfortable with their taking up space in my head from time to time.

Every day is different. Progress isn’t necessarily linear. The things I thought I’d dealt with come back to confront me. But as long as the process — doing the climbing — is still of interest to me, then this isn’t a problem. I just have to keep showing up, keep climbing those walls.

Skills Development: Foundations

I watched this video a few months ago, but thought it worth returning to since it covers a lot of really useful ground for anyone who has to learn new skills / develop etc. Which is to say, it's relevant to everyone on planet Earth.

Or just read these notes to get an overview of some useful things she talks about. (If you want to read a transcript, go here.)

“Allison Kaptur: Effective Learning for Programmers” — Notes from YouTube

We learn early on that Kaptur’s job at the Recurse Center was to help and support students grow and learn amidst the freedom that the programme there afforded them. This kind of unstructured environment can come as a shock if you’ve only been able to work in structured settings in the past (schools, universities, big companies etc). The unstructured freedom to which Kaptur refers around the 1:30 mark also happens to be a hallmark that defines self-study work.

“Growth Mindset”

• Kaptur introduces the work of sociologist Carol Dweck and the distinction she’s drawn between fixed mindsets and growth mindsets.
  • A fixed mindset “holds that intelligence is a trait that some people have in some fixed amount, and they can’t really affect how much of it they have.”
  • A growth mindset “says that intelligence is something that you can work on and something you can develop with effort.”
• Whether someone adopts a fixed or a growth mindset then can determine how they view various other aspects of work. With regards to ‘effort’, people who believe in fixed mindsets hold that “if you are good at something, then it should be easy”. (And, conversely, if you’re bad at something, then it should be hard.) People with a growth mindset believe that you need to work hard at something to become better at it.
• Kaptur mentions how Dweck’s work has also shown that people who are praised for their effort in the task being performed tend to get better results [slight simplification of what she said] than those who are praised for what they achieved. This is a fairly well-known and well-publicised aspect of Dweck’s work.
• Kaptur notes that having a fixed vs growth mindset is something which (it seems) can be changed. And the switch from fixed to growth mindset can sometimes happen with deceptively easy tactics.
  • Sometimes it’s as simple as being aware of the things you’re saying (e.g. “Oh, I could never learn physics”). Kaptur suggests when you say “I am…” or “Some people are just…”, these might be times to examine whether you’re stuck in a fixed mindset pattern.
• Four strategies to change a fixed mindset:
  • 1) “Reframe praise and success” — if someone praises you for something you said by saying “you’re so smart”, you can mentally (most of the time you will say this to yourself internally) reframe this as “yes, I did a great job on that project. I worked very hard and I used an effective strategy.”
  • 2) “Reframe failure” — this is basically the opposite of the first strategy. Listen to your self-talk when you fail at something. If you’re saying “I failed because I’m bad” or “maybe I’m not cut out for this kind of work”, then try reframing it by asking yourself what you learnt from this attempt and what strategies you could change or use next time you try something similar.
  • 3) “Celebrate challenges” — if you can find ways to frame places where you struggle as a victory or an accomplishment in and of itself, this will really help drive you into that growth mindset. Accordingly, when the going gets tough, celebrate the difficult as an opportunity for growth, development and learning.
  • 4) “Ask about processes” — asking “how did you do that” can often be really illuminating, and is better (when viewing someone else’s work, for example) than saying “of course they did x or y; they are a genius/wizard”.
• On Confidence & Imposter Syndrome
  • Dweck’s research shows that confidence doesn’t help you respond to challenges. A lot of advice counsels feeling more confident in response to difficulties in work etc, but the angle Dweck is explores is the idea that “if you’re doing something new, confidence about something old doesn’t help you with that.”
  • If you hold a fixed-mindset, any moment is basically a chance to prove whether or not you are a failure. “So running into challenges is particularly stressful in that context.”
  • The trick to getting past all of this (of course) is to adopt a growth mindset. (20:10)

Strategies

Dweck’s research also shows that those who really embody a ‘growth mindset’ are also focused on strategies (and not just outcomes).

• “Make It Stick” — Kaptur offers some useful tips that she gathered from this great book. You can read my review here, in which I also extract some of my favourite actionable points.
  • “Learning is an acquired skill” — the premise of the book
  • 1) “Effortful retrieval > rereading” — this can be something like self-tests administered through Anki, or it can just be writing a review of a book after you’ve read it. Or it could be trying to summarise a recently-mastered topic by teaching it to someone else.
  • 2) “Spaced practice > massed practice” — Kaptur references three main ways to space out practice — spaced / varied / and interleaved.
    • Spaced = spacing practice sessions out over time rather than bunching it all together in a single mega-session
    • Varied = find a way to vary the kinds of practice you’re getting so that you’re not getting falsely sure of your command of the topic.
    • Interleaved = shuffling the kinds of exercise / practice you’re doing so that it’s somewhat random is better than always sticking to the same order (or a predictable order).
  • 3) “Difficulty is (usually) desirable” — (with the related point that making errors is usually desirable). One difficulty that isn’t desirable, however, is anxiety around performance. This comes out of Dweck’s research.

This is all difficult — a consequence of the fact that all of these strategies are difficult is that people don’t do it. They don’t challenge their recall, they don’t push into the areas they don’t know and so on, even after they’ve been specifically instructed in the ways that these strategies are more effective.

Kaptur encourages us to find ways to make effortful retrieval part of our everyday lives and work. This may mean you have to:

1. use a flashcard programme to test you
2. take guesses
3. be systematic about how you attack your problems. She is speaking in the context of programming, so she talks about debugging but it works for most problems. Have a hypothesis about what’s going wrong, and then tackle each part systematically.

She also suggests we find ways to implement spaced practice. The harder you work to retrieve a fact from your memory, the better this is for your grasp of that fact, so in the end while it feels horrible to test yourself on recall of materials you don’t know so well, it’s actually better for you.

With a growth mindset, errors are something to be welcomed (because they imply that there’s some sort of a feedback loop going on, from which you can, in turn, learn). Thus finding ways to get more feedback (about your writing, your code, etc) is to be encouraged.

Learning Without Seams

We’re often told to learn from others, to take (role) models and to emulate either the path they took, or some of the key lessons they learnt along the way. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to figure out how someone reached a particular goal, or they actively work to prevent you from seeing the struggle that took them there.

This is as much the case for sedentary pursuits like fiction writing as it is for active things like climbing. You can watch a video of someone like Alex Honnold, someone known for his lack of self-aggrandisement and who always seems to downplay the stakes of what he’s just done, and find it hard to see the work, the sweat, or the basic realities of what he did to reach this point. (In his case, years of practice/experience possibly combined with a disposition towards risk-taking.) His book was frustrating for exactly that reason: you had only a minimal sense of the stakes of what he did.

For fiction or many other kinds of rewriting, the whole work of editing, rewriting is more or less deliberately geared towards removing the friction, removing the sense that someone toiled to put this story together. As readers or consumers of stories, we don’t want to sense the seams, don’t want to be aware of how something was constructed. But as practitioners or artists, we need to see those seams to be able to learn our own craft.

So there’s a tension, and that tension instructive in helping you find good models. I’ve been trying to write more about my own failures on this blog so as to balance things out. Whenever I’m learning a new skill, I try to find different types of models. Firstly, people who have reached the heavens, who are trailblazers and who break new ground in their particular skill / discipline. Secondly, those who are a few steps behind, and who really have had to work to get there. It’s this second kind of model where you’re more likely to see the seams of their journey, and you’ll most likely be able to learn from them.

On Learning New Skills, #showyourwork and other housekeeping

Newly released from life under the PhD regime, I have been exploring new interests and indulging my curiosity down new pathways. Last time I wrote, I explained how I had taken to studying sharks and various aspects of conservation and marine biology. There was a certain amount of training around higher-level concepts in that course: in particular, on the scientific method, ways to problem-solve and so on, but in general the emphasis was on the material rather than specific skills.

I think that learning new skills -- expanding the lenses you have through which to view the world, or giving yourself more options for a variety of perspectives -- is an important part of becoming more useful. To that end, language learning was always an important part of getting to know any subject or place (either the implicit language of a particular domain, or the explicit language of a people or country).

Recently, I've taken to trying to expand my numeric and digital literacy. I've always been technically literate, at least to the extent that I was able to solve my problems, fiddle with code a little and play around with technical tools and programmes for which I have no formal training. That said, there is a wide gulf between that position and a more confident data literacy, where I can interpret things through the lens(es) of statistics, use tools to analyse what is going on and so on. I've always felt like this was a core weakness in my ways of understanding the world, so I'm now trying to address or remedy that.

My first step is to address the gaping holes. These are a mix of mathematics, statistics, probability as well as things like computational languages that will allow me to engage in these disciplines with more than a basic-level understanding. There is a fair amount of debate as to whether the name is useful or not, but for now, I'll state that I'm training myself in 'data science'.

I learn these kinds of skills best through a practice- and feedback-rich environment, so I'm taking a project-based approach to my studies. Khan Academy (what a resource!) is my mentor for mathematics, and Udacity (whose courses I've taken in the past and been very impressed by) is helping with the Python/coding aspect. Each skill group I learn is followed by a mini-project that allows me to use the skills in an applied context.

All of this is by way of introduction to what I really wanted to talk about today, which is a recent problem that I encountered while completing my coursework. The details don't matter that much, so I won't get into them, but suffice it to say for now that I was trying to write a python function that calculated the number of days between one date and another date.

One feature of coding that I find frustrating is the way loops (bits of code that repeat for as long as certain conditions remain met/unmet) can be included within loops, and sometimes maybe another set as well within the loop-within-a-loop. I'm new to this stuff, so this level of recursion (is that even the right word? I'm pretty sure recursion is used for something else) makes my brain hurt when I try to think about it too much. But think about it I must.

So there I was, with some broken bit of code, no idea how to move forward. The answer to the problem was just one click away, but I didn't want to just see the answer. I wanted to learn the thing that was absent. I wanted to learn how to get from my state of confusion to a state of understanding.

This seems to be a common enough problem in my new studies that I thought it might be useful to describe. You can explain the solution, at which point you understand how that particular problem was solved, but how do you improve the likelihood that you'll be able to solve a different problem in the future? Does looking at the solution help? Does spending a week staring at a piece of paper, wishing the solution to magically appear, help?

In the end, what I'm trying to get better at is problem-solving. As far as I've been able to read so far (in books like Sebastian Gutierrez's fantastic Data Scientists at Work), this skill is valued far above any specific skills like competence in one programming or computational language vs another. The specific languages can all be learnt. Getting better at solving problems, interviewees seem to constantly imply, that is much harder.

Which is where I am, trying to solve hard (hard for me, at least) problems.

My solution involved thinking about the problem more deliberately. Udacity hosts an online forum where students can post bits of code, questions etc. There's usually someone who answers the question within 24 hours. The emphasis is on finding new ways to think about problems rather than just providing the answer. So, teaching you how to fish instead of giving you a fish. That old chestnut.

I posted a question. In writing out the question, I was forced to be more deliberate in how I thought out the problem. By specifying the exact point where I saw something going wrong, I was forced to be more sequential, more methodical. I started to see new pathways forward to progress with the problem. I would then go off and work a bit more until I hit another roadblock, at which point I'd post a follow-up question. Then a bit more insight would follow the process of writing up the problem. Then a bit more work, another roadblock. You get the idea. I think I submitted 4 different questions/writeups in as many hours. By the end, I had thought my way out of the problem. Nobody needed to reply to my query; I had solved it myself.

This is quite a simple insight, in many ways: writing things down, making them concrete... these are things that help with the process of thought. Thought, taken out of the mushy-tissue-filled black box that is our brains and put on paper, is something that benefits from being methodical. I'd long known (at least, theoretically or implicitly) that writing helps thought. Every time I've worked on an essay or on a book, the process has clarified my thought in ways that wouldn't have been possible had I just remained satisfied with 'thinking' about things.

There are a bunch of small project ideas I have and want to use as ways of practising my new / fledgeling skills. I have certain data sets from my time in Afghanistan that I'd like to work with. There are other interests that I'd like to stimulate by applying this new tool / set of tools.

#showyourwork

This brings me neatly to my second point. I finished a book by Austin Kleon recently and it revolves around similar-ish ideas. Kleon talks about the importance of sharing the process of work as well as the work itself. He explains a bunch of the reasons why this is a smart idea, and he discusses various ways that you can enact this as a guiding practice going forward.

It reminded me that the last major learning experience I went through (not including languages or personal growth) was when I started travelling in and learning about Afghanistan. I was writing lots back then, either in emails to a group of friends and family, or later in blog form or in articles written for free for local magazines. (In my work for AfghanWire, too, I drafted a mini-encyclopedia of sorts, with entries for the important pieces of context (people, places, events). Researching all of that was a huge task, but looking back I'm certain that I learnt a lot through the process.)

The same thing happened when I started studying sharks, as I explained last time. I used twitter as a way of connecting with scholars and people who had already spent years studying the discipline. I used my podcast, Sources & Methods, to connect to at least one group (the Gills Club --> see the podcast here) and to connect to talk about that new interest.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I will be blogging more. Most blogs will not be as long as this, or previous posts. In the past, I would only consider it worth blogging if I had taken a week or few to gather together all the relevant insights to a particular topic or issue, but I'm not sure that's reasonable any more (thanks to Kleon's book) and I want to benefit from the power that comes from writing through problems on a more regular basis.

Housekeeping

I mentioned that I'm done with the PhD. So now the rest of my life starts. I haven't decided on the next step just yet, and there still some loops that need tying off. I have some research/report-writing to finish, a novel written last year during a fit of PhD-procrastination to edit/rework, and more to be done with my Jordanian colloquial Arabic.

One somewhat important development is that I'm moving to Amman (Jordan) this coming week. I'm not sure how long I'll be there, but consider it my base from now on. If you're ever passing through town, please do drop me a line.

My final piece of news is that Felix and I have signed a contract to work on a new book for Hurst (title and all other details TBC) which will be an anthology of Taliban writings/statements. It'll cover the whole gamut of their experience from the 1980s up until the present day. We'll be drawing from the materials of the Taliban Sources Project as well as other sources we've gathered along the way in previous years. I'm quite excited about the project, and it'll be an amazing resource once out. The problem for a lot of research, as I've mentioned before, is that the primary sources aren't used half as much as they ought. We hope this project will offer a corrective in this respect.

How to become a memorisation and language ninja

I’m very glad to be able to announce two new things I’ve been busy with over the past few months.

Firstly, I’m launching an email course showing how to learn long lists of items by heart. This course is outwardly directed towards Muslims, since the list that you learn over the course of a week, is a list of 99 Names of God — the so-called Asmaa ul-Husnaa. But the broad principles are the same for learning any long list of things, so don’t think you need to be a Muslim to take the course. The materials come with lots of handouts and supplementary information about memory and the like.

Note that this first course is part of something new I’m calling Incremental Elephant, a place where I can offer more courses related to memory, language-learning and productivity.

Secondly, as regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve been blogging about technology, productivity, language learning and the intersection between the three for several years. Along the way, I’ve fielded dozens of questions from readers about which programme to use for this or that scenario, or which textbook to use when starting out with language x or y. I’ve increasingly been taking on longer-term clients to coach through these issues, so I’m taking the opportunity now to announce officially that I offer one-on-one coaching for language learning or productivity-related issues.

The language you’re learning doesn’t need to be one that I already know, because my coaching is usually targeting the meta-issues of how you’re studying rather than what you’re studying.

I offer weekly or biweekly Skype coaching sessions. This will include a mix of reviews of work you did the past week, planning your studies for the coming week and brainstorming techniques to get you over specific problems that are preventing you from moving forward. (For example, I’ve recently been working with someone who has problems declining verbs, so we’ve been tackling that from several angles using a variety of techniques).

More news on the Ph.D. front in a few months, I hope, but for now, go check out the 99 Names course and get in touch if you would like to discuss working with me to improve how you go about learning languages.

UPDATE: I've written up a more extensive explanation of what one-on-one language coaching involves, and what kinds of problems it's best suited to tackling. Read more here.