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By rewriting the material, you are recoding it. You are forcing yourself to think about the information differently: what you are doing is explaining it to yourself. This to me is far more effective than something like highlighting, because in rewriting that material, you are also clarifying your understanding.
One of the most successful methods I've found for me is to rewrite the material. I haven't seen anyone suggest this yet. By rewriting the material, you are recoding it. You are forcing yourself to think about the information differently: what you are doing is explaining it to yourself. This to me is far more effective than something like highlighting, because in rewriting that material, you are also clarifying your u…
One of the most successful methods I've found for me is to rewrite the material. I haven't seen anyone suggest this yet. By rewriting the material, you are recoding it. You are forcing yourself to think about the information differently: what you are doing is explaining it to yourself. This to me is far more effective than something like highlighting, because in rewriting that material, you are also clarifying your u…
Speaking from experience. when I stopped using a third language and learned a fourth, the third is now almost gone, replaced by the new language that took its place while first and second languages that are in constant use were not affected.
One of the most successful methods I've found for me is to rewrite the material. I haven't seen anyone suggest this yet. By rewriting the material, you are recoding it. You are forcing yourself to think about the information differently: what you are doing is explaining it to yourself. This to me is far more effective than something like highlighting, because in rewriting that material, you are also clarifying your u…
Our memory is structured so that we forget things at an exponential rate (exp(-a t)). The better we remember things, the smaller the coefficient (a). You can look around for pictures of "forgetting curves" [1].
The idea is that for new knowledge, the coefficient (a) is large, so you need to refresh your memory sooner. As you retain the knowledge (the coefficient gets smaller), you can wait longer before you need to refresh your memory. The exact coefficient is going to be dependent on the person, the type of knowledge (for the person), the context in which it's learned etc. etc.
A simple way to do this without flash card applications is to try to recall the information you've learned periodically. Can you recall it after a day? A week? A month? If you can't, go back to the information and relearn it, and try again, making sure to do active recall to refresh your memory.
Another trick is to try to explain the knowledge you've learned to someone else, or pretend you're trying to explain it to someone else, if you don't want to subject your friends to it. Often times a "why" will come up or some piece of it will seem arbitrary that you won't be able to explain, which is a good signal that there's a concept you've missed and need to review to understand it more deeply.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
[1] https://elitemedicalprep.com/what-is-spaced-repetition-and-w...
I have a "trick". My native language is not english. 99.9% of what i read is in english. Comprehension for me is also slow when just reading(at least once). Memory, as i found out, works if you connect new knowledge to existing knowledge. Usually, when i read and understand something to the point of the "aha" moment is not sufficient. Just understanding something in that moment is not enough for storing in long term…
Any material which is worth knowing, but that will not become part of a routine (i.e coding patterns or structures that would be used everyday) which would enforce the learning through repetition will need to be reviewed/used/consumed at regular artificial interval instead.
I've had a personal wiki for years, and moved to Obsidian.md two years ago. Content that I find usefull or worth keeping is broken down and rewritten into my wiki.
Here it is important to note that simply copy pasting long form text from a source does not work as well as writing the content in your own style. Writing it down, and having to reason about the content as I am doing so helps me retain it for longer.
I then have a list of content that I review at regular intervals (weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, 3/5 years). These are simply links within my wiki.
The tricky part here is to not overload your future self. Sure I can write down pages and pages of information and just expect future me to consume it. But in reality I know there is a limit.
1. Have a habit to review 10 flashcards in Readwise [0] every day 2. As I read, stash snippets of interesting things into Readwise 3. If there are bigger insights I want to digest, I take notes using Dendron [1] and link those insights into other things I'm studying
Eventually, I want to integrate my markdown notes in Dendron with Readwise so that it's easy to block out something I want to review with Readwise in my notes, and for that to automatically show up in Readwise.
I tend not to memorize in that way. Reading gives me a basic familiarity with a topic and, more importantly, helps me understand where to find information when I need it. If I use a piece of technical information regularly, I'll just keep looking it up until exposure fixes it in my memory. However, if it's something I do need to remember and can't look up, spaced repetition tools like Anki are helpful. You should pro…
I absolutely don't memorise things on purpose. I just use them, and try to remember where to look them up again.
Memorisation is a fancy tricky that doesn't gain you that much over knowing where to find the answer.