The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition

TL;DR: Study foundational blocks by repeating then until you understand. Keep repeating as you build knowledge and move to "harder" things.

I like the message, but not the messenger.

Articles like this, in my point of view, fail to delivery their messages in a better way because they are simply too long and with too much noise for my taste.

The point he is trying to get across could be explained in a simpler way without the necessity of explaining how he went to the army, what he did there and all his personal history.

All this information is completely irrelevant to the main goal of the article and turn it into a boring story instead of useful piece of practical advice.

Some people extoll the virtues of long-form writing. But even a site like HN is far too information dense to spend so much time reading one article. It's a different matter when we're learning something of an academic nature, of course. That's why I love summaries such as yours.

Important to note that repetitions are never exactly the same: new connections are found each time.

Also, choosing what to repeat seems important. Drilling in what is already understood may help you become a good teacher but how does one develop new and original ideas?

> What I had done in learning Russian was to emphasize not just understanding of the language, but fluency. Fluency of something whole like a language requires a kind of familiarity that only repeated and varied interaction with the parts can develop. Where my language classmates had often been content to concentrate on simply understanding Russian they heard or read, I instead tried to gain an internalized, deep-rooted fluency with the words and language structure. I wouldn’t just be satisfied to know that понимать meant “to understand.” I’d practice with the verb—putting it through its paces by conjugating it repeatedly with all sorts of tenses, and then moving on to putting it into sentences, and then finally to understanding not only when to use this form of the verb, but also when not to use it.

Wow, what great timing. I remember reading this article when it was originally published (apparently in Sept. 2014) and I believe I read it because it made the HN front page back then. It's changed the way I think about teaching, especially technical skills to non-technical students.

The best students I've had so far are ones who are pretty smart and hard-working already, but by and large, they are also the ones who follow my advice to type out code by hand, run it, change it, repeat, break it, several times. And to memorize a few essential keyboard shortcuts (Tab for auto complete, Cmd-Tab for window switching, etc) so that the work of retyping and debugging code itself is much more frictionless.

Unfortunately, and understandably, most college students aren't thrilled with the idea of repetitive practice makes perfect (or at least, makes learning the important concepts much easier). This year I'm going to do a lot more testing involving writing code with pen and paper, on the theory that if you can actually write out code by hand, then you probably know the fundamental patterns (I'm talking fundamental, as in a common for-loop) essential for higher programming.

edit: One thing I should point out; this doesn't make me right but I do dogfood this approach myself when learning any new programming language. I'll write out a tutorial. Then write it the way I think it should work. If I'm half distracted, I'll write it backwards. The thing is, I'm an experienced enough programmer to know that taking the extra time to know how things work is always worth it in programming, because of how insignificant the work of physically writing code is compared to actual programming. Non-programmers do not realize this and approach it as if they were asked to write 20 pages about Hamlet, and then 20 pages about Hamlet using different adjectives.

A lot of people connect with concepts via story-telling. Life lessons aren't always learned by just consuming a stream of facts. And facts themselves aren't inherently valuable. A good story helps some readers filter what applies to them and what does not.