Ask HN: How to learn new things better?

So in the spirit of new year's resolutions I'm planning to learn some new things this year; specifically, I want to to draw, and I want to at least get started learning Japanese. I'd also like to keep improving my skill at mahjong, which I picked up last year, and keep on learning tech-related things.

However, I find it pretty difficult to pick up new things. Learning to draw especially is pretty overwhelming for me; I have no idea how to start, as someone with no skill or experience in drawing whatsoever. Learning a language is also pretty intimidating, and it doesn't help that I find the usual way of learning languages (grinding flash cards) to be distinctly awful (not to mention I'm terrible at it).

As HN seems like a community where people love to learn new things, how do you guys go about things like these?

Tim Ferriss wrote a book on how to learn things fast. It's called 4 Hour Chef: https://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Chef-Cooking-Learning-Anything... He gives a lot of tips but it's up to you to test them out and see what works for you.

I've observed a couple of things about the way I learn and I think that these are pretty general

a.) Print is a lot better than digital.

b.) You shouldn't read books linearly. I generally jump around a lot and read a particular book several times. The first pass might take just an hour or two, I generally try to understand the structure of the book, create a scaffolding of sorts, I might get 15%. During the second pass I might try to get the next 30%. I should have a good idea of the concepts of the book, I might not be able to solve all the problems. In the next pass, get the next 30%. The fourth pass is optional if you really need to understand 100%. The best part is that a lot of times, you don't actually have to do all the passes, the first two might be enough.

The one thing I always hated about school is how you are forced to master each chapter 100% before moving forward. Sometimes going forward actually helps you understand previous chapters because it puts them in context.

c.) Highlighting helps me a bunch. Some people have the issue that they might end up highlighting too much. I don't highlight when it's all new to me, but only after I might have finished the chapter, I'll go back and think about what's important to highlight. It feels like the process of selecting what's important might be more important than the highlighting itself. But when you come back to it later, the highlighting definitely helps. Writing some notes with a pencil in the book is also good.

d.) More important than fully mastering all the material is making sure that you aren't bored or frustrated. If you can't move forward with something, give it some time, come back to it.

e.) Generally if I'm confused, doing a quick review pass from the very beginning of the book tends to clear things up a lot.

f.) Doing a "compare and contrast" between things that seem similar (or even if they don't) is usually a good way of strengthening some connections.

Btw, over the last couple of weeks, I've been trying to learn ML almost full-time. In the process, I think I managed to figure out what are the best resources for this and I'm in the process of setting up a website discussing what I've found. I started working on this yesterday so it's not quite ready yet. However, if you'd like to check out ML in 2017, I'm hoping to make the process a lot less painful. You can sign up here if you'd like to get notified when it's ready

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfnksZmz7oH9Vpjtxp1...

Check out Dr. Robert Bjork's page on desirable difficulties (https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research/).

Additionally, you need to write about whatever you're learning. Essays, reviews, whatever strikes your fancy. Learning really happens when you try to use the information.

With any new skill you need to be willing to sink a lot of time into it. And you need to be fine with being absolutely terrible at it in the beginning.

I usually tell people who want to learn to draw to go to http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/2009/12/preston-blair-le..., get the Preston Blair book, and start doing these exercises by master animator John K (creator of 'Ren & Stimpy'). You will get a lot better, a lot faster. These exercises focus on simple cartoon characters who wear a lot of their construction on the outside; once you can draw cartoon characters, you can keep drawing more of them if that's your thing, or you can build on top of that and start learning anatomy and drawing more complicated characters. (Or do both.)

There's other well-regarded drawing courses on the internet and someday I should probably pick a new one to send noobs to, what with John K kind of being an asshole - but I learnt a hell of a lot when I worked under him, and he is really good at teaching this stuff.

Most of what I know about drawing more complicated figures came from a combination of Bridgeman's "Constructive Anatomy" and Loomis' "Figure Drawing for All It's Worth", and a life drawing teacher who hewed very closely to Glen Vilppu's drawing manual. If you can fit some life drawing classes into your life then TAKE them, you will learn a ton.

Also: Make a space in your life to do this. I ride the bus a lot, and before the advent of smartphones, I'd have little to do to amuse myself besides stare out of the window, read a book, or pull my sketchbook out and draw. Maybe draw some idea floating around my head, maybe draw something I glimpsed out the bus window, maybe something based on my fellow passengers, maybe just some cubes, or the hand I wasn't drawing with. I got a lot of practice in without feeling like I was making myself "practice". Whatever you may be learning, if you regularly drop yourself into a time and place with nothing much to do besides the thing you wanna learn, then you'll do it more often.

Don't blow several hundred bucks on a ton of paints, or on pro software and a Wacom tablet. Just start with a few hardback sketchbooks and some pens and pencils. Oh, and not mechanical pencils. Just grab like a pack of Ticonderoga 2.5Bs, they're cheap and pretty good. And try holding them so that the side of the point addresses the paper for a lot of the beginning of your drawing; this will do several things for you:

* it will train you to keep your wrist fairly steady, and to draw more with your entire arm; keeping your wrist straight and steady will help keep the Carpal Tunnel Fairy away. * it will make your initial lines light, and prone to fade away as your hand brushes the paper; this keeps you from bearing down to gouge an impossible-to-erase line in the paper, and gives you more room to make mistakes before having a dark, illegible mess of lines you can't draw over.

Don't get lost in trying to save a drawing, either. Paper's cheap, turn the page and try the same subject again, or a new one.

When you make a picture you like, hang it over your drawing board, turn it into your computer's backdrop, and keep trying to draw something better than it. You may find yourself hating it because you start seeing all the mistakes. That's great - go draw something new that doesn't make those! (This may take many tries, some mistakes are harder to stop making than others.)

Don't worry about "your style". If someone points out a mistake in your drawing and you find yourself wanting to say "but that's my style!", then you are just covering up your weaknesses unless you can actually sit down and bust out a version of the drawing that Does It Right. When you can do that you can legitimately say "dis mah style". Steal stylizations from artists you love (you're looking at other people's art, right? A lot?), make your own based on reality.

You will find a lot of people declaring "rules" of drawing. Always do this, never do that. The truth of the matter (IMHO) is that all rules of art are actually just warnings: "never do this" really means "if you do this without thinking about what you're doing it'll probably turn out badly". Know the rules, know which ones you're breaking, and break the fuck out of them while staying well within the boundaries of the other rules you know.

(I spent a decade in the LA animation scene, then burnt out and draw comics now. If you wanna look at my work to decide if I'm someone who you should listen to in this, it's all at http://egypt.urnash.com)