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Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month

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Re: Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month

#21

Post by yorwba »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #13
ArcMex wrote: post #11

I learned to recognize hiragana and katakana like this. But learning the language itself took me a lot more time and effort. Had to practically immerse myself in Japanese 24/7.

I smashed out Hiragana in 4 hours flat. Learning the rest of the language took 3 years. I do love the obvious wisdom that if you put a little bit of active effort as opposed to just passive consumption that you can build a skill and not just consume things. It's like those low hanging fruit are good but you're still in pain for another 180 hours until you've done your first 200 hours. That's usually when things start…

> you're still in pain for another 180 hours until you've done your first 200 hours. That's usually when things start to get sustainably enjoyable because you know enough to not be constantly frustrated and can actually have fun no matter the remaining difficulty.

You can get there a bit earlier by carefully adjusting your practice difficulty to be closer to your comfort zone than the "real" skill you want to tackle and then slowly raising the bar as you get better.

For example, I wouldn't be able to understand any random Japanese sentence someone could throw at me right now, but I built a system to pick sentences from https://tatoeba.org that I should be able to understand based on the words they contain, and it's been very encouraging to notice how much I can understand already. The only problem being that I haven't found a good selection criterion yet. Optimizing for highest probability that I need to refresh at least one of the words in a sentence tends to produce very long "sentences", e.g. https://tatoeba.org/sentences/show/4752008

Re: Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month

#22

Post by jammygit »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #14
mossplix wrote: post #2

10,000 hours is for mastery not just learning

Well it's likely a little more complicated than that. Either way my model is 20, 200, 2000. Those are 3 milestones (roughly) where you progress through different phases. Going on about 10,000 hours for skills isn't meaningful for most people because almost no one will use that info to decide "this only takes 10,000 hours I think I'll master it." It only applies to the people who don't need the advice because they're…

2000 / 20/WK = 100 weeks, or approx 2 years of part time hobby work. That's not too bad.

Where does the 2000 hour number come from BTW? I haven't seen it before.

Re: Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month

#23

Post by jammygit »

paulcole wrote: post #10
karmakaze wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10,000 hours checks out. At 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, that's 4.8 years to master say a technology, language, or software stack.

Very convenient that it’s a nice round number.

Erickssons original number was more like 10 years of daily deliberate practice increasing drom 0.5 to a max of 4/hours per day iirc for experienced people. It was roughly observational based on violinists and pianists. The original paper was interesting.

Re: Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month

#24

Post by ndnxhs »

backpropaganda wrote: post #15

The main bottleneck to learning new skills is access to good feedback from experts or coaches, not time.

This is why I am learning tech stuff at light speed but music theory is painfully slow. I have experts everywhere at work who can point me in the right direction and give feedback but when learning stuff totally on my own it can be hard to work out what I should even work on or if I am aproching something in the right way.

When I first started teaching myself programming I wasted ages on pointless things that didn't get me anywhere.

Makes me wonder if there would be value in a cheaper form of university where instead of going through the whole process you just get access to experts you can talk to and ask your dumb questions.

I know there are a lot of places on the internet where you can ask questions but they tend to cater to experts only because most people don't like answering beginner questions that get asked 100 times unless they are paid to.

Re: Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month

#25

Post by backpropaganda »

ndnxhs wrote: post #24
backpropaganda wrote: post #15

The main bottleneck to learning new skills is access to good feedback from experts or coaches, not time.

This is why I am learning tech stuff at light speed but music theory is painfully slow. I have experts everywhere at work who can point me in the right direction and give feedback but when learning stuff totally on my own it can be hard to work out what I should even work on or if I am aproching something in the right way. When I first started teaching myself programming I wasted ages on pointless things that didn't…

I really wish there was a platform to find top experts and ask them questions. Surprisingly enough, Twitch is one such channel. Jonathan Blow streams there some times, and I've asked him a lot of questions to which he gives detailed responses, because the question and answer is useful for all the viewers, and not a waste of his time, because it gives them a way to connect to their fans. Twitch is not meant for this though, and for instance, has no easy way to refer people to questions already answered, etc. But I think such a platform (video stream + text questions) with some modifications can provide this type of platform we're looking for.

Re: Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month

#26

Post by growlist »

baxtr wrote: post #6

There was a time when I just loved TED talks. That has changed. I am not so sure why. But I think I got the feeling the insights I’m getting are not worth the time spent.

This pretty much sums up my thoughts about TED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s

Re: Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month

#28

Post by fidla »

colechristensen wrote: post #8
baxtr wrote: post #6

There was a time when I just loved TED talks. That has changed. I am not so sure why. But I think I got the feeling the insights I’m getting are not worth the time spent.

TED talks are infotainment. Pornography for people whose vice is feeling like they've been inspired and gotten smarter. In short, they ring false. It feels like you're learning something, but the lesson plan was devised by a marketing department for the idea. It feels like the primary motivation is how good of a story can be told, and not the actual truth. "Popular science" in all its forms – sucks. Leading people to…

There are still interesting talks...you have to weed through them though. David Byrne gave a talk about the history of acoustics which I found fascinating.

Re: Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month

#29

Post by baxtr »

growlist wrote: post #26
baxtr wrote: post #6

There was a time when I just loved TED talks. That has changed. I am not so sure why. But I think I got the feeling the insights I’m getting are not worth the time spent.

This pretty much sums up my thoughts about TED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s

Hilarious!

Re: Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month

#30

Post by gerbilly »

baxtr wrote: post #6

There was a time when I just loved TED talks. That has changed. I am not so sure why. But I think I got the feeling the insights I’m getting are not worth the time spent.

TED talks have been coopted into a promotional venue for 'clever people'.

It's an advertising platform aimed at a certain demographic: people who like science and tech and just so explanations for things.

I did however enjoy Rodney Mullen's talk immensely: https://www.ted.com/talks/rodney_mullen_pop_an_ollie_and_inn...

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