Ask HN: How do you memorize things you read?

— especially if they're technical you don't use them regularly at work?

For example, I don't work in finance (got the degree but my grades were abysmal), but I have a great deal of interest in the field, so I bought the CFA and CAIA curriculum. As I read it I grasp it and answer provided problems with no difficulty. But when I return to the material a few months later, I may as well re-read the whole thing for the amount of detail I've retained.

I train myself to look things up in the manual quickly. For instance I use four programming languages regularly and sometimes have to use another. Sometimes I forget how I'm supposed to, say, look up the length of an Vector/List/array but it's OK because I can look it up in a few seconds.

When I do cardio at the gym I take my tablet and read technical documentation, frequently over and over again. The goal of that is not so much to memorize facts, but to become familiar with the landscape and to become very quick to look details up when I have to look them up.

I've yet to see a question in a data science interview that can't be answered with: (1) Look it up in the hashtable or (2) Look it up in the literature.

It's very hard to actually comprehend any technically challenging concept without being constantly exposed to it. The more challenging it is, the more time you're going to need so it become something like second nature to you.

Take up as many relevant projects as needed to master the underlying theoretic aspects of whatever you're interested in, whether that's in math or programming. Don't get frustrated if you get stuck somewhere. You can always take a break and jump back to take a better look to any helpful readings to better understand some concept you may have missed earlier. Just make sure you're already pretty familiar with the very fundamentals first (e.g. don't expect good progress on a machine learning course without being already familiar with linear algebra - probability fundamentals.)

I usually need to find "usable" ways of introducing the subject I'm studying in my day-to-day life.

As for finance, eg. I'd try to read Economy mags more often, and try to explain to myself just "what the actual hell" they're saying.

This method can be very challenging when you're starting on something, but by the time (two weeks) you get to know "just enough" you'll be flying through the news, and then you can get to scientific papers on the subjects that you have interest on.

For programming, my way for it is exactly the same, but without newspapers and articles: just try to approach everything in a specific mindset.

Recently I started learning how to speed read with the help of an app that quickly flashes a few words at a time.

This type of reading has forced me to re-think how I memorize or even check that I've understood something.

My current process is to stop at the end of a chapter and re-cap what I've learnt and id necessary check by reading in normal mode.