How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

> That’s a shame, because it’s the most effective way to build your skills.

this is just not true. blocked practice (i.e. practicing the same task repeatedly) is generally worse for long-term retention than mixed practice strategies where you vary the practice conditions or interleave different tasks in practice

e.g. if you go through 100 problems of 2 digit multiplication, you will probably have worse retention than if you went through 10 of those problems, then 10 division problems, then 5 word problems, then 10 3 digit multiplication problems, and so on, equating practice time

drilling _feels_ like a really effective way to learn because you do better at it and quickly develop muscle memory or mental shortcuts, but your performance on practice tasks is really not a good signal of your actual learning or retention.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275355435_Learning_...

That's more of a reflection on the people doing the teaching than the style of teaching itself I think. This is purely anecdotal but I absolutely hated most of my pre-university education as it felt like jumping through completely meaningless hoops. I'll still happily practice scales or musical fragments by rote on my guitar for hours on end though, and this is a very effective method for me. It took me a long time to figure out I actually love learning, it's just that there's a lot more to learning than the industrial-style process that goes on in the average British comprehensive.

If a person's approach to educating their kids is coercive ("jump through our hoops or you'll be working at McDonalds your entire life") or downright abusive ("you're a worthless child to us if you don't meet this grade") then the results can be catastrophic. For every success story, this kind of maltreatment will produce many people who give up on learning altogether or drive themselves headfirst into mental illness. I definitely think history will judge this period as a bit of a dark age in education, the fact that people who've long retired still report exam nightmares says a lot about the completely arbitrary and needless pressure we put our children under.

In my experience being "well-spoken" (ie having an accent that's fairly close to RP) and being quick at picking things up has served me far better than any qualifications I have, both in the tech industry and out of it.

> Now they are ubiquitous

They were saying that back in the day as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Johnny_Can%27t_Add

>Have you learned Chinese?

Yes, and still am. Not really active anymore since I'm busy with other things. I don't read much, but I can read a book, albeit slow and with much difficulty. Writing I do even less, and handwriting I never really did apart from tests and filling in forms. Speaking and listening I do every day. After a while I just decided to not focus really much on handwriting because it easily takes the most effort for something I actually barely use.

I've played a bit with memory palaces for fun and found them to be effective, but really not for Chinese Characters. I mostly used my own flashcards with Anki. I used pictures and tone colored characters to help. That worked fine, but making the flashcards also took a lot of time so it wasn't really perfect either. Having many synonyms also complicates the whole ordeal. But overall spaced repetition really, really helps with managing lots of vocabulary. You can have a deck of several thousands of words without too many issues. If you find words hard to remember it's also OK to just delete them (Anki also helps with this by automatically labeling cards you often fail as leech).

The mnemonics I use are the "build in" ones in the characters, maybe you already do this by yourself and actively learning them won't change too much. Nearly all characters have some meaning and/or pronunciation component hidden in them which can help you remembering them, or guessing their meaning or sound when you first encounter them.

I don't really think about radicals since those are just arbitrarily chosen components used only for paper dictionaries (and who wants to use those in the age of smartphones...). Some random examples of interesting components: 疒, is a character that is not used anymore (I think) but it means disease and if any character has this component you can be very sure it's some kind of disease.

月 is a tricky one. It's moon and it often really doesn't make sense in words until you know that 肉 is often corrupted into 月. The 月 in 脑 doesn't mean moon but meat/flesh.

Some characters change depending on where they appear as components: 水/氵, 人/亻.

I like to use the Outlier Linguistic Dictionary on Pleco for looking up how characters are build up and see if it can help me remembering the character. I find little stories help me to remember words/characters. A character I forgot how to write and just looked up: 虹 (rainbow). It' made of the component snake/insect/worm because the ancient Chinese thought it looked like a snake in the sky. 工 is there for sound because gong/hong sound similar. Or 取 (take/get/fetch), it's literally a hand taking an ear.

I don't think mnemonics is the One Easy Trick that will make your routine 10x more efficient, but depending on how you learn now it could really boost your efficiency. If you're not using any form of spaced repetition yet I think that really could be it.

The will to do the drill will bring the willingness to execute.

I am not a painter but I followed a pure drill approach to teach html/css/javascript to 12 of my operations/monitoring team members (11 males 1 female, aged 24-27) who lost their job during start of Covid.

None of them had any background in programming or engineering, 3 of them dropped out after two weeks.

All those who went through the drill got jobs as developers. 7 as react developers, 1 test automation and 1 script developer.

All I did was ensure the drill and motivate them not to give up. They were all from very poor families so the motivation part was easy - hope of a better life at the end of drill.

The mantra is, don’t fool yourself, type it, clock the hours and don’t miss the meeting.