Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by sreyaNotfilc » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

fidla wrote: post #27

This is bad advice for people wanting to learn a musical instrument. It takes way more than 20 hours because much of what you do when you play say the mandolin has to become automatic in order for you to do it well. There are no shortcuts.

I think every advice can be malleable. Just getting started and seeing some results (whether its 20 hours, or 2000 hours) is what matters.

I would say after 20 hours is a good sample size and that you should have a good indication on -

1. Where your skill level really is

2. What your current aptitude for learning said skill

3. How you feel about learning the skill and potentially going forward

4. Where you would like to go next to further push that skill

From there you may revise the course that you're on (add or reduce the time invested).

For me, I do like having 45 mins chunk of time to work through a problem. Its give me time to understand the goal, and get invested. 45 mins tends to fly by so you're not fatigued afterwards. Then you can rest and reflect.

That's how I'm handling my trumpet work (learning scales and songs).

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

#32

Post by btown » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #21

james_s_tayler wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is the system you wrote for this open-source? Sounds really really interesting.

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

#33

Post by paulcole » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

jammygit wrote: post #23

paulcole wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I think it was Gladwell (shocker) who shoehorned himself into the concept and made up the 10,000 hour rule.

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

#34

Post by james_s_tayler » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

jammygit wrote: post #22

james_s_tayler wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, roughly 2 ~ 4 years. Call it 3. That's how I tend to think about skill acquisition.

Just personal experience of getting good at things over the years. It's a rough model and I'm happy for people to disagree if they want but the numbers aren't hard and fast they're more of a ballpark hueristic.

It's sort of a 4-tier order-of-magnitude pattern I suppose.

X0 hours (low hanging fruit)

X00 hours (pain period)

X000 hours (personal mastery)

X0,000 hours (world-class mastery)

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

#35

Post by mikestew » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

fidla wrote: post #27

This is bad advice for people wanting to learn a musical instrument. It takes way more than 20 hours because much of what you do when you play say the mandolin has to become automatic in order for you to do it well. There are no shortcuts.

This is bad advice for people wanting to learn a musical instrument

This is amazingly good advice for those learning their first musical instrument. Because casual observation tells me that nearly no one spends that kind of time on an instrument starting out. If one spends 45 minutes a day practicing (not noodling) on an instrument for a month, I don’t think sounding reasonably decent on a tiny set of tunes can be avoided. Rhonda Vincent won’t be inviting you on stage for a mandolin duet, but you won’t embarrass yourself in front of friends.

Now, getting good? Well, yeah, that’s going to be that same 45 minutes a day for the next ten years. But after twenty hours I think one would earn the right to call themselves a mandolin player.

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

#36

Post by yorwba » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 6:36 PM UTC

btown wrote: post #32

yorwba wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is the system you wrote for this open-source? Sounds really really interesting.

I started working on it about 4 months ago and have been dog-fooding it since, but it's still in a pretty rough state.

Part of the problem is the quality of open-source language analysis tools. I use Open JTalk for text-to-speech on examples without available recordings (which is most of them) and sometimes it gets the pronunciation plain wrong. So I use a different program (Kuromoji) to get a written representation of the pronunciation, which it also frequently gets wrong but (hopefully) at different times than Open JTalk.

The other problem is that so far I've been the only user, and many things that should be configurable aren't (I expect the constantly looping audio to be high on the list of things people would want to change).

That said, if you're interested, I could write up a minimal readme file, slap on a license and push it to GitHub.

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

#37

Post by james_s_tayler » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 7:06 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #21

james_s_tayler wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I used the Kanji Odessy 2001 Anki deck back in the day when you could get your hands on it. It was 2000 sentences with audio ordered such that each sentence followed the n+1 model. Hands down the best resource.

It still takes a few hundred hours to get through the pain period.

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

#38

Post by StrictDabbler » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

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.

All you need to explain that is two phrases:

"So..."

and

"It turns out..."

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

#39

Post by imtringued » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 1:42 AM UTC

fidla wrote: post #27

This is bad advice for people wanting to learn a musical instrument. It takes way more than 20 hours because much of what you do when you play say the mandolin has to become automatic in order for you to do it well. There are no shortcuts.

Nobody who wants to learn a skill wants to master it in 20 hours. The entire point of this article is that the 10000 hours number is a red herring.

Spending every single day learning something is the exact opposite of a shortcut, it requires a huge amount of discipline. 20 hours spread over 30 days should be more than enough to turn someone who doesn't know what a mandolin is into a novice mandolinist who knows what further steps he has to take to get better.

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

#40

Post by imtringued » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 1:47 AM UTC

james_s_tayler wrote: post #37

yorwba wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I used the Kanji Odessy 2001 Anki deck back in the day when you could get your hands on it. It was 2000 sentences with audio ordered such that each sentence followed the n+1 model. Hands down the best resource. It still takes a few hundred hours to get through the pain period.

I think there is a Japanese Core 2000 deck which is of a similar nature.