Immersion

The idea is that you pick up key words and phrases first, and then learn the grammar like a kid, unconsciously in the process. Ideally students learn the language through intensive exposure to it in a context that makes sense. So, for example, if you learn Italian, you better do so in Pizzeria. Your the teacher the can explain you the menu, you can start to discuss the wines and after the espresso review the dishes.

Immersion is commonly associated with the Berlitz, a language school that stopped using grammar textbooks long time ago. When Maximilian Berlitz started his school and was in need of an assistant French instructor in 1978; he employed a Frenchman only soon to discover that Joly barely spoke English, and was hired to teach French to English speakers in their native language.

Shadowing

Shadowing is a technique in which subjects repeat speech immediately after hearing it (usually through earphones). The reaction time between hearing a word and pronouncing it can be as short as 250 ms, which is only the delay duration of a speech syllable. The audio is usually accompanies by a manual of bilingual texts. The technique was developed by famous language learner Alexander Arguelles, who speaks over 50 languages.

Scriptorium

With Scriptorium students write the language while simultaneously speaking it out loud. While doing so students should (1) read a sentence aloud, (2) say each word aloud again as you write it and then (3) read the sentence aloud as you have written it. The purpose of this exercise is to force yourself to slow down and pay attention to detail and then review unknown words or refresh your grammar.

Mnemonic

The idea is to match the unfamiliar (what we want to remembered) with the familiar (what we already know). You use this for learning vocabulary by creating an association in your mind that makes it easy to remember. For example, lets say you wanted to remember the French word “chou”, which means “cabbage” in English. “Chou” is pronounced like “shoe” in English, so you could imagine yourself putting on cabbages on your feet instead of shoes. Then, when you need to remember “cabbage”, your brain will think “cabbage -> shoes -> chou”.

Drown Yourself to Swimming

Most people are not in the position to apply this technique, but if you can and really want to learn the language go for it. Drown Yourself to Swimming means leave the comfort of your home and go to the place where they speak the language and then live there and try not to speak any other language until you’ve learned the new one. It might take 6-12 month, but if you manage not falling back to a familiar language and actively search for conversations with locals, you will indeed learn it fast.

Habits are driven by our believes and consists of 3 elements: cue, routine, and reward. For example if you believe that emails need to be answered within 24 hours, the habits sequence most likely looks like that:

1. Cue: an email you receive
2. Routine: you answer it immediately
3. Reward: the pleasure you get from pressing the send button

You can change your habit if you change your reaction to the cue that triggers it. In order to do that, you need to alter your believes about the habit itself and create rewards for the new anticipated reaction.

So if you want to reduce your time spend on emails, say your new believe is that a research project you are working on is more important, then change the cue. You could for example set your email client to receive message only once a day, change the notification setting or create a different user on your computer for emails so you are required to logout and login to check your mails. Once you have changed the cue, you will experience a new routine.

To support and strengthen the new habit, make sure you put good rewards in place. If your new project is a long and enduring research paper which does not give you instant pleasure (there is not send button), you could use a timer that rings every half an hour to give yourself 5 minutes snack brakes.

Visit Scientific American and find lots of fun and interesting experiments that you can do at home, such as extracting the DNA out of a Banana.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/find-the-dna-in-a-banana-bring-science-home/

Arguably the most natural and powerful form of learning is through experience, or more precise through reflection on doing and feedback.

By the age of one, we all had a long and painful encounter with Experiential Learning when we tried to walk and then failed, felled and cried like a baby… And even though this was a unpleasant and discouraging exercise going on for weeks, we all made it. Without a teacher, how-to youtube videos or new-age self-help literature.

Because as soon as the first shock was over and we were sitting up again, our brain unconsciously started to make sense of all information available to track down how this embarrassing failure could have occurred. It remembers that by the time we pushed ourselves up, everything was fine. The feet on the floor, the arms in position, the head and shoulders up right. Ready to go!

It was the moment when the Gluteus Maximus muscles in our upper left leg pulled the feet 12.3% towards the front in an angle of 23 degrees and the left arm did not compliment the movement, that the ventricles in the inner ear responsible for static balance got confused for a second. When in the same moment the cat ran by our eyes sent an alarming signal to your hippocampus and we completed lost it… Outch!

Sound confusing? Well, unconsciously this analysis of the relationship of various events within our body or in the external environment happens all the time as we learn to walk, talk, kiss, function in the office or dance the salsa with our grandma at the wedding of our older brother. Once we understood what went wrong, we know what we need to change when we try next time.

Experiential Learning can also done in a more conscious manner to learn a specific skill or just become better at what we already love doing.

• First get yourself into a situation to experience
• After the experience is over, reflect on what happened
• Then try to understand the relationship of what happened and form an abstract concept - if I do A, then I receive B
• Last, decide what to do differently next time

For example if you want to learn how to ride a bicycle, its pretty like the that the following will happen:

• If you get onto a bike and start kicking the paddles you are afraid of the speed. You therefore ride so slow that you fall to the side.
• After you remember that you fell at the exact moment when speed was the slowest
• You create an abstract thought linking speed to stability
• Last, you decided to ride faster next time

Lets try again:

• This time you ride fast. In fact, so fast that you crash straight into the next fruit stall.
• You head hurts and you realize that speeding like that was really dangerous.
• You create the next abstract thought: speed needs protection
• This time you decide to wear a helmet next time you give it a try.

Top football clubs use Experiential Learning after each game and smart companies as soon as a new product was launched when right after the team gets together, analyses what happened and decide what to do different next time.

If you are all by yourself and you are learning something where instant feedback doesn’t come painfully, make sure you have someone that can gives you a second opinion on a regular basis. For young entrepreneurs that can be a mentor, for upcoming journalists the readers of their blog and for English students a friend at school or the teacher.

A Memory Palace uses visualization to organize and recall information. Its like building a palace with many rooms and in every room you can place one item. By combining each items with a location, you can later recall them by mind-walking through your palace.

Memory champions like Johannes Mallow who can remember 132 events and their dates in just five minutes or Ben Pridmore who managed to recall 4,140 digits of binary numbers - strings of numbers consisting of 1 and 0 - claim to use this technique.

For example if you want to remember how to make pancakes, try to place each ingredient in a specific location inside your apartment - milk at the entrance, eggs in the bedroom etcetera etcetera. By doing this, be as specific as possible and ideally link it to a little story. Lets give it a try…

1. After a day of hard work, you are coming home into your 7 room apartment (there are 7 ingredients) hungry to make 8 pancakes for you and your friends.

2. You already purchased flour on the way home, but now you need to check if you have all the rest of the ingredients. As soon as you enter the apartment you place the two cup of flour on the sideboard at the entrance.

3. On the living room floor you see the two cups of milk - almost full. Great!

4. In the corner of the big bedroom are two massive eggs cracked open watching TV - how weird!

5. You then walk into the small bedroom. Two teaspoons of baking power are peacefully sleeping in the bed.

6. You walk into the bathroom. A quarter cup of butter has melted on the floor. Be careful its slippery.

7. You try to get out on the balcony, but its full of sugar cane. It’s enough to make 3 teaspoons of sugar from it.

8. You walk through the entire apartment into the kitchen. Its empty. All you see is some white salt on the wooden table - exactly one teaspoon and thats all you need.

Now try it yourself: Close your eyes and place the 7 items in your own house. Then walk through your virtual apartment to imagine what is where. After try to explain someone else, or just say it out loud, what you need to make pancakes to test your memory. If you fail, do it again.

Tips and Notes:

• The funnier and graphic the images are that you imaging the more likely you can remember them.
• Neuroscientists and creativity experts argue that memory enhancement is great because the more you wire and re-write your brain with memory the more complex and intervening your synopsis get. This leads to higher creativity as when you switch into your defused thinking mode, you have more space in your brain to bounce an idea around.

Play Ping Pong between your focused and diffused mode of thinking to tricker creative thoughts and deepen your learning experience.

To learn something new, you can divide it into chunks. Those mini chunks can then be learned individually and once mastered your brain can fuse those small chunks into one larger more complex one - like building a lego world by starting with one room.

To form effective chunk follow these steps:

1. Before you start, figure out the main framework of what you want to learn. For example when you study the war between Japan and America, make yourself familiar with the basics of World War II. One way to do that is skipping through a school book looking just at headlines and images before you start with a specific chapter. Another is to watch a movie about the war. A basic understanding of the subjects later acts like a superglue to attach the chunks in your brain.

2. Once you are familiar with the overview, it's time to focus on specific concept. Now you should not be doing anything besides learning that chunk. For your most focused learning mode you need your full capacity of your working memory and therefore you need to focus and avoid procrastination (the Pomodoro Technique might help). After you are done, test if you have learned the chunk.

3. The probably most effective way to test your learning is recall. In order to do that, try to repeat the material just thereafter you have studied it. You can do that by summarising the information in your own words, explaining the material to a friend, speak it out loud as if you were teaching it or by applying the concept in a different environment and creating graphic analogies. Only go on to the next chunk if you can successfully recall the current one.

4. Once you have mastered the small chunk of the subject, repeat the study of the underlying context, the big picture. Now all the mini-chunks will cluster together and create a strong network of interconnected synapses that will allow better recall, a deeper understanding and increase your potential for creativity.

Tips and Notes:

• Use Spaced Repetition or what I call "sleep and repeat" to improve your learning outcomes. The technique advocates to deliberately break up the study of a certain concept into short chunks by setting a clear start- and quitting time. Once done with a daily dose of study, you stop and repeat the next day. During the sleep your synopsis will form new connections that increase recall of the learned material.

• It is important to note that the process of working out the solution for a problem, is what creates the learning. So if you just look at a solution and go “oh sure, I would have figured that out” then you don’t learn it, thats just a common illusion of competence in learning.

Remember when somebody tells you that you need to a have a clear goal in order to achieve something or get better? According to this learning technique, the exact opposite is true. One key insight to mastering a skill is to focus on the process of learning that skill rather than the the learning outcome itself - the product.

So for example if you want to become great at surfing, instead of setting a goal to become a national champion, you should focus on the process of surfing itself. The best surfers are not those that train to win a prize, but those that engage with the waves every day, because they found a way to enjoy the process - its sunny, the water is not too cold, they do it with friends.

In an often cited design experiment from pottery-making teacher split the class into two groups: the first group was to focus on making as many clay pots as they could in the hour; the second group was to focus on making the highest quality clay pot within the hour. At the end, the teacher would grade them and announce a winner. It was clear that the highest quality pot made was from the group who focused on quantity instead of those with the goal in mind to make the best pod.

Here some tips to make process learning easier:

1. Find a process that suits your character and learning style, so that you can enjoy the time spend studying or at least make it more bearable. There is no point to study if you feel sleepy, bored or are in an environment where you cannot focus.

2. Set a fixed study time in which you just focus on the material without trying to reach a certain learning goal, then stop. The next day continue. Its important to set a fixed quitting time (say after 25 minutes). This will give you a clear reward when you are done (time for fun!) and therefore increases the chance that you study again the next day.

3. To maximise your learning outcome, study short but often. Neuroscientist argue that synapses grow at night which means that spaced repetition, the act of regular studies with sleeping breaks in between each session, is far more effective than to study long hours on one single day.

4. If you have trouble to focus or tend to procrastinate (e.g. switch from doing something hard like studying math to something easy like browsing the web), try to protect you from any distraction. You might want to be at a quite place, use headphones or apply the Pomodoro Technique (a timer) to help focus for chunks of 25 minutes before you stop to relax.

5. Eat your frogs first thing in the morning - do tasks that are especially difficult first. In the morning you likely will have the most will power. And always remember its progress not the product of learning that will lead to success!

Please let us know what you think and leave a comment in the section below.

เทคนิคการเรียนรู้ของไฟยน์แมน เป็นเทคนิคที่มีประสิทธิภาพสำหรับการเรียนรู้เนื้อหาใหม่ ทำความเข้าใจในส่ิงที่รู้อยู่แล้วให้ลึกซึ้งยิ่งขึ้น หรือเมื่อต้องเตรียมตัวอ่านหนังสือสอบ

อันดับแรก เริ่มจากการเลือกหัวข้อที่คุณต้องการและเริ่มศึกษามัน

เมื่อคุณเข้าใจเนื้อหาของเรื่องนั้นแล้ว ลองเขียนอธิบายเรื่องนั้นลงในกระดาษ ประหนึ่งว่ากำลังอธิบายเรื่องนั้นให้คนอื่นฟัง โดยพยายามเขียนและพูดอธิบายไปพร้อม ๆ กัน เหมือนกับอาจารย์ที่กำลังสอนอยู่หน้าชั้นเรียน

นี่จะทำให้คุณรู้ว่า มีเนื้อหาส่วนไหนที่คุณเข้าใจและยังไม่เข้าใจ ถ้ามีเนื้อหาส่วนไหนที่คุณติดขัด ลองย้อนกลับไปศึกษาส่วนนั้นซ้ำอีกครั้ง จนกระทั่งคุณสามารถอธิบายเรื่องนั้นได้ตั้งแต่ต้นจนจบ

หลังอธิบายจบ ลองกลับไปอธิบายซ้ำอีกครั้งตั้งแต่ต้น แต่คราวนี้พยายามใช้ภาษาง่าย ๆ หรือใช้ตัวอย่างภาพประกอบในการอธิบาย ถ้าคำอธิบายของคุณยาวหรือซับซ้อนเกินไป แปลว่าคุณอาจจะยังไม่เข้าใจเนื้อหาดีนัก คุณจึงควรกลับไปศึกษาใหม่อีกครั้ง

การทบทวนโดยใช้การอธิบายเนื้อหาซ้ำ ๆ เป็นวิธีการเรียนรู้ที่มีประสิทธิภาพอย่างยิ่ง เมื่อคุณสามารถอธิบายเนื้อหาได้โดยใช้ภาษาที่เข้าใจง่าย นั่นแปลว่าคุณได้เข้าใจเนื้อหานั้นอย่างถ่องแท้ และจะสามารถจดจำเรื่องนั้นได้นาน

ริชาร์ด ไฟนย์แมน เป็นนักฟิสิกส์ชื่อดัง ผู้เคยได้รับรางวัลโนเบลจากผลงานด้านพลศาสตร์แม่เหล็กไฟฟ้าเชิงควอนตัม

เป็นที่ทราบกันโดยทั่วไปว่าเขามักชอบขอให้นักคณิตศาสตร์คนอื่น ๆ อธิบายแนวคิดจ่าง ๆ ด้วยภาษาง่าย ๆ เพื่อทดสอบว่าพวกเขาเข้าใจเนื้อหาจริงหรือไม่

Drown your way to swimming

Don’t start at the bottom, start at the top. Find the very best person in the field and follow what they say. If you don’t understand their words because they’re over your head, listen to them more - google their terminologies - until you do understand the world they live in. Compare your work to the best on earth, not to your peers.

Refuse to learn without doing.

Don’t read a blog on how to code without hand-coding/copying every example. If you listen to a lecture, take specific notes - this will lock in information. Research shows that taking more selective notes causes you to process the information and retain it better.

Start a blog

Disseminate the valuable information you’re learning to others. The simple act of teaching will cause you to process the knowledge to a level of simplicity that greatly increases your understanding. Plus, any human interaction surrounding the knowledge - comments, arguments, corrections, will cause it to lock-in deeper into your memory.

Practice shorter, but more frequently

A guitar student who practices 10 minutes every day will do far better than one who plays 2 hours once a week. The latter will simply keep re-learning much of the same thing each week, forgetting it by the next week. Your brain remembers the first and last things the most, so make sure to recap each “learning session” with the most important things you want to remember.

By Will Stern on Quora (http://www.quora.com/What-learning-strategies-do-people-who-are-quick-learners-follow)

For more info on learning languages, explore YouTube or visit Duolingo, a great website and App to learn new languages - see video. The app Anki can be useful to study specific words with spaced repetition. But whatever you do, first connect emotionally to the culture and try different learning styles. There are now also other few cool sites and apps to learn languages. Most of those apps use multiple ways to interact with a languages. So expect to read, listen, write or watch videos.

Here some useful apps and sites:

https://www.duolingo.com/

https://www.busuu.com/

https://www.babble.com/

http://ankisrs.net/

1. Connect to the culture.

Like with anything what you want to learn, you first need a emotional experience with the subject matter in order to gain a deep interest in it. To learn languages it is therefore useful to connect with the culture of the place where the language is spoken. This can be done via music, food, films, products or other means. Without a deep interest in the culture you will hardly learn its language.

2. Be a kid again.

Children allow themselves to make mistakes, that makes it much easier for them to learn a new language. Adults often come with a sense for perfections and hence never really get to learn the language. you should ask “bathroom where?”, before “excuse me sir, would you point out me the way to the washroom please”. So allow yourself to be a kid when learning languages.

3. Believe.

It was difficult for others, it will be difficult for you. You however can still do it so don’t tell yourself, “I don’t have the ideal person”, “I don’t have the time”, “I am not talented”. If you do that you just follow a self fulfilling prophecy of those who tell themselves they cant learn a new language. Or as Henri Ford said: Whether you think you can, or think you cant, you are right.

4. Find your own technique.

Some people want to use a study based approach, other learn better by interacting with locals verbally or improving their skills through writing. The importance is that find your way and then consistently continue to learn it. To find your own style, we recommend to try different techniques, then track your own progress and see what style makes most fun and brings you furthest. Here some of the most popular techniques with a small summery of how they work:

To understand the logic behind this model, lets go backward to see where it comes from. Lets say you want to study to play the piano:

1. First you need to ask yourself if you are interested. If not, there is no point to study. You would otherwise just waste your time as your attention for things you study without interest is close to zero.
2. To be interested you need to have a feeling for the subject, or in this case music. You must like either the act of playing the piano or enjoy listen to the music itself. Without a feeling for something there cannot be interest for it.
3. To have a feeling for something you must engage with the matter. In case of the piano that can be achieved by going to a concert, listening to an amazing piano player on youtube or even better meeting people who make music themselves.

One effective way to learn for recall and memorise, is to use analogies and graphic images. Say you want to learn a mathematical formula, write down the formula on one side of a flash card and on the other you draw and an image that represents it. Now study the flashcards by looking at the images first and then trying to recall the formula on the other side. Tip: Use the technique of Spaced Repetition - short but repetitive study - to maximise your learning outcomes.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com

The Centre for Digital Education is a US research and advisory institute specialising in K-12 and higher education technology trends, policy, and funding.

http://www.icademy.com/

For students around the world seeking a well‑rounded education, this school provides a accredited K12 curriculum. The schools offers an individualised learning plan, exceptional learning experiences, a support team of teachers, college counselling, an international student body and numerous enrolment opportunities throughout the year. Fees start at 5,000 USD/year for full time students.

http://www.k12.com

US accredited program combines online instruction scheduled weekly, interactive online discussion with classmates and teachers, as well as alternative media. Families can purchase K12 products or connect with a participating public school in their state.

http://www.internationalconnectionsacademy.com/

International Connections Academy was founded in 2001 by educators and innovators who recognised the power of online learning to transform K–12 education. The school is an accredited, online private school serving students in grades K–12 throughout the United States and abroad.

Josh Angrist, well known economist and founder of the School Effectiveness & Inequality Initiative says that students can learn a lot in their later school years. “We’re showing dramatic gains in middle school and later for kids who come in at a very low baseline,” he notes of the research on urban charter schools. The idea that children cannot compensate for disadvantages they face early in life is “a compelling narrative,” he says, “but it’s not true.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/article/508381/the-natural-experimenter/

Adopted children tend to have a slightly higher IQ than siblings who remained with their biological parents, a recent study found. The difference between siblings - equivalent to about four IQ points - appears to stem from higher average educational levels in adoptive parents, according to the researchers.

"The more educated the adoptive parents are, the bigger the advantage for the child," said study co-author Eric Turkheimer, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. "Even in the presence of genetic differences among people, improving the environment helps children's cognitive ability."

The research was published online March 23 2015 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

http://consumer.healthday.com/cognitive-health-information-26/brain-health-news-80/adopted-kids-average-iq-higher-than-non-adopted-siblings-study-697681.html

There is a new program in the US that tries to promote to un-roll off college and instead move into a cool house with a bunch of others and a mentor to work one year on a lot of fun stuff.

Here details to the program from their website:

The program is divided into four phases, each lasting two-three months. These include living in a Gap Year House, traveling abroad, working at an internship, and completing a creative project. During this program, you will learn about yourself and the process of learning, make lifelong friends with people from around the world, find mentors, and develop the skills necessary to be successful both personally and professionally.Born from decades of educational research and engineered in Silicon Valley, the program creates a new category of post-secondary education, blending a structured skill development protocol with the benefits of self-directed learning. You will sharpen the skills you will use every day of your adult lives – effective communication, resourcefulness, negotiation, building social capital – and deepen your sense of autonomy and personal effectiveness.

visit: http://www.uncollege.org/

Here is how you learn to type faster. All you got to do is to watch the video once and then follow the steps below every morning for 20 minutes for 30 days. Use the timer function of your mobile phone to track the time you spend on each of the 3 sections below. Important is you do it every day and for exactly 20 minutes.

Before Your start:

Test your current writing speed with TypingTest. Once you are done, note down or share your speed so you can compare it when you completed the course.

First 15 days:

Spend 20 Minutes every day on Typing.com, to learn to position your figures and to type certain keys. Complete Beginner, Intermediary, Advance and Speciality Lessons.

The last 15 days:

Spend the next 15 minutes on Typing.com, to continue your studies and the next 5 Minutes on the game RapidTyping or TypeRacer, where you car race against other learners.

When you are done:

Now again go test your writing speed with TypingTest and compare the results with the test of day one. You can now also calculate the % you increased your typing and if you are a math genius many even how much time you saved, giving you type 5 hours a week for the next 30 years ;)

Note:

The above guide is based on the learning method Spaced Repetition. According to brain research it is believed to be one of the most effective ways to learn really anything. It follows a few principles:

• Learn every day a little, instead of just one day a lot. The reason for this is sleep. It's during sleep when your brain grows synapses (new connections), so if you don't sleep between your learning sessions you'll simply learn less.
• Set yourself a clear start and ending time for your learning. Ending is as important as starting as it acts as a reward and hence increases the likely hood that you start again the next day.
• While you learn, don’t do anything else and remove all distractions (turn off your phone,...). Use the Pomodoro Technique if you have trouble to focus.
• If you don’t really enjoy what you want to learn, do it in the morning, it's when you have the most energy for that kind of stuff.