Be Immersed in What You Do
日本語はこちら。
What do you do when you want to learn something new? A couple of things come to mind.
Buy books and read through them back-to-back?
Read online articles?
Take courses?
Watch videos?
All these are good and I've done all of them myself to varying degree of success.
But there's one thing I find useful when learning something new:
Try to be immersed in what you are learning.
What does it mean to be immersed?
By being immersed, I mean to be surrounded by the thing you are learning.
Let's say if you are learning a new programming language by reading a book. In addition to reading the book, you can be immersed by:
Searching and reading articles about the language
Watching videos about the language
Listening to podcasts about the language
The idea is to be surrounded by information on the thing you are learning as much as possible.
How does it help?
This may sound a little off-putting. After all, you are learning something new and you are not familiar with it. Wouldn't surrouding yourself with more of that stuff confuse things further?
To answer that, let me explain two things I find challenging when learning something new and how being immersed helps with them.
Challenge 1: Understanding the new words, concepts, and ideas
When you are learning something new, there are many words, concepts, and ideas that you are not familiar with. You will probably not understand many of them in the first go.
But by being immersed, you are exposing yourself to the same words, concepts, and ideas from different sources. This repetition helps you to understand and remember them better. You may not fully understand a concept the first time you encounter it in a book but you may understand it better when you read about it in an article or watch a video about it.
(As a side note, I find that this is sometimes why a certain source "seems" very clear and easy to understand, but doesn't have the same effect for somebody else. It's because you've already built up some understanding of it from other sources and that source happenend to the one that pushed you over the edge.)
Challenge 2: People have different ways of understanding things
Different people have different ways of explaining things. What may not make sense to you when explained by one person may make perfect sense when explained by another person. For example, some people prefer more abstract explanations initially and then digging into the details whereas some people prefer starting from the details and then building up from there.
This probably also differs based on the topic you are learning so it's very difficult to find a single source that explains everything in a way that makes sense to you.
Again, this is where being immersed helps. By exposing yourself to different sources, you are more likely to find a source that explains things in a way that makes sense to you. A highly regarded book may not make sense to you but a random blog post may explain things in a way that makes perfect sense to you. You never know so it's good to be exposed to as many sources as possible.
Find your style
The actual style will depend on you and the topic you are learning. Some people may prefer watching multiple videos, some people may prefer reading multiple books, and some people may prefer a mix.
Hope you find the right style that works for you. Happy learning!