We live in such a visual world, that I cannot help but be occasionally reminded that I do not. Today’s reminder took the form of a language learning game. The premise, (clever, really!) was to associate images with the new words that were being learned. It took me an appalling amount of time to realize I could correctly determine the word by looking at the picture (I’d been guessing based on prior knowledge). I had not even paused to consider the possibility that the pictures above the text were relevant!
The world around me is streamlined into shapes and positions, stored in my mind in an audio data file or a physical map. I remember things not as pictures but as strings of audio descriptors. A personal description for me is never a picture- it is always a string of words.
So it seemed logical to think that the best thing I can do is to give myself more words- after all, I can hardly give myself more neurons in the appropriate quadrant. So, now as I find myself searching through software, I’m making a point to look for the more audio oriented.
Time is of limited supply, to all of us, and thus it’s a natural thing to value efficiency. Knowing the ways we learn (and don’t learn) can be very valuable in terms of determining a most efficient way to learn something. Once, a visual method might have been perfect. These days, I’ll choose something else. How do you learn best? What strategies are the most effective for teaching yourself?
McCurry's Miscellanea 