跟读练习: How to Learn Anything FASTER - 通过视频学习英语口语

Hey friends, welcome back to the channel.

Today we're talking about learning.

Now learning has been probably one of my main superpowers since I was very young

and learning how to learn is one of those like meta skills

that no one ever really teaches us but

that can have like an enormous impact on our life in basically everything that we do.

For example, when I was in med school I learned how to learn

and therefore I could study for everything that I was doing more efficiently

and that freed up my own time to do things like set up a business and set up this YouTube channel.

And these days, even though I don't have many more exams to prepare for, learning is still a huge part of my life.

Trying to get better at making these YouTube videos, trying to get better at running a business, all of this stuff involves learning.

And so in this video, I'm gonna share nine tips that I found really helpful that are evidence-based about how we can learn anything we want faster.

Let's go.

Tip number one is to sharpen the ax.

Now, this is from a quote that's attributed to Abraham Lincoln, where he famously said that if you gave me six hours to chop down a tree,

I would spend the first four sharpening the ax and he's really talking here about the power of preparation.

And this definitely applies to learning anything as well.

Let's say we are studying for an exam and we wanna learn it a little bit better.

Reading a great book called Make It Stick would be a great way of learning how to learn

or checking out my Skillshare class on evidence-based study techniques.

Equally, let's say we're trying to learn something like the guitar or chess or anything like that, something that's not related to studying.

We should still spend a decent amount of time figuring out the meta learning behind what we're actually gonna learn, like how we are going to learn the thing.

For example, when I was learning how to play the piano by ear, I spent a decent amount of time on the learn piano

subreddit where people were explaining how to learn how to play piano by ear

and just spending a little bit of time sharpening the axe

before I actually sat down to learn the thing really helped accelerate my learning process.

Tip number two is to use crutches to optimize our focus.

Now whenever we're learning anything, it's really tempting to kind of learn it in the background like practicing the guitar while watching TV or something like that.

But obviously when we're fully focused on the thing that we're learning, our brain learns the thing a lot better.

And so I found a few different crutches or hacks that have been particularly helpful in helping me focus on things.

One is the five minute rule, which is a general tip for productivity as well, which is that if we want to do something, we're finding ourselves like having difficulty in starting out doing the thing,

like actually getting started, overcoming the activation energy.

The five minute rule says that we just have to convince ourselves

that we're just going to do the thing for five minutes.

And then after we've done it for five minutes, we're allowed to just not do it.

But more often than not, I find that if I've been practicing the guitar or playing the piano for five minutes, I do then want to actually continue to practice.

Another thing that's really helpful is to just chuck my phone away.

I literally take my phone, I toss it onto the sofa or on the floor like a good tosser, and then I'm ready to focus and not be distracted with the thing that I'm trying to learn.

All right, tip number three is to find opportunities for immersion.

So there's a great book called Ultra Learning by a chap called Scott Young, where he talks about his journey through learning languages in like three months at a time

and becoming fluent in a language in three months.

And the key to that, as all language learners say is immersion, just being as immersed in the language as possible.

And the general principle here is that we learn best

when we're in the environment where we're actually gonna be using the skill.

So for example, when I was learning how to do magic to become a closeup magician, yes, I was doing some practice in front of my webcam

and in front of my mirror just to get the sleight of hand down, but really my webcam or mirror is not, it's not the arena in which I'm gonna be performing it.

And so I made it a point to try and perform magic for real people as much as possible.

I would take a deck of cards into school and I'd have a cards in my room at all times.

And so friends would come over, I'd kind of pay, be like, hey, do you want to see magic trick?

And eventually once I got okay at performing for friends and family, I started then reaching out and doing paid gigs,

even though I was nowhere near good enough in my head to get paid to do magic.

Eventually I did end up getting paid to do magic.

And those like walk around gigs at balls

and parties helped improve my abilities in a way that just doing it in front of the mirror really wouldn't have done.

Tip number four is to figure out what are our weak links

and then use lots of drills and stuff to improve them.

So if we use med school as an example, I had a few subjects that I was pretty weak in.

Neurology was one of them.

If you'd asked me what is Guillain-Barre syndrome, I'd have been like, oh God, I have absolutely no idea.

I didn't even have a mental model for where it would fit into the subject of neurology.

And so when it came to studying efficiently for my exams, I knew that, okay, I have to drill the things that I'm weakest on.

And I spent just a whole day basically creating a one-page syllabus of just neurology, just focusing on that one subject.

And just because I spent like eight to 12 hours that day doing it, I basically plugged it as an area of weakness, and now it was no longer an area of weakness.

And the question I would keep on asking myself every day when I was sitting down to study was, if the exam were tomorrow, what topic would I be the least happy or the most pissed off about?

And then I would just study that topic.

And this is really good because whenever we're learning or whenever we're studying or anything like that, it's very tempting to just do the stuff that seems familiar to us.

If we're studying for an exam, you know, it's very tempting to open up the book to page one

and just even though we already know what's on page one, if we're learning the guitar, it's very tempting to just play through songs that we've already played before.

But really the learning only happens when we're trying to fix our weaknesses

and we're trying to operate at a decent level of difficulty.

If something is too easy, we're not gonna learn anything at all.

And so if we wanna maximize the learning and learn anything faster, we wanna really hone down on what are these areas of weakness?

What are these weak links? and how do we use drills to improve those as quickly as we can.

Tip number five is to test ourselves.

Now this is a thing that in the world of studying is called active recall, but it also applies to the world of learning anything in general.

I have a whole video about that that's linked in the card over there.

And if you wanna find out more, you can definitely check out my Skillshare class about how to study for exams, also linked in the video description.

By the way, Skillshare are sponsoring this video.

I'll tell you more about them a little bit later.

Anyway, the idea behind active recall or retrieval practice is

that we don't learn by trying to put stuff into our

brains we actually learn counter-intuitively by trying to take stuff out of our brains.

And so if you've had that experience where you've read something in a textbook

or on a website and someone asks you about it a few days later and you've completely forgotten about it, that's just because you haven't tested yourself on that knowledge.

And the word testing has all these negative connotations

because we think of testing as like a school thing and we get graded and we get judged.

But if we move towards thinking of testing ourselves as being a strategy for learning, everything becomes so much easier.

That's why when learning to play the guitar, there's only so many tutorials you can watch before you actually start having to put it into practice

when you're studying for exams.

There's no point reading the textbook and just summarizing what's in the textbook.

The point is you have to test yourself so that your brain has a chance to work, to retrieve the information, and that is what really drives learning.

And in the field of learning, there is this concept called the desirable difficulty concept, which basically just means something shouldn't be too hard where we're just,

like for example, if I were to try playing tennis against Roger Federer, it would just be too hard.

I wouldn't really learn anything.

But equally, if I were to try playing tennis against a 10 year old who doesn't know how to play, it wouldn't be fun, I wouldn't learn anything because the difficulty is at two different extremes.

I wanna be playing tennis against someone who is like at my level

or a little bit better than me because that is the real arena in which I'm gonna be learning.

And that's why having a coach, for example, is really good

because a coach can moderate their play style to be at my level and therefore I'm more likely to learn.

That is desirable difficulty.

And so whatever we wanna learn efficiently, we wanna apply this concept to try and make it a little bit more difficult.

Learning is not supposed to be easy, it is supposed to be hard.

And if it's hard, then it means we're doing something right.

Tip number six is to get intense feedback as often and as quickly as possible.

So feedback obviously is how we learn.

We do something, we see that we're doing it wrong, and then we improve the thing.

And again, feedback is one of those words that can seem a little bit like dirty at times, especially if we're starting something out where we're not sure of our own abilities.

If we get constructive or critical feedback, that can really be a blow to our ego.

If you're that sort of person that needs the ego massage, then at the start of learning something, what you need is praise and encouragement.

For example, if I was just starting to learn how to sing and people would just give me critical feedback immediately, I'd probably feel a little bit like, oh, okay, I don't really want to sing.

I'm one of those people who just can't sing.

Equally, if I were to start drawing and people would be like, oh, haha, that's really crap.

You should do this instead.

I'd probably feel pretty bad about it and therefore it wouldn't help me continue on the journey.

So I think at the start of a journey, for most of us, we need that like injection of positivity and enthusiasm rather than necessarily critical feedback.

But if we do decide to switch gears and to start taking learning something super seriously, we wanna kind of avoid the praise and recognition aspect of it, which is kind of unhelpful.

And instead focus on the critical constructive feedback, what can we do differently?

Again, this is why having a coach for stuff is actually really, really helpful.

Ever since getting a personal trainer, my everything in the gym has improved, my biceps have gotten bigger, I'm a one step closer to becoming a Gymshark athlete

because now I have someone who's like there and then giving me feedback on the things that I should do differently.

Whereas before, maybe once in a blue moon, I'd film a video of myself, send it to a friend, they'd reply a few days later.

It's not really a tight feedback loop.

And really, it's the tight feedback loops that encourage learning, whether it's for exams or whether it's for anything else in life.

Tip number seven is the concept of over learning, which is that when we're learning something, we actually want to try and understand or learn it in more depth than we necessarily need to.

And the idea here is to continuously be asking why a thing works the way that it does.

So for example, when I'm working as a doctor, and I see senior doctors who, you know, most of being a doctor,

admittedly, is about following guidelines and following a prescribed set of rules and basically a flowchart for everything that we do.

But and so there are some doctors who have that have that view of, you know, all I have to do is memorize the guidelines or look them up.

But then there are other doctors who have a more first principles understanding approach to medicine, which is that, okay, I know what the guidelines are that I should prescribe this drug,

but I'm actually going to take a step to figure out why that's the guideline.

Why did they do that?

What's the paper?

What's the evidence around this?

And, you know, in, in my experience, it's hard to say that, you know, camp two is objectively a better doctor than camp one, but certainly the sort of doctor

that I want to be is the doctor who understands stuff from first principles

and understands the rationale for doing stuff rather than just memorizing the guidelines.

This applies to music theory in the guitar as well.

I had a guitar lesson this morning

and we were talking about how it's very easy to learn how to play anything by just following a tutorial.

But when you follow a tutorial, the thing that you're learning is, you know, my fingers are going in this particular position.

Whereas what we wanna try and get to, and John Mayer talks about this a lot on his Instagram, what we wanna be getting to is just an understanding of music theory,

so that instead of I put my fingers in A, B, and C positions, we think, okay, I'm playing a C7 chord, and the reason I'm playing a C7 chord is because of this,

and therefore my fingers are gonna go in A, B, and C position.

And so the end result is the same we're still playing that chord and we could still probably just play the song.

But when you have that deeper appreciation of the reasons behind why things are the way that they are,

it just makes learning anything else in that particular sphere much easier and much more efficient.

Tip number eight is all about spacing.

This is something in the world of studying we call spaced repetition.

Basically there's a concept called the forgetting curve that was discovered by a chap called Ebbinghaus in like the 1800s.

And the forgetting curve is that whenever we learn anything, whether it's like a fact or a skill or whatever, we're just gonna forget it and our memory for the thing is gonna decay over time.

And so we have to keep on practicing

or testing ourselves on the thing to actually continue to have our brain kind of use up space for

that kind of thing.

Because it's like with our muscles, when we don't use our muscles, our muscles are gonna atrophy and they're gonna get smaller and we're gonna get less hench.

Equally with our brain, if we learn, let's say a language when we were five years old, and then we don't use it for the next 10 years,

we're actually gonna forget most of the language because our brain doesn't need to have that information in it anymore.

But thankfully we can combat the forgetting curve by using this concept of spaced repetition.

This applies not just to exams, but to any other skill as well, which is that if we kind of repeat the thing at spaced intervals, so let's say I might learn a song on the guitar on day one,

and then I might repeat it again tomorrow, and then I might test myself on it again next week, and then next month, and then six months from now.

And if I've spaced my repetition of this thing enough, eventually playing that song is gonna go into my muscle memory, it's gonna go into my long-term memory,

and I won't need to practice it very much anymore to be able to play it whenever I want.

Now, if you're trying to learn something that has specific facts, there's all sorts of different apps that you can use to help with spacing.

The one that I personally enjoy the most is free, and it's called Anki, after the Japanese for Anki Shimasu, which I think is to memorize.

Anki is just like an incredible app that completely revolutionized my experience of med school.

It does have a bit of a learning curve, And so did you know I have an entire Skillshare class about how to use Anki, the basics, along with some advanced tips,

along with some guides on how to use Anki to learn absolutely anything, along with bonus interviews from other students all around the world that are using Anki for stuff very effectively.

If you wanna check that out and any of my other like 10 classes on Skillshare, you should hit the link in the video description because Skillshare are very kindly sponsoring this video.

So if you wanna check out my class on Anki

or my class on evidence-based study tips or any of my three classes about how to be more productive, then hit the link in the video description.

Now, while I was filming this video, Skillshare had an offer of giving you 30% of the annual premium subscription, but they've actually changed up that offer.

So now if you're one of the first thousand people to hit the link in the video description, you will get a one month free trial, completely free to Skillshare premium,

where you can check out my Anki class and all the other 10 classes I've got on Skillshare.

So hit the link in the video description, be the first 1000 people to hit that link to get a one month free trial.

This is amazing.

It's a no brainer.

You can just watch all of my classes.

So thank you Skillshare for sponsoring this video.

And finally, tip number nine is to teach what you are trying to learn.

We often have this thing of like, oh, I'm not allowed to teach something until I become an expert at it.

But there's this concept that CS Lewis talks about that I talk about a lot called the curse of knowledge, which is that when we're trying to learn something,

often we don't learn best from experts.

We learn best from people who are just one step in front of us along that same journey.

And so the way I think of it is that I would rather learn from a guide than learn from a guru, guide versus guru.

And I would rather be a guide than try and be a guru.

And certainly for me, I found that when I was going through medical school, my favorite revision sessions or lectures would be the ones that were given by medical students in the year above me,

rather than those given by world-class Nobel Prize-winning professors, because those guys were like old and like really far removed from the things that I needed at the time,

whereas another medical student just one year above me was like really, really helpful.

And then when I started teaching medical students, when I started teaching guitar, when I started teaching piano and YouTube as well with my part-time YouTuber Academy, I found that anytime I try and teach something,

it really solidifies my own knowledge and understanding and learning of the thing itself.

And so now I have a general policy that whenever I'm learning anything, I'm documenting my process while learning it.

And that helps me learn better because I know

that I'm possibly gonna be teaching this thing a few months or years from now.

If you liked this video, you might like to check out two specific books about learning.

One is called Make It Stick and the other one is called Ultra Learning.

And you can actually find summaries for both of those on short form, which is my favorite way of getting summaries of books.

That'll be linked in the video description if you wanna check it out interested in the science of effective learning, check out this video over here, which is from a few years ago, but it's still genuinely one of my favorite videos of all time that I've ever made,

one of the best ones, I think, as well.

And it's all about the power of active recall and why testing ourselves is the best thing ever.

And I talk about a lot of scientific evidence around it, and loads of people have said that that video alone has changed their life.

So thank you so much for watching.

Hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you in the next video.

Bye-bye.