We are not engineering a situation in a hope to understand an idea. It seems that re-living the context of learning is particularly effective because there is nothing artificial about it. We should go one step further and enjoy the luxury of affirming our knowledge by learning ideas once again. We are all privileged to be able to learn and expand our knowledge. Through the preserved context of learning, I was able to briefly go back to the moment when I learned the vocabulary and learn it once again. Reading the note months later, I could remember that tautology was the word that Kundera used to describe the motto “Long live life,” in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Yet in the note, I had written down the sentence in which the vocabulary appeared to me. If we can preserve the context in which an idea became familiar to us, it would be possible to re-live that moment later when the idea is not so familiar anymore.įor instance, I could not remember the exact definition of the word tautology days later I wrote down this note. We remember the context of learning more vividly than the learning itself. ![]() Preserve the Context in Which Learning Occurs Yet at the moment, when we are basked in the rewarding feelings of becoming more intelligent, we need to discard the self-assurance and maintain a healthy skepticism about our ability to remember. If some ideas still manage to escape our memory in spite of our conscious effort to capture them, how confidently can we claim that we have learned them when we have no such efforts at all? We often overestimate our ability to remember new concepts because when we have just learned them, our memory is the freshest. Maybe one day I would have gone on to create yet another one. I feel that, had it not been for the weekly reminders, I would have never realized that there even had been duplicates. Here is my first note about the expression “bent on” and here is the duplicate that followed. Writing the duplicate note, I was completely oblivious of the fact that I had learned the same word merely five days ago. Each time convinced that I had learned that word. For instance, I wrote two duplicate notes for the same vocabulary in five days. Our understanding of a new idea goes away more quickly than we might realize, no matter how convinced we are at the moment of its conception. They might reveal something interesting about how we should approach learning vocabularies and beyond. Here are some observations about my journey. I have tried this method while reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and The Rebel by Albert Camus.ĭuring this period I was able to write down 58 new vocabularies and reminded myself of them automatically every week. Then I hit Shift + Enter to save the note and went immediately back to reading. Whenever I read a word I that did not know, I hit Cmd + d to open the browser extension, wrote down its definition, and copied the sentence in which the author made use of that word. Yet, since I mostly learn new vocabularies while reading books on Kindle in my browsers, I extended it by making a browser extension.įor the past three months, I have been using this browser extension to write down new vocabularies and receive weekly digests. It was Dnote, a program to quickly write down things using a command-line and send myself weekly digest of them. And I decided to use an open-source software I wrote a year ago. In this light, I found myself in need of automation that would make me revisit the words I learn. However, three months ago, as I was piling yet another word onto the graveyard of a notebook, I realized that the ground was filled with dead words because I had never bothered to look twice at them. I instead paid more attention to my ego and the satisfaction of feeling smart for a moment. Whenever I learned new words, I chucked them into this notebook with little attention to whether I was remembering their meanings. ![]() More specifically I have created a notebook in which I have been mindlessly burying vocabularies for the past two years. I can speak from personal experience because tragically enough I have created a graveyard of words. I find that unless we write down what we learn and revisit them periodically, our learnings quickly expire. ![]() However, at that moment our relationship with the new vocabulary is at its most vulnerable. In the very moment of looking up a word’s definition, there is a vague sense of confidence that we have firmly grasped the meaning of the new word. Learning More Vocabulary Using My Own Open Source Software Sung Cho StoriesĮvery day we learn vocabularies that are unfamiliar to us, and soon forget about them as our memory naturally fades away.
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