Many of you reading this are students and if not, I strongly stand behind the saying that we all should be life-long learners. We should always be striving to learn more, to educate ourselves not only in terms of academic education but also in terms of life education, which includes concepts ranging from the subconscious mind to financial literacy. Thus I believe that people like Robert Kiyosaki or books like The Secret or The Power of Subconscious Mind should have a place in the lives of all of you. In this article, I want to reveal one of the most effective methods to learn quickly and easily with minimum effort but maximum result. I have been using this technique for a very long time and I can say that it works perfectly. I strongly recommend that you give it a try!

Learning/forgetting Curve

The human brain is an exceptional memory tool, more complex but also more effective than the most modern computers of the present. It is the most effective computer on Earth. However, even the smartest computer has no use if we don’t know how to use it. Our brains work in a specific way, which we can take great advantage of. I’ll share a curve that represents the way our brain retains information. On the Y axis, you have the amount and the quality of information retained and on the X axis, you have time. You can see that we always forget the info we put in, but the more often and the more regularly we repeat learning the same information, the longer it takes for us to forget it (which is represented by the lower and lower steepness of the curve as it proceeds with time). If you keep repeating this process, you’ll eventually retain the information for years, if not a lifetime. Imagine moving to a new city. When you see the streets once, you will not remember where to go next time. But after passing through these streets for the hundredth time, you will have no problem with the directions there.

Utilise What You’ve Just Learned About

Knowing all this, we can derive many useful learning techniques. In this article, I want to talk about 2 of the techniques I personally use. The first one is the utilisation of smart apps that account for the learning and forgetting curves and the second one is the utilisation of our sleep and the functioning of our subconscious mind during that time.

Anki

This app is excellent for the retention of any information ranging from graphical, economic or business information to language information such as words or idioms. I personally use this app to practice and learn Chinese vocab. I find it very useful because it works on the bases of flashcards. It involves many combinations and many options that allow you to personally customise its functions according to your needs. As I mentioned above, it accounts for the ways our brain retains information. Thus you don’t have to worry about working out your own intervals, as these are already included in the app. Of course, if you want to customise those, you can.

Utilise Your Sleep!

The way our conscious and subconscious minds work is indeed tremendously interesting. This technique is something that has helped me learn Chinese and go through IB with a very good result. In essence, you utilise the fact that your subconscious mind works during your sleep. The way this works is that before you go to sleep, you take 10-15 minutes to go over what you want to learn. Then you go to sleep and when you wake up you do the same thing. Your brain consumes and retains the information during your sleep. When you wake up and review the information, you’ll realise that you actually know it as if you’ve just read it. This is something that people from many areas of life utilise. For instances, there are many great examples of people learning how to play an instrument, struggling to play a song in the evening and playing it almost perfectly after waking up. The way our subconscious mind works is truly amazing. Utilise it!

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You’ve probably heard this a thousand times in your life. You have to read as much as you can! Books will widen your perspective and expand your language bank. You need to read to become successful! But what if reading really bores you? What if there’s no time forreading in your life? If you’re dealing with issues like this, you came to the right place! We’ve got an excellent tip for you that will help you read not effortlessly, but very, very effectively! This will not only enormously support your knowledge obtainment process, but also save your butt if you’re a college student who needs to read very quickly and, as mentioned above, effectively. Let’s get into it!

The luxurious reading method. Not everyone knows about it, but once you discover it, you will never want to come back to normal. Speed reading is the ultimate way of textual knowledge obtainment. Why is it so special?

It teaches you that a text is only a set of ideas you need to navigate through and familiarize yourself with it in the shortest amount of time possible without losing the understanding of the idea.

Now what do we mean by navigating through a text? Every text has a certain structure. Since we started talking about books, let’s stick to them. Chapters in books are structured in a very specific way. That being: Introduction, body, conclusion. You can go even further. Every single paragraph has a little introductory line and a little conclusionary line. Take a book and try focusing only on the structure of one single chapter. Once you see this, go to the next step.

Familiarising yourself with the text. There is a reason we talked about the structure of the text first. You already discovered that every chapter has a little introduction and a little conclusion. Now it is important to realise why are these two important? They’re crucial because the whole argument is introduced and summarised in them. To understand what argument the author is making in the chapter, you only have to read the introduction and the conclusion of your chapter. Why is that people also read the body paragraphs? That is where the authors put there arguments into context and provide their readers with more specific examples. Don’t get us wrong, you need to read the body, it’s just that the body should be the last part you read.

The process of you reading through the chapter should be as follows: Read the introductory part, read the conclusionary part (understand the argument) and then skim through the body. This way, you’ll get the idea and you’ll also have an example in the back of your mind to put the idea into practice!

Now the third and the most revolutionary part of the speed reading strategy. You need to change the way you actually read! Thus accomplishing the third point, finishing the text in the shortest possible time without any losses in your understanding of the text. To understand this, we need to go to the roots of the way we read. When you normally read, you read every single word of every single line of every single paragraph of every single page. However, the speed reading strategy comes in with an amazing idea. The use of peripheral vision. What is peripheral vision? It’s why you can see the person on your right slapping you and dodge his arm. You’re not focusing your eyesight on that person’s hand, but we have a pretty wide angle of vision which allows us to see things we don’t necessarily focus on, but could cause any harm to us (naturally).

Now how do we make any use of this? Let’s focus on a single page for the sake of this guide. Try to fold the page into four parts (fold into half and then again). After folding it, you get three columns separating your page into four columns. Now focus on one single line. When you read it, read only the first and the last word and the three words that are on the lines (folds). This means that your eyesight will begin at the start of the line, bounce from the first word to the second, then to the third, fourth and to the last. If you do this steadily enough, you will also read the words you haven’t put your focus on, peripherally. Now do this with the next line and the next line and so on. You will quickly realise that you’re going really fast and you’re still getting the idea about what the author is talking about. It is obvious that each speed reader has his own way of speed reading. Some use three words as their “bounce points”, some use four.

Now put all of the three steps together and here you go! Use this strategy to boost your knowledge obtainment! Also, one little tip for the end. We suggest you do make notes. You might not get back to them, but it is proven that you’re more likely to remember things when you write them down compared to only reading them!

If you want another source regarding this technique, we suggest you watch this.

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