Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

After more than two decades as a developer, I have just now begun to realize all the other valuable skills, outside of technology, that I have not developed. And consequently, I've been very hungry for this additional education.

I understand you're looking for IT education, but I would recommend audio books (or language courses). If you haven't done any of these, give some a try:

* If you don't know a second language, try the Pimsleur courses.

* How To Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

* Getting to Yes, by Bruce Patton, Roger Fisher, and William Ury

* How We Choose to be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People, by Greg Hicks and Rick Foster

* Managing Oneself (Harvard Business Review Classics), by Peter Drucker

It's easy to learn the technical things with hands-on time and night time efforts, but sometimes the tech is so much fun that some of us just simply ignore topics that have longer term value and frankly can enable us to really make the most of our technical abilities.

>Pimsleur courses

I was wondering if that would show up in this thread. I have a fairly frequent, though not regular, ~45 min commute, and I've been working on one of their Korean courses. Each lesson is 30 min long, so it fits pretty well.

The only concern I have is that it can be very mentally taxing to, say, correctly respond using Korean to a question asked in Korean. I'd rather not die on the highway than learn a new language, so fairly frequently I have to drive first and ignore the audio for a few seconds.

To help fix this I've been doubling up, playing the same lesson on two commutes. More practice is always good in a language, I guess. I'm also fairly young and have only been driving for about six years, so it's not all autopilot yet.

The lessons are a bit dry, tbh. I've been wondering if there are any other audio-only language lesson publishers I should try that might provide some different styles.

Oh I would listen to the same CD over and over, and now I cannot get it out of my head if I tried :P. I definitely was not working toward a goal; I just found it surprisingly fun (and pleasantly distracting) while suffering commutes.

I didn't investigate alternatives for audio. If I were riding a bus, I would use DuoLingo app (which I found almost addicting).

I've heard "How to win friends and influence people" mentioned regularly. What impact did it have on you, if you don't mind me asking?

The book describes principles of good communication. When you read it, you think, "Duh." However, many of the points and methods described were not how I, nor people I knew, behaved when interacting with others.

It's not easy to answer your question simply, but I can say it started for me with just remembering to consider, "What does this other person want?" There are many ways this is described in life, such as "Put yourself in their shoes", but I was shocked to realize how rarely I approached situations with that consideration.

The stories used for illustration are rather quaint and wordy, but they do the job nicely. Plus, we tend to respond to anecdotes better than just rules.

It's a short book, and IMO something that should be taught (and practiced) as a class in middle school.

Thank you for responding. It sounds really interesting and I think I could use something like that, I've purchased it on Audible and will listen to it next.

When you were doing the Pimsleur courses, how far did it help you progress? Did it stick with you?

I went through the first two CDs of German I and French I, but because I'm a driver who automatically prioritizes driving first, I was only half-attentive to the language courses. That said, what was on those two CDs, if I started hearing the phrases again, would come right back.

I didn't stick with it, however, because I moved to Netherlands :).

Well I'm going to give it a go. Thank you for posting above, you've put me on to two valuable resources. :)

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