Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month | Hacker News Reader

Learning a new skill by putting in 45 minutes a day for a month

ideas.ted.com

98 pointssesellis41 comments

There was a time when I just loved TED talks. That has changed. I am not so sure why. But I think I got the feeling the insights I’m getting are not worth the time spent.

TED talks are infotainment. Pornography for people whose vice is feeling like they've been inspired and gotten smarter. In short, they ring false.

It feels like you're learning something, but the lesson plan was devised by a marketing department for the idea. It feels like the primary motivation is how good of a story can be told, and not the actual truth.

"Popular science" in all its forms – sucks. Leading people to believe things because they're told in a certain way that makes them feel good. The problem is you don't get to truth because the explanation is easy to understand and intuitive. Lies are easy when that kind of explanation is common.

When you're actually learning things, you need to be able to substantiate the facts, not just have statistics and study results thrown at you by an engaging speaker. In real science classes they make you drop balls and measure currents and synthesize chemicals and do calculations.

I also loved TED talks when I was younger.

There are still interesting talks...you have to weed through them though. David Byrne gave a talk about the history of acoustics which I found fascinating.

Absolutely, I'm talking about the collection as a whole, not necessarily every individual talk. The problems though are pretty pervasive and try hard to elicit that "I found fascinating" feeling, but you find more that accuracy and meaningfulness take a back seat to fascination.

I don't get this sentiment. https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/347104878/transf... What's wrong with something like this? I thought it was an amazing piece. They're all TED speakers with interesting stories to tell. Is it bad to be inspired by these stories now? Are we not allowed to learn from the experiences others have made, or to learn about their struggles, even if maybe we can't necessarily apply them to our own lives? I feel a distinct lack of empathy around here.

They've over-done it, especially with the TEDx content. As a result the quality has declined dramatically.

TED talks have been coopted into a promotional venue for 'clever people'.

It's an advertising platform aimed at a certain demographic: people who like science and tech and just so explanations for things.

I did however enjoy Rodney Mullen's talk immensely: https://www.ted.com/talks/rodney_mullen_pop_an_ollie_and_inn...

This pretty much sums up my thoughts about TED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tom6_ceTu9s

Hilarious!

TED talks are mainly a circle jerk now, it used to be partly a circle jerk before but now they aren't even pleasant to watch. You get the same pauses, the same dramatic pics with every single talk.

All you need to explain that is two phrases:

"So..."

and

"It turns out..."

Don't have 20 hours to learn something new? That's fine - all you need is 20 minutes to watch this video on your phone.

This is bad advice for people wanting to learn a musical instrument. It takes way more than 20 hours because much of what you do when you play say the mandolin has to become automatic in order for you to do it well. There are no shortcuts.

This is bad advice for people wanting to learn a musical instrument

This is amazingly good advice for those learning their first musical instrument. Because casual observation tells me that nearly no one spends that kind of time on an instrument starting out. If one spends 45 minutes a day practicing (not noodling) on an instrument for a month, I don’t think sounding reasonably decent on a tiny set of tunes can be avoided. Rhonda Vincent won’t be inviting you on stage for a mandolin duet, but you won’t embarrass yourself in front of friends.

Now, getting good? Well, yeah, that’s going to be that same 45 minutes a day for the next ten years. But after twenty hours I think one would earn the right to call themselves a mandolin player.

I think every advice can be malleable. Just getting started and seeing some results (whether its 20 hours, or 2000 hours) is what matters.

I would say after 20 hours is a good sample size and that you should have a good indication on -

1. Where your skill level really is

2. What your current aptitude for learning said skill

3. How you feel about learning the skill and potentially going forward

4. Where you would like to go next to further push that skill

From there you may revise the course that you're on (add or reduce the time invested).

For me, I do like having 45 mins chunk of time to work through a problem. Its give me time to understand the goal, and get invested. 45 mins tends to fly by so you're not fatigued afterwards. Then you can rest and reflect.

That's how I'm handling my trumpet work (learning scales and songs).

Nobody who wants to learn a skill wants to master it in 20 hours. The entire point of this article is that the 10000 hours number is a red herring.

Spending every single day learning something is the exact opposite of a shortcut, it requires a huge amount of discipline. 20 hours spread over 30 days should be more than enough to turn someone who doesn't know what a mandolin is into a novice mandolinist who knows what further steps he has to take to get better.

I learned to recognize hiragana and katakana like this. But learning the language itself took me a lot more time and effort. Had to practically immerse myself in Japanese 24/7.

I smashed out Hiragana in 4 hours flat. Learning the rest of the language took 3 years.

I do love the obvious wisdom that if you put a little bit of active effort as opposed to just passive consumption that you can build a skill and not just consume things. It's like those low hanging fruit are good but you're still in pain for another 180 hours until you've done your first 200 hours. That's usually when things start to get sustainably enjoyable because you know enough to not be constantly frustrated and can actually have fun no matter the remaining difficulty. Then once you hit the 2000 hour mark you're pretty much good.

> you're still in pain for another 180 hours until you've done your first 200 hours. That's usually when things start to get sustainably enjoyable because you know enough to not be constantly frustrated and can actually have fun no matter the remaining difficulty.

You can get there a bit earlier by carefully adjusting your practice difficulty to be closer to your comfort zone than the "real" skill you want to tackle and then slowly raising the bar as you get better.

For example, I wouldn't be able to understand any random Japanese sentence someone could throw at me right now, but I built a system to pick sentences from https://tatoeba.org that I should be able to understand based on the words they contain, and it's been very encouraging to notice how much I can understand already. The only problem being that I haven't found a good selection criterion yet. Optimizing for highest probability that I need to refresh at least one of the words in a sentence tends to produce very long "sentences", e.g. https://tatoeba.org/sentences/show/4752008

I used the Kanji Odessy 2001 Anki deck back in the day when you could get your hands on it. It was 2000 sentences with audio ordered such that each sentence followed the n+1 model. Hands down the best resource.

It still takes a few hundred hours to get through the pain period.

I think there is a Japanese Core 2000 deck which is of a similar nature.

Yeah. KO was way better tho. Such a shame it's not around anymore.

Is the system you wrote for this open-source? Sounds really really interesting.

I started working on it about 4 months ago and have been dog-fooding it since, but it's still in a pretty rough state.

Part of the problem is the quality of open-source language analysis tools. I use Open JTalk for text-to-speech on examples without available recordings (which is most of them) and sometimes it gets the pronunciation plain wrong. So I use a different program (Kuromoji) to get a written representation of the pronunciation, which it also frequently gets wrong but (hopefully) at different times than Open JTalk.

The other problem is that so far I've been the only user, and many things that should be configurable aren't (I expect the constantly looping audio to be high on the list of things people would want to change).

That said, if you're interested, I could write up a minimal readme file, slap on a license and push it to GitHub.

Fiance moved to my country and it was insane seeing her go from knowing the numbers 1 to 10 to being able to carry out discussions with my parents, doctors, people in public in less than 12 months. And we speak her native English at home.

She took a class (~1 hour/week for three months) which included forced conversations with a tutor for 10-15 minutes/week where they would talk freely about a subject and a simple written handin about the same topic at the 6 to 9 month mark and I'm really jealous I've never been able to adopt a language that effectively.

The main bottleneck to learning new skills is access to good feedback from experts or coaches, not time.

This is why I am learning tech stuff at light speed but music theory is painfully slow. I have experts everywhere at work who can point me in the right direction and give feedback but when learning stuff totally on my own it can be hard to work out what I should even work on or if I am aproching something in the right way.

When I first started teaching myself programming I wasted ages on pointless things that didn't get me anywhere.

Makes me wonder if there would be value in a cheaper form of university where instead of going through the whole process you just get access to experts you can talk to and ask your dumb questions.

I know there are a lot of places on the internet where you can ask questions but they tend to cater to experts only because most people don't like answering beginner questions that get asked 100 times unless they are paid to.

I really wish there was a platform to find top experts and ask them questions. Surprisingly enough, Twitch is one such channel. Jonathan Blow streams there some times, and I've asked him a lot of questions to which he gives detailed responses, because the question and answer is useful for all the viewers, and not a waste of his time, because it gives them a way to connect to their fans. Twitch is not meant for this though, and for instance, has no easy way to refer people to questions already answered, etc. But I think such a platform (video stream + text questions) with some modifications can provide this type of platform we're looking for.

I enjoyed his book "The First 20 Hours". Most of the content is how he specifically applied it to learn certain skills: Switching from Qwerty to Colemak keyboards, and learning to play Go were interesting. He also had a chapter of learning to program in 20 hours.

10,000 hours is for mastery not just learning

Well it's likely a little more complicated than that.

Either way my model is 20, 200, 2000. Those are 3 milestones (roughly) where you progress through different phases.

Going on about 10,000 hours for skills isn't meaningful for most people because almost no one will use that info to decide "this only takes 10,000 hours I think I'll master it." It only applies to the people who don't need the advice because they're naturally on the path of doing it anyway.

But 2000 hours you can sit down and have a real think about. After that it's diminishing returns for that last 5%~10% that will take 5x as long.

2000 / 20/WK = 100 weeks, or approx 2 years of part time hobby work. That's not too bad.

Where does the 2000 hour number come from BTW? I haven't seen it before.

Yeah, roughly 2 ~ 4 years. Call it 3. That's how I tend to think about skill acquisition.

Just personal experience of getting good at things over the years. It's a rough model and I'm happy for people to disagree if they want but the numbers aren't hard and fast they're more of a ballpark hueristic.

It's sort of a 4-tier order-of-magnitude pattern I suppose.

X0 hours (low hanging fruit)

X00 hours (pain period)

X000 hours (personal mastery)

X0,000 hours (world-class mastery)

10,000 hours checks out. At 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, that's 4.8 years to master say a technology, language, or software stack.

Very convenient that it’s a nice round number.

Erickssons original number was more like 10 years of daily deliberate practice increasing drom 0.5 to a max of 4/hours per day iirc for experienced people. It was roughly observational based on violinists and pianists. The original paper was interesting.

Yeah I think it was Gladwell (shocker) who shoehorned himself into the concept and made up the 10,000 hour rule.

Indeed. “10000 hours” rings as true as your average Ted Talk.

That's pretty much the first thing he says in the TED talk.

to be fair he takes about 10 minutes to say it

I find it takes 45 minutes to really get into some dense subjects. Without putting in the second, third, or fourth 45 min chunk that same evening, I'd personally have a hard time unless it was an easy task/subject.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com