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Comment by 3jckd | Hacker News Reader

I can subscribe to this. Whenever I needed to learn or revise something, I would just write it down again, usually paraphrasing the original material.

While I wouldn't use that material directly ever again, I noticed that I would often paraphrase a paraphrase, so to speak, because I would remember some of the material.

Tangentially, this thread shows that people prefer different ways of taking (or not taking notes) usually due to a habit itselfc as opposed to superiority of one method over the other. It reminds me of Dvorak vs qwerty, while technically superior for typing in English, the cost of switching is not worth it for most people out there.

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Although I must admit that most classmates find it horrific ("you're throwing away all the notes?!") so there must he some personal differences, I can honestly say I have never seen anyone learn from laid back magazine reading so many students do, that glazed over look while they try to mechanically reach the last page. Same goes for listening or watching or any other passive reception of material.

Learning is a function of production or reproduction of knowledge, not consumption. I stand by this regardless of "learning style".

Discussing with classmates, solving problems, reciting out loud, and taking notes are how you learn.

Absolutely - at the end of the day, it's "whatever works for you" in the context of personal learning/accreditation.

Do you feel that had you taken notes on an eReader / iPad with a pen input you would have similar effectiveness? I used to take notes for work in a small pad and found I didn't reference them often. I've recently tried moving to digital notes and there seems to be little friction to the switch with the exception of additional distraction (ie all those other apps).

Not OP, but I ditched taking notes on paper for the most part. I write stuff down on the iPad Pro (Notes and/or Notability) instead nowadays. It is easier to find and extract things and I can just archive them to the cloud when they are not needed anymore.

The only time I use paper is when I don't have the iPad on me and for personal journaling (for which I have a dedicated notebook anyway).

Same here. I've found the new iPad Pro + paper like screen protector to be a very near real experience with very little noticeable input lag for notes. Now, it is a very pricey alternative but agreed on all points.

I did consider the Boyue Likebook Muses [0], but figured for longevity the iPad may be the better buy. I did try the reMarkable and was very disappointed in it's price to performance/usability, at least for me. Little things like no backlight at that price point was hard to get over.

[0] https://goodereader.com/blog/product/boyue-likebook-muses-st...

I prefer the digital pen for sketching and doodling. I exclusively sketch on my Surface now. I also prefer digital reading because I don't have to carry a book around and I can ctrl-f. It's been years since I've bought a physical book.

However for taking notes I still prefer paper. It's really small aesthetic things like the texture of the paper and the no-latency ink. For some reason although taking notes with the digital pen results in better notes the experience of taking the notes is less pleasing to me.

Like I said I optimize for the best note-taking rather than taking the best notes. Once or twice when I was bored, I intentionally created illegible notes by writing in scribbles, or writing over a full sheet as if it was a new sheet.

Even creating illegible notes produced a learning outcome, and in some cases I felt the information stuck more because those notes were different and stimulating.

I'm inclined to agree about reproducing knowledge, however I've spent the last few years learning languages and learning languages is the exact opposite, where the majority of learning is done through simply inputting language.

For example see Krashen's ideas on language acquisition https://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html

Now this makes me feel like I hold a contradiction because the way I think about learning a language and learning math are opposite in this way.

Do you or others have any thoughts on this matter? Is it because we evolved some tailored machinery for acquiring language naturally as children, or because they are learnt the same "way", it's just that language is generally just a tremendous amount of associating stuff that it requires 100x more consumption. I guess one could naturally acquire the times tables over time if all combinations of a*b up to 10 come up in conversation enough times, but a general procedure for doing multiplication wouldn't be acquired magically.

Do you mean just being immersed in the language here rather than practicing/using it?

In some sense though, I imagine that when you hear something in a foreign language, you are actively making links to sounds or words that you think it may relate to (so in some sense, taking a mental note).

Growing up, I found that listening attentively in class and asking questions had me retain the most. Overly focusing on note-taking actually distracted me and those would usually be my worse day. I still took notes, however, most of the learning happened in the classroom and my notebook was the "textbook" that acted as my reference later.

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