How to Learn Things by Yourself | Hacker News Reader

How to Learn Things by Yourself

brunothedev.github.io

30 pointsbrunothedev15 comments

I learn a lot of stuff of my own but I have to admit for almost everything in hind sight I probably would of been better off doing it the proper way. There is no better setting than a classroom, that meets regularly, with an experienced professional who takes the art of teaching seriously showing you how to do something and being surrounded by other beginners and watching their mistakes.

Well said.

During Covid I learned a good amount of Chinese sitting home alone.

When I had the chance to sign up for an evening class, the rate of learning exploded.

When I finally had the chance to visit China, there was no comparison to the immersion.

"Learning things by yourself" is amazing when that is all you have.

It means you're never completely limited.

But it isn't a substitution for an immersive learning environment.

True. But doing a class with no practice outside class is also pretty limited. Living in China is the best way to learn the language, but only if you put in the effort too. I knew plenty of westerners who lived in China but put no effort in to learn the language. You have to do both immersion and study by yourself.

The thing is that sometimes you don't have access to a classroom

I've been using online tutors to help with online courses and it's been a great pairing. It's unbelievable the level of academic expertise you can get online for a reasonable price.

I agree with the technique of divide and conquer, but those links are really hard to see! Bright blue on a dark blue background, oof!

ctrl+A helped me

I kinda just ham fisted catppuccin here, gonna change the link color ASAP

If there were self hosted options of unstuckstudy.com and notebooklm.google.com or a combination of both then we'd have a good option for home study. NotebookLM has good potential to summarize and analyze information, but I hope they extend this feature for use as a full blown teaching assistant or tutor, especially with its engaging dialog because it is that upbeat voice dialog that keeps me awake as opposed to just watching a boring youtube video or reading a boring book, since most of these are really boring and don't engage the audience, especially those made with education in mind.

I've been meditating on the idea of using an LLM or Python to automatically generate Anki cards from source materials like PDFs.

I feel like this is the wrong approach. I say a lot of the benefit of flash cards comes that you’re supposed to be writing your own because the heavy lifting that comes from thinking about what to include on them is really good for your learning, or at the very least it helps you look back at what you thought was key to remember.

Can confirm, this is why i considered it a alternative to note-taking, and i fell no one wants to automate note-taking.

I’d say the real benefit of flashcards is being reminded of the content at specific intervals, helping reinforce what you’ve learned over time. Writing them can be useful, but the real power of flashcards comes from spaced repetition, which strengthens memory and recall by revisiting material at optimal times.

use LLMs and dont read books... got it...

rip deep knowledge

When did i say to not read books? I said that it is much more efficient to find a particular part talking about a subdivision you want to learn, also, why is LLMs by itself bad? Is there any alternative to it that is not expensive nor hard to find?

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