Hacker News Reader

Side note, but much as I like Khan Academy overall, I've always struggled with Sal's slow and repetitive speaking style in the videos.

"Now you add the five ... [pause] ... add the five ... add the five to the seven ... to the seven..."

Running them at 1.5 - 2x helps a bit, but it's still annoying to the point that I find it very distracting.

View on HN

While it depends entirely on personal opinion, I believe that it helps significantly. It helps build up the problem/solution from the ground up and he goes through each step out loud to help a student understand. I get that some people hate it and think it is so childish for such simple steps. For other people, it helps a lot. Learning on KA works best if started aat a young age and done consistently (you get used to the style and you learn everything from the ground up).

In my case, it's not so much that I find it childish, it's that I find it incredibly distracting which means I can't focus as easily on the content. Instead of "oh, now I understand how that equation works" I catch myself thinking "why is he repeating the same word over and over - that's so annoying!". Then my brain starts obsessing over "when is he going to do it again?", even though I don't want it to. It's a bit like trying to deliberately ignore something. It becomes all you can think about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com