

Learning New Information Is Easier When It Is Composed of Familiar Elements - akbarnama
http://neurosciencenews.com/familiarity-memory-learning-2433/

======
ThomPete
It's also called analogies and I am not sure why that required a study to find
out, but perhaps it's more the science behind they are looking for.

Seymour Papert wrote an amazing book called "Mindstorms: Children, Computers,
And Powerful Ideas" which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in
this field.

------
madaxe_again
Something of a "no shit" paper. I'd wager that students who studied algebra
before calculus did better than students who were made to do calculus having
never learned algebra.

~~~
bildung
_> I'd wager that students who studied algebra before calculus did better than
students who were made to do calculus having never learned algebra._

And you'd win :) The type of learning you describe differs from the types of
learning most (to my knowledge pretty much all) neuro scienctists are
researching, though. You describe meaningful learning, neuroscientists
research the rat-in-a-maze-types (associative and instrumental learning).

They work in fundamentally different ways. You probably know that "aha" moment
when you suddenly grasp a new concept. Most often, this pretty much equals
meaningful learning. You mull over some content, and once your mind can make
sense of it, you have "leaned" it. No need for rote learning at all.

Associative (and instrumental) learning works completely absent of meaning.
It's just pattern matching between e.g. stimuli and responses. Rat pushes a
button, food drops into the cage. After 20 repetitions, rat learns that a
causes b.

The article describes students rembering Chinese characters without being able
to read Chinese, so no meaning involved.

~~~
natsukaze
Of course there is a meaning in chinese characters.

Once you get that 木 is a tree (which is pretty easy to see), you might figure
that 林 is woods and 森 is a forest, even though 森 will look wildly complicated
for someone who never really looked at chinese characters. People are learning
to read chinese like this for thousands of years, and instead of remembering
12 individual brushstrokes for 森 you just need to remember that it's 3 trees.

~~~
madaxe_again
It's also book in Kanji, and I've always thought it looks more like a book
with its leaves hanging open - even though the pictogram is indeed a tree.

~~~
z2
You may be thinking of 本 :)

It actually has a much more complicated and varied etymology than that of
'tree'.

[http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?subm...](http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?submitButton1=Etymology&characterInput=%E6%9C%AC)

~~~
drivers99
The Heisig method is very good at getting you to be able to remember the
differences between characters, in particular how to write them. (To keep it
on topic...) it is based on building up the characters from previously learned
components ("radicals"). It also builds on your existing knowledge of English
because you learn the radicals and characters with English keywords. The idea
is to learn the characters in English first, so that you'll have that as a
base of knowledge to learn the actual language.

[1] a good intro:
[http://akitajet.com/wiki/Heisig_Method](http://akitajet.com/wiki/Heisig_Method)
if you want to try the method I would suggest picking up Remembering the Kanji
volume I and then utilizing [http://kanji.koohii.com](http://kanji.koohii.com)
for the mnemonic "stories" and to practice with their spaced repetition
method.

------
copsarebastards
Also in the news: sky blue, grass green.

------
power
There is less new information to learn if it can be encoded using already
learned elements, so this is as expected.

