

Learn Anything Faster With The Feynman Technique (2012) - zbravo
http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2012/04/learn-anything-faster-with-the-feynman-technique/

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asafira
As a current physics PhD student, I'd like to mention that this is exactly how
I've gone through my educational career. In physics, such simple terms go a
long long way, and to this day I still fall back on very simple ideas to
understand sophisticated systems (e.g., "Well, there is positive charge here,
so negative charge would want to get close to it", etc.). Many papers and many
people make things seem far more complicated than they are. Personally, I am a
huge fan of using colloquial language in describing things, as I think it
makes things far easier to parse and get something out of it that you feel
comfortable with.

I've seen a lot of success in my teaching, too, largely because of my effort
to keep things colloquial and down-to-earth. Too many teachers fall into the
trap of not falling back on things students are comfortable with when students
are not understanding the material (or, hell, maybe the teachers aren't
particularly comfortable with the subject matter). A huge part of my success
as a teacher is exactly that I try to see where the students' train of logic
gets derailed and take a step back in how abstract the explanation is there
while also providing ample motivation for that sort of thinking.

Lastly, I wanted to recommend a great resource for learning specifically
physics from a guy that is fantastic at explaining things in simple terms:
Walter Lewin. Walter Lewin is a professor at MIT, and has incredible video-
recorded lectures on electricity and magnetism (the class is 8.02). if you
have an ounce of interest, go watch some --- you won't regret it.

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crusso
_Many papers and many people make things seem far more complicated than they
are_

 _cough_ wikipedia _cough_

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iLoch
Many professors love making their students feel dumb for some reason.

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reeses
You can generalize that to "many people love making less experienced or
knowledgable people feel dumb."

Feel free to add qualifiers such as "experts", "position of authority",
"newcomers", and "it's tradition!"

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vubuntu
This is how I have intuitively learnt pretty much everything that I know so
far. Didn't know there is a name to this technique. The only way to know that
I understood something properly, is to try to explain it in my own
words/vocabulary/analogies. Mostly I would be thinking out loud to myself or
writing down/drawing flow chart etc, during such 'absorb info & explain'
phase. Sometimes sounding off to a friend or colleague also helps.

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crystaln
TLDR: Learn what you're trying to learn well enough that you can write it in
your own words.

Feynman was wonderfully intelligent, but I'm not sure he deserves to be named
the inventor learning.

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tbarbugli
this works great for me!

