Scott H Young

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The Best Articles on Learning

Learning matters to everything you do in life. Here are the best articles I’ve written on the subject.

The 5 Best Articles

Although I’ve written hundreds of articles on the subject, if you’re not sure where to start, read these five:

  1. How to Start Your Own Ultralearning Project – PART 1
    How to Start Your Own Ultralearning Project – PART 2 The process behind taking on ambitious projects to learn hard things.
  2. The Complete Guide to Memory Everything you need to know about the science behind long-term memory.
  3. How to Learn a Language in Record Time How I’ve learned Chinese, Spanish, French, Korean, Portuguese and more.
  4. The Feynman Technique [VIDEO] How to understand difficult ideas.
  5. Five Scientific Steps to Ace Your Next Exam The science behind the right way to study.

Ultralearning

Ultralearning is a strategy for aggressive, self-directed learning. My book shares the science and stories behind people who’ve accomplished big things through learning hard subjects in unique ways:

Here are some of the initial articles which motivated the book and explain the concept:

In addition to writing about ultralearning, I’ve also taken on my own ultralearning projects. Here are my more popular projects:

  • The MIT Challenge. My project to learn MIT’s 4-year computer science undergraduate curriculum, which I did over 12 months from October 2011 to September 2012.
  • The Year Without English. Learning Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and Korean by avoiding speaking English for an entire year.
  • Portrait Drawing Challenge. Thirty days devoted to trying to improve my ability to draw faces well.
  • Let’s Learn Quantum Mechanics. One month to learn the basics of quantum mechanics. This entire project was livestreamed as well–so there’s a complete record of what I did to learn it.

Holistic Learning

Before ultralearning, one of my more popular ideas on learning was holistic learning. This approach to learning things argues that learning through making connections, analogies, examples and pictures leads to a better understanding than rote memorization.

My book Learn More, Study Less, is largely about this approach to learning.

Here are some popular articles I wrote on holistic learning.

Side note: Although holistic learning was (and remains) one of my more popular ideas about learning, I feel like my more recent work is better grounded in the scientific research of how learning actually works. I still think there’s some useful ideas here, but if my current writing and past writing occasionally contradict it’s usually because I learned something about learning which changed my mind!

Complete Guides on the Science of Learning

Want to know how learning really works? I’ve collaborated with cognitive science PhD student Jakub Jilek to produce some longer essays on the science behind learning:

Here are some other articles, dealing with specific facets of the science of learning:

How to Learn Specific Subjects and Skills

In addition to writing about learning generally, I’ve written a number of articles about how to learn specific subjects, or how to deal with specific learning challenges:

Tools for Learning Faster and More Effectively

Struggling to learn something hard? Here are some of the best tools for learning hard skills and subjects:

Big Ideas on Learning

Beyond tactics and tools, here are some of my best articles about my philosophy of learning and how to approach learning new things:

Start with an explanation

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