Language Learning
- Watch a movie in a foreign language with the subtitles in English, cover the subtitles, and quiz yourself after every sentence they speak.
- Go to the mall in a foreign country and ask different people the same question to train yourself how to listen to their responses.
- Use a spaced repetition system to memorize and quiz yourself on vocabulary.
- Read a book in a foreign language while also listening to the audio to force yourself to move at a normal pace through the book.
MORE IDEAS FROM THE ARTICLE
... is by far the most effective method for rapidly improving your abilities at any skill.
It requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.
- Find a teacher or a 'substitute.
- Assess your limits.
- Set SMART goals.
- Practice with focus.
- Get feedback.
- Repeat, while maintaining motivation.
- Look at an app’s UI, logo, color scheme, etc., hide it, then try to redesign it on your own from memory. Compare your design to the original.
- Copy a work you like by drawing over it, then try to recreate it on your own. Compare your recreation to your copy, where were you weakest?
- Use YouTube tutorials by skipping to the end, trying to reproduce it on your own, then watching the tutorial to help improve where your attempt was weaker.
Come up with three different sales copy for a landing page, try to rank how they’ll perform relative to each other, then compare the results after testing.
- Use a speed reading app to force yourself beyond your reading comfort zone while testing yourself for comprehension, and slowly up the speed as you’re comprehending things accurately.
- After reading a book, or section of a book, close it and try to write a quick summary or bullet points of what you learned.
- Force yourself to start sentences over if you use filler words such as “like” “um” “uh” etc.
- Give presentations with no words on the slides, only images.
- Video tape yourself presenting and watch it to identify weak points.
- Try other kinds of speaking such as stand up comedy, improv, dramatic interpretation.
- Try stopping people on the street and keeping them entertained for as long as possible, using body gestures, excited speaking, etc
- Forbid yourself from using certain kinds of words, such as adjectives or adverbs.
- Force yourself to write from a different perspective than you usually do, or in a different style.
- Break up someone else’s writing and try to reproduce it on your own, such as by trying to recreate their structure, word choice, or other elements.
- Writing articles or stories within a certain fixed timeframe.
- Force yourself to convey ideas in extremely compact forms, like tweets or haikus.
RELATED IDEAS
A popular training program among newbies at the gym is the ‘starting strength’, where the routine and techniques change every few days or weeks, in order to avoid plateaus and maximize strength gains.
It helps to switch and mix up the exercise and uses the theory of constraints to avoid any particular muscle group becoming a bottleneck.
The term "deliberate practice" is mostly attributed to Karl Anders Ericsson, an influential figure in the field of performance psychology. Deliberate practice turns amateurs into professionals. It creates top performers in any field.
Doing something regularly but mindlessly is not the same as practicing it. Deliberate practice means repeatedly performing a set of activities with the intention of improving the specific skill.
Give yourself breaks in between practice sessions.
Even professional athletes and performers take time between sessions to recharge so they can maintain the right quality level during practice.