Reddit Reddit reviews Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

We found 8 Reddit comments about Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Memory Improvement Self-Help
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
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8 Reddit comments about Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything:

u/SuikaCider · 446 pointsr/languagelearning

Edit: Apparently I had nothing better to do than this evening, so here's a wall of text. Hope it's useful for you.

EditII: Didn't expect so many people to look at this, either.. so I'll say: this isn't an in depth zero-to-hero guide for Japanese, this is just a tidy gathering of the path I took to learn Japanese to my current level (minus a few textbooks), which is definitely still very far from fluent. I'm personally learning Japanese for its literature, and the vast majority of what I did was aimed at getting into books as fast as possible (cough Heisig cough) -- if you don't care about reading, I'll be the first to say that a lot of what's here might not be interesting to you. Google around and see if my suggestions fit your learning style or not. Japanese is weird in that there are literally resources for everything, so I'm sure there's something that fits you.

EditIII: Just wanted to link the DJTguide, a library of tons of resources organized into different skills and stuff. If you don't like my suggestions, I'd personally start here to find something else.

intro -- textbook stuff -- post-textbook stuff -- tutoring -- loose timeline

I have lived in Japan (for school) for two years, speaking nothing before I arrived (fully intended on going to Spain instead lol)...and am now somewhere between N2/N1, which is the level of fluency required to work with Japanese businesses/join a Japanese-conducted program. At this point no conversation is a problem, I can read modern literature for enjoyment (older stuff literally employed a partially different language and requires its own study), and follow movies/comedy shows/anime without subtitles if I'm pay attention.

I didn't try nearly as hard as I could have, so I honestly think you could reach my level of "fluency" if you make a religion of it -- a research student at my university came speaking nothing one year ago and now speaks notably better than I do across the board (on behalf of being forced to communicate with people for like 12 hours a day). Granted, you don't have the luxury of multiple Japanese people needing to communicate with you in order to do their job, and thus adjusting their language to your level to communicate with you all day every day... but I still think you can learn enough in a year to thoroughly enjoy yourself, at the very least.

Here's how I'd do that.

Textbook Stuff

  1. Read The Kanji -- don't use this for kanji. Make a free account, use it to learn the Hiragana and Katakana (two of Japanese's three alphabet systems; 48 characters each and phonetic. One is for Japanese-origin words, the other is for loan words and other random things). It just throws flash cards at you with each of the symbols; you can probably commit them to memory in a few hours. It's okay if you forget a few or several or even most of them at first; you're going to see these things so often that they'll be impossible to forget before long. We're just shooting to prime your passive memory so that you'll see a word written, have your curiosity irked, and be able to work it out, connecting that forgotten information to more and more recent memories to help remember them. Plus, this is a model for your year as a whole -- contextually acquiring passive understanding that stretches your boundaries, then diving back inwards and working to solidify passive knowledge that has become useful for your current situation or will allow you to express something you want to express currently, into knowledge that gradually becomes active.

  2. Buy Genki I, its workbook, Genki II, and its workbook. This will walk you from knowing absolutely no Japanese at the beginning of Genki I, and while mileage varies, I was personally able to make sense of ShiroKuma Cafe (see the link in the next section) upon completing Genki II. I'm currently taking the first "advanced" level Japanese course at my uni, meaning that I have had the opportunity to talk with other "advanced" (apostraphes meaning take with a grain of salt, looking at myself) learners about how they learned Japanese, and the Genki series is by and large the crowd favorite.

  3. Buy Heisig, or you can probably find a version somewhere on the interwebs....... make an account at Kanji Koohii (a site where people work together progressing through Heisig, mainly by sharing the mneumonics they make for the kanji), and otherwise follow the instructions on Nihongo Shark's Blog. He suggests to completely put learning Japanese on hold till you finish the 2200 Kanji in this deck in 97 days, but I think that's ambitious as is, and eats too much of your year up. So I personally would say learn 15 a day, every day, until you finish -- that will have you finishing in around 5 months, you'll be on target with the 6 months I'm plotting out for Genki I + II even if you miss a few days. (see below).

  4. Others might disagree and you can make up your own mind, but I personally think learning the Kanji is essential. They take time to learn at first, but repay you dividends later on when you accumulate vocabulary basically without thinking, passively, by reading or watching subtitled shows. Plus, any resource you'll use past the beginner stage will require kanji.. meaning if you don't learn them, you can't use these resources, and gimp yourself down the road. They're incredibly logical and like legos; the resources in #3 basically talk about the most efficient way to build things out of those legos (to help remember what each lego is). Also look into Moonwalks with Einstein if you'reinterested in memory in general. The thing about Kanji is that they unlock Japanese, as every single Kanji has a unique meaning, and Japanese words are basically simple definitions of themselves. Take fire extinguisher, for example: 消火器。It literally means extinguish-fire-utensil/tool. Good luck understanding a random word like that in any other language at first sight, but it's easy in Japanese, and the vast majority of Japanese words are exactly like this. Learning the Kanji allows you to take a word you've never seen before, instantly have a reliable guess as to what it means... and depending on your familiarity with the Kanji, maybe even how to read it. This happens to a lesser extent in conversation, also. Kanji are a new system of logic, but once you adjust to it, it's pure magic -- eventually, you sort of stop needing to study vocabulary, because you can just read and passive understand most any word (which you'll eventually work into your active vocabulary). I talk about "The First 2000 Words" in #5, and basically, words give you diminishing returns -- they're a lot of bang for your buck at first.. but past 6,000, 10,000, 20,000 ... learning 10 or 100 or even 1,000 new words might not give you noticeable improvement.

  5. This anki deck is Genki in Example Sentences; pace your daily reviews so that you'll be going in time with your progression through chapters in the book. I really, really wanted to link you The Core 2k(the first 2000 most frequent words of Japanese) because I really liked it and the first 2000 words make up a significant majority of daily conversations (we repeat a lot of the same things over and over, the same bread and butter structures, laced and spiced with more rare nouns, then descriptive words, and the occasional verb)......... but I also think that context is the biggest key when it comes to language learning, and the 2k doesn't have that for you right now. It's eventually going to outpace your Kanji studies (if I'm recalling how I studied accurately), and more importantly, the word order does not follow Genki. You're going to be spending a lot of time with Genki for 6 months, the pace that I want you to complete these words in. You're already going to be stretched thin, so I guess I'm going to recommend you take that Genki deck and use it as a supplement to help you get more out of Genki -- it looks like it's going to take, on average, ~25 cards per day. I don't know if that's ideal, but then again, I stuck with Genki until I finished Genki (no other resources, began Hesig - also below - about 2/3 of the way through), and I began watching Shirokuma Cafe (below) immediately after Genki II, able to (at first, painfully) understand it... and I think I'm just a normal dude, if you're also a normal dude -- or, better, a better than average dude -- I guess Shirokuma should be good for you, too, after Genki II and this Genki Deck.
u/Shibidybow · 12 pointsr/IWantToLearn

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004H4XI5O/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

This is something that I've been working on and it's a work in progress so I make no claim to being an expert. This book was offered to me as a way of learning a new paradigm for how memory works and i'm giving it a shot. It's something that I already did at a smaller level to remember things. It's given me a deeper understanding and more tools for the toolbox. Good luck!

u/MmmMeh · 3 pointsr/LifeProTips

Yep. This method has been used apparently for millennia, and is still considered the best way. ("Memory Palace" is a more common name, but it has many less common names.)

See "Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything"

> ...follows Joshua Foer's compelling journey as a participant in the U.S. Memory Championship.

> The techniques he mastered made it easier to remember information, and Foer's story demonstrates that the tricks of the masters are accessible to anyone.

http://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-Everything-ebook/dp/B004H4XI5O/

Or lots of other books...I see "The Memory Palace":

http://www.amazon.com/The-Memory-Palace-Everything-Shakespeare-ebook/dp/B007V3FLTE

Edit: here's the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

u/Gleanings · 2 pointsr/freemasonry

Recommended books:

Solomon's Memory Palace:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B079HMMCKH

Learning Masonic Ritual:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DDT0S5C

Fun read on memory work, probably at your local library, Moonwalking with Einstein:
https://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-Everything-ebook/dp/B004H4XI5O

...where he refers to the older sources Rhetorica ad Herennium: https://www.amazon.com/Rhetorica-ad-Herennium-Cicero-ebook/dp/B01IKZN3XW

and the sources summarized in Art of Memory by Frances Yates:
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Memory-Frances-Yates-ebook/dp/B005TKD6UC/

The Medieval Craft of Memory looks interesting, but no time to read so far:
https://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Craft-Memory-Anthology-Pictures-ebook/dp/B01AXLJDJ4

More modern approaches to the techniques are on:
https://artofmemory.com/

u/AquaQuartz · 1 pointr/getdisciplined

I recently read a book called A Mind for Numbers. It specifically is targeted at people in school who are struggling in difficult subjects (STEM specifically, but the techniques are applicable to any subject). I definitely recommend you give it a read - I'm not in school anymore, but I have found it to be relevant to my own personal studies.

If you feel your memory is really bad, look into techniques to improve it. The TED talk linked by /u/tripledolan is a good place to start. You can read the book by that same guy, Moonwalking With Einstein. It's about the national memory championships, and how people train their memories to almost superhuman levels.

Finally, if you have access to a school counselor, maybe try making an appointment with them. Poor memory function is a symptom of depression, so that may be a root cause.

u/JesusGotJuice · 1 pointr/IWantToLearn

I suggest looking into the techniques that memorization champions utilize. They focus less on repetition and more on how they digest information. You can check out some books like Unlimited Memory or Moonwalking with Einstein.

u/sethra007 · 1 pointr/hoarding

Hi, Aimless_Wonderer!

Well, IMO there's a couple of ways to approach it.

  1. You said it yourself: the memory is "often something insignificant enough". You have to recognize that good and significant are two different things. Just because the memory is pleasant to recall doesn't mean it's significant enough to keep that item (or those several items, as the case may be) around cluttering up your house. If your brain has shuffled the memory over to the "Not Important" side of your brain, then that's a good indication that you can let the item(s) go.

  2. If you just can't bring yourself to get rid of the item, because you still want to recall the memory you've associated with it, you have some options:

  • If it's multiple items, whittle it down to one or two key things. For example, I made the decision a while back to keep my mom's airplane ticket stubs. I did NOT keep the gift bag that we used to give them to her, or the Fed-Ex envelope that they were delivered to me in. What for? The important item was the airplane ticket stub.
  • Take a picture of the item in question, and store it on your hard drive and/or in the cloud (via Dropbox or Box.com or something). That takes up a lot less room, and you still have the item in digital form.

    And while you're doing exploring those options, you can do exercises to improve your recall of that memory, maybe even try to associate it with another object that you have to keep.

    One of the things that Randy Frost and Gail Skeketee talked about in their book Stuff is that compulsive hoarders actually have extremely good memories. They're just convinced (for assorted emotional and psychological reasons) that they don't, and that they'll lose memories if they get rid of the items that trigger them. So before you get rid of the item in question, see what you can do to recall the memory without it. You're already capable of recalling the memeory, you just need to take control of what triggers it.

    When I was feeling blue, I would say to myself, "Let me try to remember something that made me very happy", and then consciously focus on recalling Ma's trip to Dallas. I would set aside a certain time everyday (the time spent walking the dogs after I got home) and not do anything except focus on happy memories to try to lift my mood. After a while, whenever my mantle clock dinged 7pm (time for walkies!), I would have all sort of happy memories just start bubbling up. Maybe that will work for you.

    There's some good books about memory improvement out there (I have not read this one, but it's on my To-Buy list) that you might want to look into, to understand how memory works and how you can get yours to do what you need.