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Articles tagged "learning".

The Prettier Your Mistake Notebook, the Less It Works — How to Build a Retest Device, Not a Fair Copy

2026-07-24 18:30:00 · Learning

Question the standard advice to "copy your mistakes neatly into a notebook." Rewriting, transcribing, and rereading feel like studying but have repeatedly been reported among the least efficient methods for retention; what works, the research says, is retrieval practice — recalling without looking — and spaced repetition — retrying just as you start to forget. So design your mistake notebook not as a fair-copy album but as a personal retest device: a three-way diagnosis for selecting which mistakes get in, a format that bans copying model answers, a next-day → 3-day → 1-week re-solving template, a strike-through graduation rule after two spaced consecutive correct answers, and a hard cost cap of 3 minutes per problem, 10 minutes per day — each step with the "why" behind it.

Don't Save Past Papers for a Final Test of Ability — Open Them on Day One: When to Start, How Many Years, How Many Passes

2026-07-23 18:00:00 · Exam Prep

This column replaces the received wisdom that past papers are something you solve in the final stretch, as a test of ability, once your skills have matured. A past paper is not a scoring device to place at the end of your studies — it is a map to open on day one. How to extract the question format, point weighting, and time limit from the most recent year on your very first day; benchmarks for how many years to work through for university entrance exams, TOEIC, Eiken, and professional certifications; a three-pass design that separates measurement, execution practice, and error recovery; a backward-planning formula from exam day; a year-by-section score matrix for locating weaknesses; and the three things you must not do. Every step comes with the reason it works.

When You're Slumping, Your Self-Assessment Loses Its Ground Twice Over

2026-07-20 18:00:00 · Learning

When you're in a slump, you can't recall what you actually did — or what you'd meant to do. Both the numerator and the denominator vanish, and all that's left is the feeling that you failed. When I actually counted the records, I'd published nine articles and about 52,000 characters in the month from June 22. And yet the open-source release I'd publicly promised was genuinely undelivered. Here are eight steps for re-running your self-assessment on records instead of memory, plus the things I've forbidden myself.

AI Writes the Code. So Humans Hold the Meaning Inside — For Now

2026-07-11 17:10:00 · Learning

Now that AI writes the code, self-study's old walls — setup, errors, no one to ask — have melted. In their place is a new gap: you can have it built, but you don't understand it. AI tends to think 'as long as it runs.' So understanding the meaning inside, and directing AI precisely, becomes the engineering that's left. But the future forks — an honest take.

How to Actually Work Through a Problem Set — Go Rough on the First Pass, the Real Work Starts on the Second

2026-07-01 18:00:00 · Learning

How much a problem set moves your score depends less on how many questions you solved than on how you cycled through them. Solve everything without timing yourself on the first pass, carry only the wrong ones into the second, and repeat the third pass until they're fully solved. A step-by-step guide — with the reasoning behind each step — to combining the grade-level drills, topic-based question sets, the review list, and the Impact department on passed.jp's English problem set.

When Self-Taught Programming Won't Stick: Rebuild With Systems, Not Willpower

2026-06-30 18:00:00 · Learning

Self-taught programming doesn't stall because of talent or willpower — it stalls because of structure. The people who keep going don't rely on grit; they rely on systems. The three structural reasons you break, six systems for keeping self-study alive, and a field guide to the most common places you get stuck and how to get out.

When Your Studying Stalls: Restart With Systems, Not Willpower

2026-06-11 20:35:00 · Learning

When your progress flatlines, most people blame themselves for a lack of motivation. But a plateau isn't a matter of talent or grit. Treat motivation as a consumable, and rebuild with systems instead: make one metric visible, raise the load by one notch, and bring the friction of starting to zero. Three concrete moves, grounded in real experience.

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