“Learn Anything Lite” is now available on the App Store!
I’m happy to announce that a fully functional free version of “Learn Anything” is now available:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-anything-free/id454178090?mt=8
The only difference between the full version and the free version are a few ads, and the number of loops that can be stored at any one time on your device: with the full version you can download and create as many learning loops as you wish to access at any time directly on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. The free trial version of Learn Anything allows one lone loop to be stored on your device – but you can still create as many new loops as you wish, as long as you upload each one to the Loop Library before creating the next. The trial version will also download loops (made by yourself or others) from the Loop Library – as long as you delete existing downloaded loops before you download another.
So now there’s no excuse not to try out this revolutionary education tool to help you learn ANYTHING – I am sure that once you have grasped the “Learn Anything” concept you will want to upgrade to the full version to take full advantage of the infinite learning possibilities that Learn Anything provides. Please also feel free to create an account on this site and let me know what you think of Learn Anything – or send an email directly from within the app under “Feedback” in the “Study” screen.
Happy Learning!
“Learn Anything” is now on the App Store!
I am very excited to announce that Apple have approved Learn Anything on the App Store!
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-anything/id454172620?mt=8
I hope you’ll agree that “Learn Anything” is a groundbreaking piece of software: most educational applications on the App Store sell static content, and you learn it – “Learn Anything” is different; we are not providing the content for you to learn… YOU ARE!
And the icing on the cake is that once you’ve created a tailor-made learning tool for precisely the subject you wish to study, you can then share it for free with other Learn Anything users. Over time we hope to build a large online library of UGLC (user generated learning content) in all languages on all subjects – and create a truly Global Learning Community.
Hopefully by now you have gathered what Learn Anything is all about (if not – it’”s a tool to learn… anything!), and I’d like to take this opportunity to provide a little history.
If there’s one thing that my education (long and noteworthy, at least on paper) taught me… it was how to learn. I’ve learned Chinese, French, Piano, Maths, Saxophone, Flute, Martial Arts, Programming… and many other very varied activites – and all to quite a high, and in many cases professional level. The more I have learned, the more I realized how important it was to have a method for successful learning – of course there is no “secret”… but there are certain keys that make learning far easier; and the most important key is this:
“Practice DOES NOT make perfect – PERFECT PRACTICE makes perfect”.
You can practise something a million times, but if you are doing it badly then you’ll simply learn to do it badly. So the trick here is to practice looping small amounts of the subject to be learned, SLOWLY. Think “Tai Chi”… Only when you can do something well slowly will you be able to do it well fast – any musician knows this to be true. Since my musical studies started aged 6 (and continue to this day) I’ve had a reasonable amount of experience in this domain (from jazz to celtic traditional music), and I believe that the way music has been traditionally handed down from generation to generation is very revealing.
I’d like to share with you my first experience of learning an Irish tune…. A well-known scottish drummer pulled out his fiddle after a jazz gig, gave me my first pennywhistle… and played through a traditional tune called “Maid behind the bar”. Once he had finished he said we were going to learn it by heart – “Now? You must be kidding!” was my first reaction… I’d never played any Irish music, and I wanted the music in front of me; the idea of being able to memorize the entire tune by ear there and then seemed crazy. About 30 minutes later we were playing the tune together. How did I learn the tune so fast? We looped the first two bars slowly – once I had it down, we looped the next two bars, and once that was memorized we looped the first 4 bars… we then repeated the process 1 or 2 bars at a time until we were playing the whole piece. For any particularly tricky passages we looped maybe just 4 or 8 notes for a few minutes until they became second nature… this is a technique I have used for as long as I can remember to iron out the glitches when playing difficult finger combinations on flute or saxophone. Loop a very small chunk slowly, gradually accelerate, and when you hit a glitch start varying the rhythm and articulation…
The same approach is useful for learning any physical activity – martial arts often require the student to learn long sequences of movements in a specific order. Again, the answer is to break the content down into chunks which can be looped, worked upon in detail, slowly, until you are ready to link with the next section of your kata… and the next section…
Learning Chinese provides another interesting insight into how the brain works. With the above subjects we were using “motor memory” to aid the memorization process; as the old saying goes “it’s like riding a bike”. With vocabulary, however, we have a different challenge because the “motor memory” aspect is largely missing. In any language it is quite easy for most people to memorize a list of 20 words by heart – but the problem is that 2 weeks later most people have forgotten 90%. Fortunately there are other techniques to help us here, one of the most important being:
“Memory Association”
To take a very simple example from learning Chinese, most people will remember for many years after reading this sentence that “人“ means a “person” and that ”大“ means big – just imagine the former is a simplified drawing of a person, and the latter is a person with outstretched arms saying “it was THIS BIG!”. Clearly, that is a very simple example; but with a little imagination, and some practice, you can create vivid mental images to associate to nearly anything.
Using memory association to link an image to a concept, noun, verb, persons name, or whatever you are trying to learn is a very useful technique which opens up interesting possibilities because we can now link one mental image to the next in order to learn long sequences of information IN THE CORRECT ORDER! Many of you will be familiar with the ancient memory system that assigns objects to areas of a room which you know well, and others will have learned 1) Bun 2) Shoe 3) Tree 4) Door… these are memory association techniques to help you learn large amounts of information in a particular order. The latter even enables you to instantly recall which item was where in the list.
Again, the key to these memory association techniques is vivid, meaningful mental images that can be linked either to the content to be learned if the order is not important (eg vocabulary lists), or to the content AND the following image if you need to remember the content in a particular sequence (eg a poem or wedding speech)
Learn Anything allows you to harness all these approaches by assigning images to the “phrases” to be learned – check out “The Daffodils” on the Video Tour” page of this site for an example of how you could use images saved from the web to illustrate key words in each phrase. As long as you can create a vivid mental storyline that links: Cloud, Crowd, Lake, Milky Way (the chocolate bar might be better!), Stretch, 10,000 bucks, Waves, Little Britain… then you will soon be able to recall the entire poem in order: your story might go like this:
I’m lying in field of Daffodils looking up at the sky… when I see a single cloud… suddenly I’m on that cloud, but there’s a whole load of people appearing there with me until a huge crowd has assembled, getting too heavy for the cloud which crashes to earth forming a beautiful lake with us all swimming around in it beneath willow trees… but by now we are all tired so we start eating Milky Way chocolate bars… and so on. The more ridiculous and vivid your mental film is, the more chance you have of remembering the content.
You’ll also find that by using Learn Anything to loop short sections, your brain will start recalling the next item before you’ve even tried to recall it. Gradually increase the length of the sections you are memorizing, and before long you will amaze yourself… In learnanything you can use “Repeat with Me” mode to start with, and when you start to know by heart the material you are learning switch to “Listen’n'Repeat” to give you a chance to practice recall.
This brings me to my final point in this post:
Learn, Revise, Recall
The act of recall reinforces memorization. This is important! Ideally, revision for most content should take place at regular, increasingly distant intervals; for vocabulary I like to revise a few hours later, then the next day, then a week later, then a month later…
“Recall” is a vital part of the memorization process: To relate this to music again – one concert is worth 10 rehearsals. Once you have recalled a tune by heart in a real playing situation then the confidence this gives you actually boosts your memory in the future – deep down it seems that you accept that you do actually know the tune, and the inner voice that nags at you saying “you’re going to forget the next part…” fades away. Until you have recalled the piece from memory in a real situation you will doubt – and doubt is not good for recall! Languages work exactly the same way – if you learn a new word, then actually use it a few times in real situations then that word becomes your friend… not just a word on a list that must be learned… a friend that you can trust and rely on to pop out just when you need him!
Another great example is names & faces. How often have you been introduced to someone only to forget their name 5 seconds later?
The first thing to notice here is that when this happens, you probably DIDN’T EVEN LISTEN to their name -usually because you were so busy thinking that you would never remember it anyway… and even if you do hear it, you can’t recall it later.
The trick here is simply to LISTEN, and REPEAT! You don’t have to actually use their name out loud (although it does help) – you can do it mentally and even add some “memory association” tricks I mentioned above to link a phonetic from their name with something particular about that person. The trick is to RECALL their name at least once soon after being introduced.
I hope you enjoy the videos on this site that demonstrate the potential of Learn Anything, and I look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions – and hopefully downloading some Learning Loops that you have created!
Neil