Getting more from books

I read more books than the average person, but I often stumble trying to express more complex ideas and don't use a wide vocabulary. I know the meanings of plenty of words, but can't remember them to use the words in conversation. Last month I read a good book about Irish monks and classical literature, "How the Irish saved civilization" but thinking about it now I can barely remember the history or the names of people and places. How do you read in a way as to learn more, better than just reading the book from start to finish? I feel like with the amount of information I consume I should be smarter.

>>4016 Information consumption by itself doesn't really lead to anything unless you can properly process the information, and in order to learn to do that, you just have to practice. I guess one way to do that would be to try and recall everything from a given chapter right after reading it and then writing down your own thoughts about it in a journal.

>>4016 I'd highly recommend reading 'How to Read a Book' by Mortimer. It teaches you what you're trying to do.

the main answer to this is to take notes, then review them several times later to move more of the information to long-term memory: "Spitzer (1939) examined rates of forgetting textbook material and found that from the time of first learning information from a textbook, we forget almost 50% of information within one day, and up to 80% of the information within 2 weeks." writing things down both tests your recall of what you read and understood and also helps you remember more. also i think that cardio exercise immediately after learning something improves long-term memory recall, but a study found that it worked even better if you waited 4 hours between the learning and the workout.

also, what should help with the vocabulary issue is some "deliberate practice" exercisess, designed to help particularly with vocabulary. (probably could find some website that helps you do this.) i know you'd think that reading books and understanding the words would be enough, but it's the same reason why doodling 8 hours per day won't make you a great artist: you're not identifying and focusing on the specific skills you want to improve. if you're interested in more, there's a good book called Talent is Overrated that drives this concept home.

>>4016 > but can't remember them to use the words in conversation. What's the point? Even if we only take native speakers into account, absolute majority of them won't understand what those words mean. Even worse, they might misinterpret them in their own perverted, sick way (which by the way can happen even if you use simplest English). At the risk of sounding like an edgy teen who believes he is the smartest person to have ever lived, I've been avoiding to use 'difficult' words all my conscious life, and constantly trying to simplify my wording and speech patterns for people around me. There have been very few people in my life with whom I can speak as I would speak to myself for example. Hmm, anyways, just my 2 cents. At the end of the day, it's just for yourself and maybe for some other person you will meet every now and then. Also, maybe you're just not that interested in topic material? Do you sincerely hold interest in whatever you're reading, or do you think you 'should' read these certain books? Anyways, if your material is even somewhat mainstream, it's going to have comprehensive analysis, it's probably been digested and simplified in many ways, you can indulge in supporting materials so to speak. And generally approach with a clear understanding of what you want to extract from the book. Why are you reading it, is it a part of a larger picture, etc.

>>4021 >Talent is Overrated If anything there's been a really hard push to deny its existence as people became more disenfranchised with higher education.

>>4024 Yeah the title is a bit pop-culture misleading; it's mainly about dispelling the notion of prodigies or inherited talent, the value of calculated practice and training, and how most people who became masters of various fields rarely exhibited any extraordinary ability early on. Here's an interesting case mentioned in the book, I'm surprised more people don't talk about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r tl;dr: some guy decides he wants to conduct an experiment to have a kid and train it to become a master of something, finds someone to marry him, they have daughters, they decide the thing will be chess, they produce 2 chess champions one of whom is considered the greatest female player ever

>>4016 I agree with the others suggesting you review in your mind after reading some chunk of the book, and that you should take notes. Those are good recommendations for actively engaging with the text and help understand it. But you'll forget eventually. For the books you really need to/want to remember, I suggest you take up a spaced-repitition software like Anki. Here are a few articles on what it is: - http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html "Augmenting Long-term Memory" (my favourite) - https://ncase.me/remember/ "How To Remember Anything Forever-ish" - https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition "Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning" (included for its overview of the research backing SRS) A system that incorporates actively reading multiple texts concurrantly while ensuring you remember is "Incremental reading". You might want to check that out. You shouldnt aim to remember everything obviously. And some books you read just for the fun of it :)

>>4016 you get no results by just reading the book, a literature textbooks explain why those books are important and worth reading. it's something I have discovered myself, after I started doing it, most of the boring books are actually very interesting and deep. I recommend writing too, keep a journal,listen to people who use fancy vocabulary on a daily basis.

>>4023 I disagree. I think you're being reductive. Yes, in a textbook context, that's the way to go, to balance simplicity, precision, and trying to minimize any ambiguity. That's ideal for when you have one single point to make, or want to instruct someone to do one thing, and one thing only. But that's not how language works, and that is for a good reason. We don't work like that. Conversation is largely exhibitionist, a good solid chunk of any chat is going to be as much about your tint on it, as it is the subject itself. Look up any word and it'll have its own history, and probably at least half a dozen synonyms. We don't go by simple IF --> THEN, your choice of wording matters a great deal and it can be used to abbreviate your message into a very compact form. Choosing an "off" word instead of a simpler, more readily available synonym is often used to implicitly make a distinction, one which can easily save you a whole sentence, of even paragraph, of elaboration. Every synonym has its own flavour. We simply don't speak like instruction manuals, that is not how language works. That difference is so great that in order to root out the ambiguity inherent in most any language you will end up near-incomprehensible to someone assessing it as normal speech. Either leaning to the end of formal logic where you have to be such a massive anal pedant that everything that can be "misinterpreted", should be, and has to be, misinterpreted. That's a completely different mode of thought that many people have a lot of trouble adjusting to, even with practice and conscious effort. The other end, you end up with legalese, where even the simplest "no" will take up five pages and reference 200 others in 14 different chapters, and still have to be just as pedantic, but through explicitly spelling out each possible unintended interpretation and addressing them separately, instead of assuming that you're speaking to a mathematician with a bone to pick. Ambiguity is a tool, and a damn good one at that. It's not an oversight, nor accident, that it's so deeply ingrained in our language. >>4021 Google dictionary(I know, it's an example) has this. It can store any words you look up for you to review later. Should be easy to export a list like that and set up some cards, and let you filter out the ones you get right. It's not going to add them to your working vocabulary, though, I drilled like 10k words for our SAT equivalent(fuarrrk me for deciding to read in English whenever I could), and that didn't have any effect on my speech. Aside from three words added because they were funny. I'm actually not sure how to best put that into practice, I guess you would just have to make a habit of reaching for words, get a little fancy with your speech. Because learning to know it when you see it does not get them into casual conversation, or writing, for that matter.

>>4028 I recognize that example. I think you'd enjoy Range by David Epstein, that's where I saw it.

>>4067 hey, thanks, im downloading it now

>>4063 wow, this Anki system looks awesome, im reading those links now and cannot wait to try this. do you use this? can you tell us your experiences?

You don't need to remember everything someone else says. It's missing the point of reading. Reading is about engaging with the material to spark new ideas in your head. It's about increasing your known unknowns. And it's about enjoying the act of it. Try reflecting on the big ideas in the material more. Come up with your own thoughts. Don't worry about memorization.

>>4069 Im an esl language teacher. i learned portuguese as an adult and now my speech is native-level. I used SRS in the early stages. Anki is a good system and recommend it to my students.

>>4016 Do some research on "Active Reading." Instead of reading for speed or entertainment, slow down, write in the margins, highlight, and take notes. After you read a chapter or two, get out a notebook and write about the ideas you've read. Review those notes as you continue through the book, make comparisons and note changes in your frame of reference. Even if you're unable to retain everything in your mind, your notebook will become a resource to easily reference the source material with and summarize what you've read, as well as an easy place to view your own thoughts concerning your reading. The more you evolve this skill, the more you'll be able to recall, and the better you'll get at your summaries and notes.

>>4070 This A cliche that holds true is that you only end up getting the most from the things that you actually care about so doing what that lainon side helps you find those kind of connections better than any recalling technique Same for big words really, if you can associate them with things you have experienced you can integrate them easily into your vocabulary

>>4066 I've learned a new word from the dictionary or the Internet every day for a while now, like "platitude" and "skeuomorphism" and I haven't forgotten any of them. I just write what the word means and why I like it

>>4069 Yes, Ive been using it for some two years now, i love it. in academics: it helped memorize in theory heavy courses with much less effort. I had a stack of notebooks i had to revise and would feel depressed(and rather do something else on the internet) when I look at them. Turned them into flashcards. Two aspects of anki made it manageabe: its scheduling(no more questioning what to study, and if I even remember a topic) and how it only requires a few cards be revised daily(I did a painless ~30 cards daily of my ~500 card deck) Its more recently that I started using anki to help remember books I read. I use it on textbooks from other fields Im trying to learn. So far, Ive gotten through half a formal logic and probability theory book. Not impressive progress, but Im excited by the fact that I even got this far! Since I read these books for fun, I didnt read them regularly(i read fiction and comics more). I read a few pages when I felt like it, sometimes taking intermissions spanning weeks. I used to just have take notes while reading but there was friction when I came back to a book: i didnt remember a lot of stuff. With anki Ive made slow but actual progress, since with miniscule effort I can persist what I learn in one reading session, and remember it in the next. Ive taken up a habit of working through my deck when Im bored, e.g on the bus. Intermittenly chipping away at the cards allocated for a day feels easier than sitting down with the intent of gettimg through everything at once. Oh, and if youd like to know anything else about anki, do ask.

>>4016 >>4018 Anyone interested in this topic should go read it.