Learning best : sort it in your favor

In both music and language learning, consider the supermarket analogy. We don’t need to memorize the layout of a supermarket to cook a meal. Most textbooks and online resources are like Supermarkets. They organize the content based on their goals: vegetables together, grammar charts, chord shapes in the same key… 

Reality is different. Focus on what is meaningful and practical for our individual goals, learn and practice material usable from day 01, navigating the learning process with purpose and clarity.

The student needs to cook a curry, get what is needed for that curry, learn how exactly to cut, what ingredients to add and how… Don’t stand at the vegetable section, starting from a corner, wasting time on someone else’s agenda.

Tailor the resources to suit our specific needs. Stop sifting through neatly categorized but impractical content. Yes, it means awareness. Struggle, having to exercise restraint, do the difficult task of thinking.

“But, we do need all the other stuff too…” 

There is a threshold. There is advantage to taking care of what we need for this month, the coming two months. We can use it immediately to get real life results – motivation, fun, feedback loop. 

Instead of just in case learning, learn for what is needed now, learn the intricacies of getting it to a practical level. Not wide, but deep – that is the real education now. 

When we go wide before deep, there’s an opportunity cost that is to your disadvantage. Can you take away energy and time from going deeper and breaking the minimum neater threshold, you are avoiding the much needed initial feedback and small success. How long can a student practice without meaningful results? If learning wide doesn’t include checking for minimum required competency, is it really learning?

Consider examples in learning German and learning chords within music.

Without the core pronunciation, word form, sentence structure and cultural skills mastered to a minimum threshold, what is the point in quantity? 

Approximate sounds not recognized by the native speaker, is not German. Instead Can we use a few relevant, frequently needed senteces to improve our pronunciation and  listening comprehension? This makes sure that we will be understood and can understand the other speaker enough to conduct successful conversation with desired results, as early as possible.

Looking at a note sheet and playing disconnected nodes is not music. Yes we need that to begin with. But before playing any more notes, use the notes which you already learnt to improve sustained playing, check for correctness of notes, connectedness of notes, finger placement and other best practices early as possible developed much needed feedback loop.

Music and language both are practical ‘art’ forms. Fix a variation of the material that is within or just about your skill level practice the underlying competencies to as early as possible get real life feedback.

When learning chords, post students waste time and effort in front of a sheet showing the chord images neatly arranged for each alphabet. G6, G7…

For the person who makes the sheet, it may be more aesthetically pleasing to arrange them in this way. It may be a clear shape, but we need to break the egg to make the omelette.

 “I was trying to force myself to go through the chord images and remember them…” we often hear from students. Forcing oneself usually means nobody told them the details they need to focus on. It also means they have an understood why the tasks they are at his meaningful… fun is anyway nowhere on the sheet.

Music and language both are beyond just knowledge acquisition. We are interacting with the other, some kind of given take in the form of a performance, recorded video, a conversation to express ourself and understand the other… even if we are doing it alone sitting in a room, one can argue that there is interaction and understanding within one self in first person second person and third person. We are listening to ourselves.

I tell the student – learning chords or german – to connect as early as possible to real life. 

Learning chords-real-life relevant

Struggling to memorize card images is too static. The method is disconnected from real life uses or results.

Instead Take a song which they really like and want to finally be able to play. The chords given for that song gives us a list of real life useful chords to practice which will most probably be used again in other songs. The sequence of existence of the chords will also be the real-life transitions we need to give attention to.

How do we make sure that the task matches the skill or just a little about the skill?

We can make open string beginner chord variations for that song. 

“since you’re playing practicing towards a result you really want you will be motivated the practice will be meaningful and fun. The exercises will be planned so that they are challenging but not overwhelming.”

The chords which are used in that song will belong to a family of chords – a concept of the students may not know yet, but will get introduced to in a practical manner, which then can be later formalized. 

When we take a second song the students may notice how the exact same chords come up again in the new song. 

This is useful learning. The student learns something which they really want to while acquiring skills which can help them widen their repertoire,play more of what they really want. They also start understanding the underlying common  structures, getting more familiar with the environment.

Integrate your learning into real-life scenarios. Figuring out real life situations from which we can get our learning material, liek a detective, can be an exciting activity

By selecting a song they genuinely enjoy and creating beginner variations based on open string chords, they find motivation and meaning in their practice. The real learning is below the surface, the transitions. 

Memorizing Chord shapes is needed, but not enough. 

Giving attention to transition between chords, identifying the most efficient ways to transfer your fingers, is essential for continuous rhythm chord playing. Identifying paths of minimal movement, which fingers can be moved as a group and other efficiency concerns are the real skills you need to practice. 

When skills of transition are practiced using similar chords, you start getting better, faster. When you can use these chords in real life songs, you immediately understand the context. You are motivated since you are directly connected with final desirable results. Instead of blindly following lessons, we need to know where exactly we are going and if it makes any personal sense to us.

The chord memory part can be practiced even without an instrument. If the chord has three fingers used, you can even start with remembering just two fingers – if they have to move as a group, the choreography. Go through in your mind the exact movements you need to make to transition between the chords. 

When this much detailed practice is required even between two or three chords, imagine if you start increasing the complexity by introducing new random chords. The useful industrial engineering concerns of bottleneck, solutions like pull vs push, applying this situations to. Construct the stages using detailed subcompetencies.

German to Go from day 01

I learnt German similarly, giving importance to practicality. We cannot depend on anybody else to sort the learning material to make it most meaningful for us.

Learning and teaching experts have been talking about autonomous learning, making the students more active in the learning process letting them collect material from their life.

I learnt the introductions, so that I could answer the most asked questions. 

Even day to day activities like making an appointment calling enough Can induce anxiety if we have to worry too much about the management and if we are expressing ourselves correctly. Sentences and words to express my needs and preferences are therefore useful from day 01. 

I learnt the different attributes like color, shape, numbers… which could then be connected to sentence templates and used in a wide range of situations.

Contrast this with the database approach of teaching animal names, kitchen utensils and other nouns, neatly arranged, working as a memory test soon to be forgotten. The opportunity cost: taking time and effort away from useful material, learnt deeply enough for practically purposes. 

Strain yourself a little bit, avoid the usual wisdom, let go of older notions of neat and clean syllabus completion. Be ready to edit out what is not really needed.

As they say, perfection is when there is nothing more to edit out.

Every sentence I learned, I practiced towards native-enough pronunciation and adhering to formality needs. I started understanding verb conjugation and sentence structures using these practically useful sentences, getting regular feedback.

Instead of going wide, incident just scheming the surface, at each point I was digging deeper. That depth is crucial before breadth. 

Until we achieve sufficiently accurate pronunciation, we cannot claim to be speaking German, regardless of how many sentences we have memorized.

Until transitions are made fluent using limited number of chords, struggling with neatly arranged chord image sheets for more, is of no use.

This is practical learning. Learning what is needed. For a purpose. To connect, correct, get better.