The Ways of Learning

I was reading an old Electronics Engineering textbook the other day and came across some very interesting ideas in the preface (the part of a textbook rarely read by anybody) regarding the way people learn.

The author very bluntly stated that everyone does one of FOUR things in order to learn something new : 

1. By Reading it out.
2. By Listening to somebody explain it to him.
3. By Doing (practical application of a concept)
   
4. By Writing it out.

Some do one or two things far better than the others. Others might be exceptional at one and pathetic with the rest.

This may explain why I personally could never stay awake during my engineering college lectures or could never wade through theoretical papers but ramped up extremely quick when I got to go over examples.  I pretty much survived through graduate school on nothing but homework problems and going over exercises and working them out (By Doing, By writing).

My dad (an incredibly successful engineer) on the other hand is remarkable at the "listening" skill. He can absorb things very quickly and used to tell me that he never used to take notes in class because he saw no point. Though he can't get his feet wet with a hands-on exercise until he's absorbed ALL of the theory behind it...which is exactly the opposite of what I need to do to learn something.

So how does Chess come into all of this? Well it fits perfectly!

Reading : Going over games, reading books on strategy / opening theory

Listening : Getting coached / yelled at by good players at the local club etc.

Doing : Practice! Practice! Getting burned OTB/Online and figuring out why.

Writing : Annotating one's games, doing beast-free analysis.

Everything I ever learned was through example, through mistake....through "doing" and figuring it out through painful practice. My brain could never take any chess advice at face value just because some GM or famous author blessed it.  Even when I pretended to "memorize" a good guideline, I would never apply it until I got burned enough in a slow tourney game.

Also explains why it took me a few years to understand why color complexes (light/dark square weaknesses) really are a big deal. :)

Apologies for the long post ... I was curious => what manner of learning worked for you? How did you as an improving chess player sponge in all that is good about your chess?

Nice post ... my personal contention is that the two chief strengths one must develop to excel at chess are skills (e.g., developing a plan, identifying candidate moves, calculating efficiently, executing a technical endgame motif, etc.)  and memory (e.g., building and retrieving the mental library of tactical and positional images, building and retrieving key opening lines, etc.).

Both these require (for efficient acquisition) structured practice and repetition. Very few of us can simply read something, then flawlessly execute it the first time, unless the task is trivial. But by the various learning techniques you describe, blended together in a structured efficient program that adapts via assessment of our learning, we can surely improve. Sometimes, very quickly.

New to internet, since June 30th; but not new to chess, or to computer programming.  Hobbies:  Chess (among other things) and writing chess data COM-DECs in AL code.  As to internet, just learning how to use it and know I will ask stupid internet questions.  One needs a full-screen editor to ask them instead of the wimpy 16-char dialog boxes -- shades of DOS edlin days coming back to haunt us all!  This is more of a query than anything else.  I have a new chess-teaching methodology, unseen, untried, and unknown.  Anyone interested?

That Chess is a language we should all know, just like the one you are reading now.  If we approached chess AS a language, we'd all be further ahead in our chess education than we are now.  When I read the word "horse" I see "the critter a cowpoke rides" and neither "horse" nor its descriptive phrase ("the critter a cowpoke rides") look anything like a horse, as defined in a dictionary -- and none of this stuff even looks like a chess diagram or a chess position!  The key to learning how to learn chess rapidly is to convert visual images into verbal images and then work with these 'chesswords' to envision chess positions.  It's the same way we learn to read in any language under the sun.  By the way, what is the visual image of the word "the"?  I can't think of anything other than another verbal image:  'T-H-E' spells "the."

I know how to convert any valid chess position into a 'chessword', memorize that 'chessword' and then store it away in my memory for use weeks, months, years, even decades later.  When's the last time I had to use the word "antidisestablishmentarianism"?  Answer:  Never!  But, I still remember how to spell it just the same.

Learning fifty new 'chesswords' per day for four hundred days will give anyone a mental library of over 20,000 chess patterns in just one year, one month, and one week.  Why is this number 20,000 significant?  Because, as Susan Polgar wrote in the introduction to her book, A World Champion's Guide To Chess, (c) 2005:  "A typical grandmaster has a mental libary of about 20,000 [chess] patterns, including tactical, strategic, and endgame patterns."

Since "the" isn't a noun, I don't think it would have a visual image. Instead it provides your brain with part of the syntax needed to understand the image received from nouns and verbs.

More to the topic, I think I learn like the OP's dad and him. I've never needed to take notes, because to me it feels like repeating what I've already learned. However, I can understand only the simplest concepts without seeing them put into practice. For example, if I read in a chess book that control of the center is a significant advantage to hold, I'll always remember it, without notes, but I won't know why until I've seen the effects of a strong center in a couple real games of chess.

Repy:  If you want to quibble about the difference between the word "the" (an article) and a full-blown noun or verb, then you're missing the point.  "The" is a valid word (period) in the English language, and, besides -- we need it!  It's one of the most important words in the English language alongside "a" and "an" just to judge from the frequency of the usage of these articles in my native tongue.

The same is true of certain basic chess positions which crop up in chess again, and again, and again -- ad infinitum et ad nauseam.  Each of these positions can be converted into a 'chessword' so that people who have a more developed verbal memory retentiveness can compete on a more even footing with those chessplayers who have a much more developed visual way of learning things.  An analogy is appropos here:  Why do some people need eyeglasses and contact lenses or lasic surgery?  To see things better.  Is chess something some people would like to mentally see better?  You bet it is!

And, the nail in the coffin of any counter-argument to the thrust of my initial premiss is this one:   How are you going to dispute it?  With chess diagrams which I may or may not understand; or, with plain, old, common, everday, ordinary words which anyone can understand who speaks the lingo.  Chess is a language; that is certain to those who understand how to read, write, and think in it.

Nevertheless, I'm here to learn new chess lore as well as to share what I know about chess which doesn't even show up on the radar screen.

At the risk of going off topic, I think you misunderstood me about my opinion on the word "the." I was not trying to quibble at all. I was not trying to say that it was not an important word--far from it--only that its function was not to trigger an image or description but instead to provide structure for the images provided by other words, such as nouns or verbs.

I think I am a bit skeptical about your idea of a language for chess. The problem is that every position is so rich that it would be hard to sum it up in a few words, and there are so many variations in even stock positions that to assign a single word to such a varied class would miss the true depth of the position. To borrow your eye correction analogy, it would be like taking a very nearsighted person and altering their vision to become so farsighted that all but the largest shapes were blurred beyond distinction.

Since I am so new to the internet, and I don't know the etiquette and protocols, I can only say that the thrust of my chess premiss I knew before hand would set some chessplayers (probably far better chessplayers than myself) back on their heels precisely because this idea is so far removed from the mainstream of chess thought that it strikes the average chessplayer as exotic, quixotic, or any other hyperbolic word one could use to describe it.  But, in a way that's the point also.  If chess does indeed hide within its labrinthine complexity a simple Chess language that anyone can learn it, then perhaps we could elevate the language of Chess to a human language, like Esperanto or something.  What do you think?

To make it crystal clear, however, as to what I think, it is this:  Chess is a transcendental game simply because competent mathematicians assure us that there are more permutations possible in the game of chess than there are subatomic particles in the known universe.  If this is true, then the chessbook cannot be written which can hold all possible chess positions because it would require more subatomic particles to etch a chess position on each of these than there are available for the task at hand.  Therefore, this is an admission by mathematicians that they cannot solve the chess equation mathematically.  What's left, however, is some kind of Chess language which can handle transcendental concepts better than mathematical equations can.  The case for creating a Chess language which can do this is still open.

Reply:  Lasic surgery and other remedies for near-sighted people doesn't really do what you suggest or else the optometrists would go out of business.  The idea is to correct a person's amaurosis scacchistica (chess blindness), as Dr. Tarrasch once called it, to just the right (20-20) focal point.  This idea, applied to chess, makes a great deal of sense to someone who DOES wear glasses to correct his near-sightedness and astigmatism.  I don't know how old you are, but when you get to be about 45 years of age, you'll begin to see the value of corrective lenses as your perfect 20-20 vision begins to wane.  The point here is to enhance or augment the current state of chess pedagogy with new techniques that complement and do not conflict with current chess theory.  The ideas that I'm kicking around in my head have more to do with enhancing chess memory than anything else; and, chess memory is the foundation stone for everything that is built upon it.

Personally, I took a personality test and while on the same site, I figured out what type of learner I am. For me, I have not found the best learning style for chess because I tend to soak up knowledge in any way possibly yet it comes with mistakes.

If feel like not learning, I will usually find a way to escape chess studying which will hurt me in the long run. I guess my moods could affect me too.  Here's are my results, these are fairly accurate since I have been taking them on my birthday since 6th grade because I wanted to know if anything would change over the years. Nothing has changed though.