Monthly Archives: October 2013

Gamified learning: a list of good resources

The main problem in learning a new skill is maintaining the required motivation and discipline, especially in the early stages.  Gamification deals with this problem better than any of the other approaches I’m familiar with.  Over the past few months, I’ve managed to study maths, languages, coding, Chinese characters, and more on a daily basis, with barely any interruptions.  I accomplished this by simply taking advantage of the many gamified learning resources available online for free.  Here are the sites I have tried and can recommend:

  • Codecademy. For learning computer languages (Ruby, Python, PHP, and others).
  • Duolingo. For learning the major Indo-European languages (English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish).
  • Khan Academy. For learning maths. They also teach several other disciplines, but they offer mostly videos with only a few exercises.
  • Memrise. For memorizing stuff, especially vocabulary.  The courses vary in quality; the ones on Mandarin Chinese are excellent.
  • Vocabulary.com.  For memorizing English vocabulary.

Am I missing anything? Please leave your suggestions in the comments section. Thanks!

Summary of The First 20 Hours, by Josh Kaufman

This post summarizes chapters one to three of The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast, by Josh Kaufman. These chapters introduce a number of general principles of rapid skill acquisition and effective learning. The remaining chapters, on yoga, programming, touch typing, go, ukelele and windsurfing, are meant to illustrate how the author applied those principles to learning each of these skills. As one reviewer has pointed out, however, there is “relatively little connection between what [the author] writes about (say) the history and practice of Yoga and the principles expounded in the first few chapters.” For this reason, these chapters are omitted in the summary below.

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