The Multiplex

Learning an instrument taught me how to learn

tl;dr

The half-life of excitement

Intensive learning can be a difficult and fleeting habit to sustain, even for a particularly determined learner. Like hobbies, the act begins with gusto and excitement, the novelty of the skill or subject providing a steady stream of motivation.

But not long after embarking on the learning journey, an uncomfortable sensation begins to creep its way among the others: you've noticed the first signs that the beacon of excitement has begun to dim. Or the realization is even more abrupt, as if these things have half-lives and you've just experienced the first interval of decay. Regardless of how the feeling shows itself, the result over time is a wake of shallowly-learned subjects, unread books and unused supplies, a closet whose contents serve as a constant reminder of your unrealized ambitions and undertakings.

Finding a steady source of quality feedback

I have created such a wake and I've experienced the frustrations that come with it. But one notably successful undertaking completely changed how I view the learning process: learning to play the piano.

When I began to play the piano, I quickly became tired of the Level 1 Beginner books and the learning apps and the Zero to Hero courses. It felt too boring, too slow, I wasn't playing anything I enjoyed listening to. So I ditched that stuff. I bought a book of Ludovico Einaudi's sheet music and some classical stuff I liked and began tackling the pieces via the Brute Force method, which in piano amounts to playing note by note over and over and over again until you've mastered a measure, then moving to the next.

This approach could, I admit, drive many learners away from the piano faster than any 'half-life of excitement' will. But for me it worked, because early on in the process I learned two crucial lessons: feedback is essential to maintain motivation, and more actual learning occurs when you've stepped away from the material than when you're engaged with it.

While learning these songs on the piano, the feedback was so powerful day by day that I could feel the rewiring in my brain. The progress between ending a practice session the previous day and beginning practice the next was staggering. Something critical happened in that interval while not practicing. And this constant source of reassurance that I was in fact learning, I was making significant progress, this helped push me through learning many songs that would normally take a learner many years to even begin learning.

The lessons

  1. Feedback sustains motivation
  2. Learning occurs between sessions

But you need to feel these lessons

Okay, these are things that many people already know. It's nothing new that while we sleep, our brains sort of connect all the dots we spent creating while studying or practicing or doing. But for me, experiencing this very concrete proof of this process in action has helped me in areas where feedback is harder to come by, like in language learning. In language learning, once you get to the intermediate level, it is very difficult to "notice" that you're making progress. There are glimmers of that sort of feedback here and there, but it's elusive enough to make language learning one of the most notoriously abandoned undertakings.

But for me, I know that just because I don't have such a concrete and easy way to "see" the improvements day by day, they're still happening. They're just thinly spread across the massive subject matter surface area that is an entire language and the various modes of using it. And this is wisdom I now take with me in all of my endeavors, hopefully creating a less bothersome wake of hobby debris along the way.

Takeaways

#language-learning #learning #piano