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Intuitively, this makes sense. Talking, like taking notes, forces us to put material into our own words. Every teacher knows that the way to learn a subject is to teach it, talking about the subject to an audience. How can talking help us read better, though? You might say, “I talk every day to teachers,Read More

There’s a good chance you can improve your reading by listening to audiobooks. From the earliest stages of its evolution, the human species has learned language by listening. Spoken languages have been around for 60,000 to 100,000 years. By contrast, languages were first written at most about 5,000 years ago. And only in the lastRead More

Writing down the meanings of vocabulary words is one element of a larger practice: notetaking. Good thinkers rarely rely on their memory; instead, they commit their notes to the page. Tim Ferriss is the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers and creator of the most popular podcast on the planet. He describes himselfRead More

Everyone knows the importance of using a dictionary, but very few people take the time to use one properly. One of the problems is knowing what dictionary to choose. FreeDictionary? Google? Merriam-Webster? For the typical student, there’s only one dictionary to use: the Longman Dictionary of the English Language. I’ve explained at length elsewhere whyRead More

Asking questions is central to good learning. Every good thinker knows that questions are more important than answers. The best questions are ones that have yet to be answered; they pave the way for innovative answers or solutions. Asking the best questions, though, requires practice with asking simpler ones. Reading offers one of the bestRead More