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Some years ago I learned to touch-type in a month, at twenty minutes a day—though of course actually getting used to it took some months more. Ever since, I'm struggling to recreate the same approach in different topics. I used the app TIPP10, a completely no-nonsense program that just presents you with progressive exercises, rates your performance, and crucially, shows how far you're from the end goal. So I just clacked at the keyboard and watched the progress meter steadily go forward. Had to change my approach once when I was trying to go fast and kept making errors, stalling in the actual learning—after I slowed down everything went smoothly again. Now, I'd so much like to have a progress meter for when I'll be able to extract meaningful sounds from the piano or the guitar, or reason about electrics, etc. For the mechanical music skills, I'm putting some hope into Synthesia and Rocksmith. For knowledge, I guess actual courses and exercises are self-measuring: either I can remember and apply what I already learned, or I can't. However the measuring gets harder with topics that don't fit into one course or which require banging at them full-time for ages (like chess). (I've already tried to learn touch-typing about ten years before that, and the combination of my youthful impatience with the woefully misguided approach of the exercise app I then used, turned the experience into a wreck. The app presented me with the ‘persona’ of the author as the sage teacher: his virtual remarks cooed and comforted me after the mistakes, encouraged me patronizingly, and offered bits of psychological well-being wisdom, all of which just made me hate myself, the app and the endeavor.) |
I would have liked to see this kind of game used to learn other skills but I never saw anything like it.
I also hoped that AI/deep learning could assists us in learning new skills but it's not yet a thing apparently...