Have you ever heard of someone incredible at archery and who never practiced shooting arrows? I know I haven’t. Nobody would even expect it to be possible either. And yet, in many areas, we learn a skill in a certain context that doesn’t apply to our real-life goal.
We learn a second language at school in a classroom, reading a whole lot and then find ourselves shocked that we can’t say a word out loud when we visit the country. Or we use fun apps and are unable to create full sentences on our own. Or we learn maths and then find ourselves shocked we can’t understand how our accounts work. The examples are endless.
Anybody good at what they do have concentrated on practicing the specific task they wanted. Benny Lewis, fluent in many languages, has gone to countries without speaking the language and focus on exchanging with native people on the first day, so he would get exposure and learn in the real context he wanted. Of course, we don’t all have the same flexibility in our lives to travel to a new country every new language, nor do we need to do so.
That’s Directness
As Scott H. Young explains it in his book
“Directness is the idea of learning being tied closely to the situation or context you want to use it in.”
While Benny’s technique has worked for him and he emphasizes the importance of practice to improve, he also does quite a bit of study at home — wherever that may be at the time.
The problem with just learning outside of context is the difficulty to naturally transfer skills and knowledge in the real context. The problem with just being direct is that you may take longer to acquire the skills you want.
In the end, you need a combination of both. You need both passive learning (such as lectures, videos or reading a book) and active, direct, learning.
Young offers 4 tactics that have worked for many people to learn quickly and well skills.
Project-based learning
Quite simple in effect, it is based on learning the skills you want through work toward an end result.
If you want to create a web page, then go ahead and start now and reverse engineer it! To start, you might need to use HTML. How do you create the header? Ah, there you go. Next, the footer? Ok, that’s how you can do. So on and so on, learn and directly apply the skill you want.
It’ll be much more efficient than just studying it all in a course and never using the skills themselves or only in tiny exercises.
Immersive learning
This applies mostly to learn a language such as how Benny has been doing. But you can also imitate it at home, changing whatever you can to the target language. From your phone to your computer, to who you talk to most regularly, to the language in which you listen to the news.
This gives you a lot more practice in various ways but there is one catch in my opinion; you need to remind yourself regularly of why you are doing this and prevent all of it to just be the background you don’t notice anymore.
It’s easy to stop reading the text on your phone and just use the images but it’ll be much less efficient.
Flight-simulator method
In some cases, it’s just impossible to practice the skill before you’ve mastered it. This is particularly the case with doctors and pilots who can’t do any direct practice legally. In such cases, simulations will be the solution as long as they stay close to the real goal.
For example, if you want to become a pro at a fighting game, the training mode will be useful but your actions may have different results based on which way your opponent is pushing his joystick. This “directional influence” (DI) impacts results and thus potential combos. To practice combos, you should then try to have someone with you. You don’t want to arrive at a tournament and be surprised by the other’s DI, right?
Overkill approach
Finally, a good way to learn a skill quickly is to increase the challenge so that the level you hope to reach is below what you are aiming for.
This method is not for everyone as it feels intense and can be quite scary.
I know I wouldn’t go make a speech in a language I just started learning! But at the same time, this pushes you to work on each specific aspect of the speech, learning valuable skills along the way. In the end, failing at whatever you try won’t be that bad if you have learned a whole lot along the way.
Being direct about your learning is crucial to saving a whole lot of time. Use the skill you learn. Develop it through real-life experiences, tests, and challenges. Don’t you want to be able to use what you’re learning?
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Mathias Barra is a French polyglot living in Japan and who has learned 6 languages and dabbled in numerous others. Being a curious child full of wonders is how he keeps on learning and can’t stop sharing about every tiny idea, even non-language-related.
Yuhakko 语학子 
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