Translation for better ‘original awareness'

General Memory Chat
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While studying my main process for now seems to be some skimming to make a mind map and then reading more of the material. I am still trying to find a highly effective process for understanding. (See this). At least, mindmaps seem better than what I was trying to do before (skimming through to memorize what I feel to be main points and before that, I was passively reading and not remembering much,unable to perform reasonable active recall and only gaining familiarity for short periods).

Early this morning, I suddenly got the idea to mind map or jot in another language other than the one in which I am reading in, (probably had something to do with the topic being on language skills​:joy:). I think this may induce a deeper level of processing especially when the language writing happens in is not very familiar (accuracy of language in writing isn’t the goal, deeper processing is). Isn’t it funny how I am trying navigate understanding strategies during my exam period? (I literally wrote one today​:upside_down_face:)

What do you think?

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That’s a very creative idea that sounds plausible, since you’re forcing yourself to restate the ideas in a different form. But I suspect the active recall exercise of telling someone else what you’ve learned, after you’ve finished reading the page / chapter, is more effective since you’re having to reconstruct the overall structure from memory, rather than just translating individual sentences as you go.

Another tactic I sometimes use for very technical material (or if I’m just feeling too distracted to focus properly), is to try to read the text out loud just from the first letters of every word. This forces me to pay a bit more attention and try to connect the context with existing knowledge.

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