Socrates once said: “I know that I know nothing”.

Quote tell us, that everyone can understand according to his/her own perception of the world and reality and, that map doesn’t reflect whole territory. However, one crucial thing we must stress here – human obtains skills and acquire knowledge every day, every hour, every minute (sometimes, we just do not pay attention to that), hence, being aware about effective learning strategies could accelerate aforementioned processes that, respectively, will enhance overall proficiency of learning and performance in daily tasks.

Learning strategies

Talking about efficiency of learning, we shall commence our research from the learning strategies. There are plenty of them out there, all effective and usable, but let`s try to emphasize the most common:

• Memory strategy – are all about strategies and tricks, that help to memorize and store information in memory and, if necessary, quickly retrieve it. Nonetheless, there is one more significant element of memorizing – regular repetition – rehearse of material, compile new samples with expressions or grammatical constructions (could be also hanging of some key words on the walls or around the apartment).
• Cognitive strategy – it helps us to understand, interpret, and reproduce new information. It includes practice, analysis, convergence, structuring of the acquired knowledge . Structuring of knowledge – our own way of recording notes or accompanying new material with visual cues; the creation of presentations, tables and graphs that facilitates the recording of material for subsequent use and repetition. Furthermore, this strategy could rely also upon learning through senses, i.e. hearing, smell, touch, taste etc. Vivid example: instrumental music, nature sounds, and other vocalizations can help students focus their attention to the task at hand.
• Affective strategy – ways to control and manage our emotions, personal attitude and reactions to the learning process. It may consist of methods to reduce excitement, ways of handling with negative emotions (listening to calm music, laughing, “re-charging of Yourself” mentally).
• Social strategy – main accent is to be made upon proper communication, clarification of quarrels in case of need, cooperation related some certain issue/topic.

To conclude – all these strategies are subjective and cannot be applied to all cases. We`re individuals and sometimes one strategy [LS4] of learning could be used, another time mix of two or three strategies is more efficient. The main idea is to accept a challenge with an open[LS5] mind and to assess all the possible options how we[LS6] can handle with it.

Speed-reading – another indispensable element of fruitful learning process. Frequently enough happens that we spendplenty of time to read article/book/reference and aftermaths the result is not satisfying at all – time is wasted, level of knowledge after reading – close to zero. Hence, hereby listed life hacks canseemingly improve speed reading skill along with obtaining a necessary information:

• Subvocalization – a key challenge in current issue; while reading, we seem “to hear” all the words by our brain; hence, there is a need to turn off mechanism for saying text in our head – chewing gum in the process of reading could be a decision;[LS7] 
• Avoiding of “returns” – when we read, we tend to turn our eyes back and stop at the word we just read. This slows us down significantly. Unfortunately, the only way to get rid of this habit is to admit that You do it and record it;[LS8] 
• Tracking of the text – one of the most amazing techniques for speed reading is “meta guiding” – text tracking; while reading a text, we can move finger / pencil over it or follow your head with it; remember to focus on every word if we want to remember the incoming information.

Mind Maps

This concept was introduced by English educational consultant Tony Buzan. [LS9] The main idea is to illustrate that our ideas arise and develop nonlinearly. One thought can potentially cause several others, narrower and relating to some aspects of the solving problem. We can develop any idea almost endlessly in all directions.  Therefore, we are to turn issue of mind-mapping – visualization of the thinking process which has been used by number of people for more than a hundred years, and the map of thoughts is one of the simplest and most universal ways of displaying[LS10]  information.

Mind mapping ideas deny any formalities. Someone draws cards of thoughts from the left to the right, someone from the top to the bottom. Our task is to learn how to keep track of thoughts in an understandable way. The more convenient for us, the better. The main thing is to remember what the mind maps consist of. According to that, we can build maps for completely different purposes, whether it is development, a post for a blog, a book or just a study of a project.

The process of mind-mapping begins with an idea. Sometimes it is a random idea. When we`re dealing with it, new thoughts appear. Along the way, we develop[LS11] an idea related to another topic. All this happens like an avalanche, and therefore mind map is useful[LS12]  in order to keep tracing of our initial thoughts. We are not looking for the right place to record, but simply fixing the idea somewhere close to the central topic. Place of such ideas can be determined later.

And the final thing about mind map – it`s easy enough to check it for flaws, but this is will be relevant for its creator only, and only in the short term prospective. At an early stage a map quickly becomes incomprehensible, and therefore the main task here is to make sure that there is no nonsense for the following person to have a look on map.

Creativity

Moving ahead, one of the crucial things of the efficient life in 21st century is creativity feature. Creative thinking requires self-confidence, activity and leadership, the ability to take risks. Furthermore, creativity depends on such qualities as:

•  ingenuity;
•  the ability to find solutions based on new thinking;
•  skills to look at a problem from different perspectives;
•  interest in experimenting;
•  ability to reflect and continuous learning;
•  willingness to come up with new ideas again and again.

Creative people always strive to revise existing procedures and stereotypes, operate on scenarios of the future, and consider various inventions and their consequences. They look for common features in things that seemed incomparable, create unexpected combinations which can be a key to solving the problem. Eventually, creative activity destroys existing stereotypes. Thus, being creative raise our chances significantly to keep pace with all the possible challenges of contemporality.

Mnemonics

The volume of information we`re obtaining every day is simply impossible to remember in a whole extent. Hence, people started to deploy books and equipment to rescue themselves: computers, voice recorders, camcorders, cameras, etc. However, a computer may not always be at hand as well as a book. A certain amount of information must always be kept in mind. But human memory is usually somehow limited and remembering one information is fraught with the loss of another.  

Mnemonics helps to solve this problem helping to expand the memory zone and facilitates the quick storage of information of any complexity using various techniques. The main one is the connecting of remembered objects with various images, with the construction of a certain sequence between them. Crucial fact here is that people think in images. It is used when we must remember unremarkable things, for example: a large phone numbers, a speech plan, some tricky words, a large sequence of numbers, etc. While memorizing bright images are used for various concepts and definitions, educational disciplines (chemistry, mathematics, physics, etc.) are easily learned.

There are different methods of remembering that are employed within mnemonics. Rhymes, formation of semantic phrases from the initial letters of the stored information, vivid unusual associations (pictures, phrases) that connect with memorized information, spatial imagination method etc. The main idea is to operate by themselves in the way that will make our life simpler and more saturated.

Be Yourself

While living a life everyone is about to face several various troubles (though some people don`t[LS13] believe in a power of word “problem”), challenges, threats etc. We`re all unique in terms of creating things, suggesting new ideas, breaking up the borders, constructing bridges etc. The main thing to remember all time – be Yourself and live a life in the way that suits You most. And above-mentioned processes and tips concerning learning will be helpful on a life path along with our fresh mind. Therefore, be patient, have a dream, drive to Your own goals and consider learning strategies as a tool which can enhance any sort of human action.[LS14] 

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 [LS1]

 [LS2]More explanation, example? Here You can mention learning through senses, how sense activate learning and eicit it

 [LS3]And reactions (becauae reactions trigger emotions and feelings)

 [LS4]Keeping key words in text for SEO

 [LS5]Or open mind?

 [LS6]Decide to whom You write: crowd or one person and keep text entirely focused on it

 [LS7]Perfect!

 [LS8]You can‘t have entire paragraph in brackets

 [LS9]I think should be mentioned somewhere in the beginning of mind maps presentation

 [LS10]Displaying what?

 [LS11]Discover? Develop? Realise?

 [LS12]Unfinished sentence? Useful for what? Or change end of sentence

 [LS13]I ->some people, positive poeple

 [LS14]Too many endings, it is like someone is dying but can let fina breath and keep reutrning. Say what You want to say and finish with somwthing abstrct like sentence before this