Finally, I want to analyze my study routine during the last 6 years. To provide you with some background info, I want to add that in general I am a fairly good student with some exceptions. Either I get straight As, or I will do moderate. I have never failed throughoutly or had to repeat a class. My weakness is definately that I am a slow learner and that I cannot deal with studying the exact same thing over and over again (ie. using flash cards only for vocabulary won’t work for me). My mind is network-based and I am a visual/haptic learner.
I want to put down here what did help me improve my learning: (no particular order)
- tables, charts, schedules: I try to put everything I learn into a table. The creation of the table alone and thinking about organzing knowledge will help me studying the subject.
- draw a comic based on the subject to study
- create mind-maps every so often
- Add-ons for Firefox (Perapera-kun), surfing the net in languages I have not yet fully mastered
- join social networking sites of target language (renren.com, weibo.com)
- make many native-speaking friends
- cook dishes from target language country, try to use original recipe
- use colourful markers, highlight notes
- do summaries of your own notes from class
- organize folders