Tansel Ali > Quotes

“Learning should be exciting and fun and never frightening”
― Tansel Ali, How to Learn Almost Anything in 48 Hours

“SMASHIN’ SCOPE.”
― Tansel Ali, How to Learn Almost Anything in 48 Hours: The Skills You Need to Work Smarter, Study Faster, and Remember More!

“Chunking When I was young, I was told to read word by word very carefully. While this was useful for the early stages of learning, it is counterproductive later in life. The ultimate purpose of speed reading isn’t actually to read fast: it is to form images of what you read. In essence, it is really reading in images. Let’s take a sentence: The big fat cat jumped over the large spiky fence. Reading this word by word, our brain processes ten words. Hypothetically, if every word took us one second to read, the above sentence would take ten seconds to read. Now let’s break the sentence into chunks. (The big fat cat) (jumped over) (the large spiky fence) In this instance, we have ‘chunked’ the words into three (bracketed) images. If it took you one second to read each ‘chunk’ or image, the sentence could now be read in three seconds. This is more than three times faster than reading word by word! And you still read every word. In order to apply chunking, we apply it to a minimum set of words. To begin with, start by taking three words at a time. How to chunk:   1. Place your reading guide in the middle of the three words (i.e. beneath the second word). 2. Instead of reading each word, look at them as a group and visualise an image for them.  ”
― Tansel Ali, The Yellow Elephant: Improve Your Memory and Learn More, Faster, Better

“Humour. Something funny can be a huge help with your visualising. This doesn’t mean you have to be the funniest person in the room, it means use what’s funny to you. When I meet someone called John, for example, I immediately picture him sitting on a toilet. For me that’s funny, for others it may not be—but it is memorable. I believe comedians are often super-creative beings because they find ways to communicate a point and to make it entertaining and unique. If you want to exercise your creativity, why not learn more about comedy?”
― Tansel Ali, How to Learn Almost Anything in 48 Hours

“Repeating words is ineffective, but creating images from those words is incredibly strong”
― Tansel Ali, How to Learn Almost Anything in 48 Hours