Such an important thing and so it is such a confounded, confusing and an abstract term. It's hard to pin down one's exact steps to learn something. It's even harder to put into concrete terms of when something is learned and how it is learned. I am aware of the books that entails such great descriptions, studies and opinions on learning and when someone starts learning. I am familiar with such books in which they have sculpted my own process of learning throughout the years in various different ways. However, I do not believe (at least, not for me) is not so concrete or neatly "fold-able" (here I go, inventing words that do not exist).
Sometimes, I think I've learned something to discover that I have not even understood the basic concepts and fundamentals of an idea, application or whatever it is that I needed to learn. Sometimes I think something has totally flied over my head leaving me speechless and well, under a heavy mist and fog turns out to be well understood and I have become able to apply it in it's practical use.
I must admit, while I like to pat myself on my shoulder for my keen observation skills, my sharp wit and my quick thinking on my feet (which needless to say has saved me from trouble several times, while it has pursued me into trouble just as many times) I never learn anything actually very quickly. I believe that learning is a step and that it is circular instead of being a one line of thing.
I often feel that in order to learn the basics we must learn a bit of the complicated so that we can trace back our steps and thoroughly and in actuality, truly understand once set of theory, it's concepts and the fundamental belief of said theory. Take for example, my struggle for grammar. While I know what a noun, an adjective, an adverb, a verb, a pronoun is, I have sometimes difficulty with other things such as direct objects, indirect objects, verb-tense matching and subject complements and such. However in a very recent time I have discovered that I have understood these when I pursued far enough to get to sentence elements (This is not to say I was not blasted away with other things, which made more sense after I went back all the way to the beginning and reviews everything until then). This is exactly what I mean by saying that learning is circular and we must often retrace our own steps and it is never perfect, just like a circle. It will always be somewhat elliptical even if we cannot see it with our naked eyes. In another example from my complications of learning Grammar, recently--not as recently as the previous example--I felt like nothing was getting through my head at all. Everything seemed at a loss and I felt like I was in the bottom of the sea and all of these terms, descriptions, definitions and explanations were just swimming around me and I was being swarmed by them as if I was freshly leaked blood and they were hungry sharks. Yeah it was that scary to me (although, I guess I cannot know for sure since I have never come face to face with sharks, neither do I have any such desire for meeting sharks up-close and personal).
In order to learn something I probably read that small passage many times and even summarize it to see if I actually did in which I return back to write notes on the whole chapter/book/etc. so that I can accumulate the knowledge. I never get anything on the first try, even if it is a simple matter. I must go back to eat, read it, highlight, write on it, take notes on it, go back and review those notes and highlight those notes before I can feel confident that I have begun my learning process of the said material.
I guess at the end what I am saying is that I am not as smart as people think that I am. Perhaps, who knows? I do not think that intellect can be measured by numbers and mathematical equations alone. It is just too subjective and biased way to approach intelligence. What I am truly trying to highlight something is to give yourself time. Just because you have not done well in a class doesn't mean you can't in another or in a higher level of that class. Tests are required to measure some sort of progress so that the universities can measure the students and their professors unilaterally. But learning is not just defined and limited to the rooms of a classroom within it's allotted time slots. You can continue to learn that class on your own time even after that class has long ended, building on what you needed and further going out to truly appreciate one topic or so the other. If you want to truly learn something, you must be patient, willing and to go through some repetitiveness.
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