4.c 关于自学能力

Make Time Your Friend 4.c: On the Ability to Teach Yourself

> By Li Xiaolai · 2008-05-19 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20110927235235/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/436.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

I often curse today's undergraduate education under my breath, but I also know cursing is useless, so when I curse, I only occasionally get angry. Without exaggeration, today's undergraduate education has to a great extent simply forgotten its roots. The most fundamental thing in undergraduate education is cultivating students' ability to teach themselves. In theory, after graduating with a bachelor's degree, students should be able to teach themselves any subject they need.

But today's undergraduate education, for all sorts of reasons, obvious or obscure, intentional or unintentional, leaves most graduates, at graduation, not only still lacking the basic ability to teach themselves, but perhaps not even having learned their own major well. Worst of all, undergraduate education not only fails to make a considerable number of students learn their major well, but even makes them come to hate their own major.

Complaining is useless, although much of the time it's necessary for physical and mental health. After cursing occasionally to prove you're still a person with normal emotions and desires, you should still spend more time really figuring out what the ability to teach yourself is, and how it should be mastered and how it should be used.

**The basic skill of the ability to teach yourself is reading comprehension.**

After finishing junior high, most people refuse to admit their reading ability is poor. But that's just an illusion. Many people simply don't have basic reading ability; at most they're merely literate—and quite possibly the number of characters they know is in fact very limited. Simple to say, reading comprehension is really very hard to do. First, reading is the process by which people who can recognize written words take in information, so before that there's a process of screening whether the information being taken in is reliable and valid—which obviously depends on a long-cultivated ability to screen. After input, the information has to be processed by the brain: what needs remembering must be remembered, and it takes repetition to really remember it; what can't all be remembered must be archived in writing, and you must also find ways to make sure it can't fail to be found in future; if newly input information is similar to but not exactly the same as information input in the past, you must spend time carefully distinguishing them, so as not to make mistakes when using them in future; if newly input information is related to information input in the past, you must find ways to figure out what exactly the connection is—you should know that the information stored in the brain has to reach a certain quantity before you can "connect everything"…… How our brains load and store information, scientists have studied for a long time and still can't say clearly, but what we can imagine is that it must be who knows how many times more complex than what a professionally trained librarian does; yet many people take it for granted that they're fully up to it—truly overrating themselves.
**Search ability is an ability built on fairly skilled reading ability.**

Writing is one of the most fundamental criteria distinguishing humans from other animals, but most people often don't value writing. No wonder. After humans acquired writing, they had the best means of accumulating knowledge and sharing experience, so much so that they became the most powerful species on Earth—other species can only rely on the most backward yet so-called magical means: genetic inheritance. But from this angle, humans may be one of the most awkward species on Earth: long evolution and the ability to use writing have brought humans to today's height, yet at the instant each person is born, he actually stands at almost the same starting point as other animals, and then has to spend quite a long time, through dull study and repeated practice, to acquire the ability to use writing and grow into a human in the true sense—and of course there must be a considerable proportion, definitely more than half, of "humans" who actually evolve less than halfway [Translator's note: the original writes 一般 ("ordinary"); 一半 ("half") is meant; translated by the intended sense] along this road and then go off thinking themselves right. As one's own knowledge keeps accumulating (through constant reading, observing, understanding, communicating, settling and sifting), a person will eventually discover the benefits of libraries; of course, in a country where a library system has never really been effectively built, the internet has almost become the last life-saving straw. In this sense, the search engine is the ultimate embodiment of the internet's value (I must interject: seen in this sense, how hateful is the practice of some search engines letting their results be swayed by commercial income). When I see many college graduates, even graduate students, who don't make good use of library resources and can't use search engines, and merely because of this can't find useful information that is in fact within easy reach, I can't help feeling sad.

**Writing ability occupies an important place in the ability to teach yourself.**

The writing ability I'm referring to here is not the ability to write novels, not the ability to write poetry, not the ability to write scripts, not the ability to write essays; I'm talking only about the most basic kind of writing ability: the ability to write concise, effective, plain, accurate, concrete expository and argumentative prose. Our education ties the Chinese-language subject and literature together too closely, so much so that it forgets what the most important meaning of written language itself is. Literature is only one of many fields in which writing is applied, and not necessarily even the most important field. Perhaps many people are unwilling to accept it, but this may be the truth: in our culture, if there really were one less *Dream of the Red Chamber* or *Journey to the West*, it wouldn't in fact affect our taking planes on business trips today, using the internet to look up information, taking Hei Jia Bai [Translator's note: the original writes 黑加白 ("black plus white"); the cold medicine brand is 白加黑 ("white plus black"); kept as written] for a cold, or drinking Red Bull when tired and thirsty. The Japanese, without the famous writers Junichi Watanabe and Kenzaburō Ōe, could just the same end up with a super-enterprise like Sony; the Americans, without Thoreau and Hemingway, could just the same win the Second World War and become a superpower; the reason English dominates the globe today is in fact not that they have Shakespeare, Bacon, Dickens and Conan Doyle. Our Chinese-language education has forgotten to teach students how to use "concise, effective, plain, accurate, concrete" writing to record their own knowledge and experience so as to gain more knowledge and experience through sharing—let alone "vivid" writing. That's why Chinese people didn't make Linux, can't make Wikipedia, and most of the blogs they write are just mood diaries moaning without being ill. Please note that here I have no intention at all of promoting "literature is useless." I'm only saying, 1) looking at the development of humanity as a whole, besides "literature," writing has many other responsibilities—transmitting information, accumulating experience, sharing knowledge and so on; 2) for most ordinary people, the latter may be somewhat more important.

**Practical ability is the root of the ability to teach yourself finally turning into real value.**

I once saw a very striking description in some book: "Many people keep 'learning' precisely because they have no goal." Many people sigh that only after starting work do they know what's really useful, but "you regret having read too little when you need it." If a person isn't very lazy, then it's never too late to start learning! Only when you know what you need does real learning begin. Take English, for example: many people study it every day but never use it. They memorize words but resolutely never make sentences, and instead go practicing some root-and-affix memorization method or associative memorization method. They memorize so many words, but never read English documents and never write English articles; of course they do occasionally speak English, but only things like "hello; how are you; I'm fine, and you?" Actually, after basically mastering 2,000 basic words and roughly understanding the basic grammar rules, you should go and use English. For example, reading original English materials in your own field is a very good chance to "use English." If there's a word you don't know, look it up in the dictionary, right; if you know every word but just can't understand the whole sentence, look it up in a grammar book, right; if you still can't figure it out (actually the probability of this isn't very high, even tiny), then ask a teacher, right. But the great majority of the students I've seen make no progress essentially only because of laziness; they've already given up practice at the first step—I often meet students who ask the teacher "What does this word mean?"; such students aren't even willing to look in a dictionary (don't tell me you can't find it; there are many kinds of dictionaries today, and there's also the internet; the probability of not finding it is tiny indeed), let alone look in a grammar book. In fact, sometimes I even feel that I was able to be an English teacher at New Oriental merely because I can look things up in dictionaries and leaf through grammar books, plus a mindset of never giving up until I've figured things out. But why are there so many people unwilling to do even this most basic practice?

If you've really understood this article, you should think seriously about the ability to teach yourself—and building the ability to teach yourself starts with your taking it seriously; it's like your lover: only if you're good to it will it be good to you. Learn something entirely on your own, whatever it is. And be sure to learn it well, better than a considerable number of people; if you really reach this point, then you're not only a complete person but quite an outstanding one—ha, you can say to yourself, "You're so talented!" My personal suggestion is to teach yourself a computer programming language. Because for documentation on computer programming languages, the internet has the most extensive and comprehensive resources. Moreover, good resources are often English documents, so along the way you also practice English reading comprehension—think about it, it's surely more than killing two birds with one stone.

**Always keep an open mind**

Our brains have an operating mechanism called "selective input." It shows concretely as a trait you see in many people: they can only hear what they like to hear and only see what they like to see. Actually, this trait isn't necessarily a 100% flaw; much of the time it even counts as a "self-protective function" for us. However, at every moment, for a person struggling to develop his mind, "selective input" is a frightening enemy. The best way to fight "selective input" is to use our best tools—paper and pen. When you have spare time, or simply at regular intervals, find a stretch of time and write down the arguments and views you can't understand for the moment, or support, or oppose, or are indifferent to. For those you can't understand, write down where exactly your doubt lay at the time; for those you support, record a few of your own reasons or examples of support; for those you oppose, you can likewise record a few of your own reasons or examples of support; even for those you're indifferent to, you can write down why you feel they're entirely indifferent. Such records will [Translator's note: the original writes 有会, with 有 ("have"); 又会 or 会 ("will") is meant; translated by the intended sense] give anyone with such a good habit an ability to process information and knowledge that others can't have—"chewing the cud." This ability to "chew the cud" is an important safeguard that keeps us from becoming victims of "selective input."
**Understanding the course of learning**

All learning processes are similar in the way they progress, but seemingly not everyone really understands this. One fantasy that isn't too stupid but is stupid enough is: as long as you work hard, you can keep making progress continuously. In fact, when learning, the relationship between progress and time is certainly not linear (on the premise that you really do work hard):

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That curve is actually more likely to be step-shaped—sometimes you'll make not the slightest progress for a long time, but at some moment start to feel you're advancing by leaps and bounds; and then comes another long so-called "plateau."

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In fact, each step in the figure above may not be so steep. If enlarged a little, each step of the staircase should probably look like this:

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You see, at any stage, there's always a period of slow progress, and only after a long while does the so-called effect of quantitative change turning into qualitative change appear, and only then might you have the feeling of advancing by leaps and bounds.

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But people often waver after moving forward for a short while, because they feel progress is "excessively" slow. So they've never experienced the feeling of advancing by leaps and bounds. Yet those who waver slowly like this until they finally give up will, in their long lives, always meet certain people around them who are "advancing by leaps and bounds"—and so, unwilling to admit their own past mistakes, of course the seemingly "most reasonable" explanation is "Oh, he must have some secret!"

Of course, more often, that curve should be a spiral rising curve. To use an analogy, it's a bit like a waltz: two steps forward, then one step back.

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If you understand the relationship between time and progress merely as a purely linear relationship, you'll never in the end meet progress you're satisfied with. Actually, nobody can endure disappointment for long. Seen this way, your past giving up was often not because you lacked perseverance, but only caused by misunderstanding the relationship between time and progress—that you actually held out so long amid frequent disappointment, even despair, shows how persevering you really are!

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