Understanding understanding

Learning is not useful if we only memorize something. The purpose of learning is to acquire knowledge that we can then use. If we want to achieve this, we must understand what we have learned.

Sometimes it's hard to know whether we understand something or if it's just a false feeling. We've all experienced listening to a teacher's explanation and found it entirely clear and logical. But then we try to repeat it and quickly realize that it's not so simple.

There is a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein - "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

To test our understanding of something, we must try to explain it in our own words. This quickly helps us identify where we get stuck when using our knowledge.

And how can we incorporate understanding into our learning?

One simple way is to try to explain what we are learning to someone else. Or at least pretend that we are teaching someone. When we create an explanation, we quickly realize where we lack knowledge. When the listener asks "why?" or "can you explain a little more, I don't understand?", and we cannot provide an answer, we have likely encountered our own lack of knowledge.

Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was also a strong advocate of this way of gaining knowledge.

It's called the Feynman method, which consists of four steps:

I. Choose a topic that you want to understand.

II. Explain it in words that a child would understand.

III. Discover the gaps in your knowledge and fill them in.

IV. Simplify the explanation into the simplest form possible.

If we truly understand a concept, it will be better remembered. But to never forget things, we can always use Anki.