In Learning, Method Matters Most

Different subjects call for different methods of learning. Science and non-science, for example, should not be learned in the same way.

Back when I was a university student, in music appreciation class, the teacher would play us a piece of music and ask us what it was about. Naturally, we had no idea, so the teacher would explain: this is the storm petrel doing such and such. As it happens, I do have a bit of musical talent. With classical pieces like "A Moonlit Night on the Spring River" and "The Moon Reflected in the Second Spring," I can more or less hum the melody in numbered notation after listening for a while. But try as I might, I could never answer the teacher's questions and ended up losing interest in music.

After graduating from university, I luckily stumbled across Schopenhauer's philosophy of music. In Schopenhauer's view, music is melody, an abstract emotional expression of all kinds, such as joy, anger, and sorrow. Music does not express any particular, concrete, definite instance of an emotion but joy, sorrow, pain, and peace of mind themselves; its lyrics are the whole world.

All at once I understood how to appreciate music—you can't actually put into words what a piece of music specifically means. Listen more, experience more, and an appreciation of music will naturally grow. Music is the most abstract of all, and precisely because of that, it is also the most concrete: sooner or later, something in your life will strike a chord with a familiar melody. Take the melody "The Bright Moon Carries My Longing a Thousand Miles." Fail the Gaokao, and it seems written for you; go through a breakup, and it seems written for you all over again.

As a kid who grew up in rural Sichuan, I had never seen the sea, let alone heard a petrel's cry, so it's no wonder I couldn't answer the teacher's question.

The same goes for Chinese class. Take "Aloof one knows they aren't the snow; As faint through air soft fragrances flow" or "Their sparse shadows slant o'er the water clear and shallow; Their hidden fragrance wafts in the moonlight dim and mellow¹." How could children who have never seen plum blossoms possibly tell that these lines are about them? That is why I have long doubted the practice of making students write out the main idea of a text and summarize each paragraph. Imposing a single correct answer is a grave mistake. First, students lack the life experience to truly understand. Second, people with different experiences should, by rights, read the same passage differently. Insisting on one correct answer is bound to kill many students' interest in learning.

The young writer Tongle Wang has said² that when one of her essays was used for a reading comprehension test, she got the questions wrong herself; the very first option she ruled out was the correct answer. Clearly, literature has no single correct answer. People with different life experiences naturally understand the same thing differently. Likewise, screen adaptations of Dream of the Red Chamber or Romance of the Three Kingdoms are bound to turn out differently depending on who makes them.

Chinese literature should be learned the way the ancients learned it: find beautiful writing that rolls off the tongue and read it aloud, without making a point of understanding it. Read it aloud long enough, and you will know it by heart. What you memorize this way also stays with you remarkably long, often for life. When I was young, I learned "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow" by heart this way. To this day I don't understand why a poem plainly about Emperor Xuanzong of Tang opens with

The Emperor of China sought
The greatest beauty in the land.
So long and for so many years
He searched, but none fell in his hands. Yet that hasn't stopped me from reciting the poem fluently decades later.

That is the "reading ten thousand books³" part. What remains is "traveling ten thousand miles": living more and experiencing more. Once your experience builds up, you naturally come to understand the material stored in your memory, and can even put it to apt use. That is the right way to learn Chinese. When I was young, I read Li He's line "Frost lies heavy, drums are cold, their notes no longer rise," and simply couldn't make sense of it. Later I studied and worked in Northeast China, where temperatures dropped to forty below and the very air seemed to freeze. On one such day, the line came back to me, its meaning suddenly clear.

In Dream of the Red Chamber, there is a scene in which Lin Daiyu teaches Xiangling to write poetry. She says, "If you truly want to learn, I have the complete works of Wang Wei here. First read a hundred of his five-syllable regulated poems and study them closely until you know them inside out. Then read one or two hundred of Du Fu's seven-syllable regulated poems, followed by one or two hundred of Li Bai's seven-syllable quatrains. Once these three poets have given you a foundation, move on to Tao Yuanming, Ying Yang, Xie, Ruan, Yu, Bao, and the rest. Clever and quick as you are, you'll be a master poet within a year!" Lin Daiyu stresses the importance of reading ten thousand books; I think she should also have mentioned traveling ten thousand miles, that is, living and experiencing more. Likewise, the saying goes, "Know the Three Hundred Tang Poems by heart, and you can compose poems even if you never could." But here too, we should not forget the need to live and experience more.

Learning a foreign language also takes the right method. In school we memorized vocabulary like mad, studied phonetic symbols, and drilled grammar. So why, more than a decade later, are we still unable to speak English fluently? Because our method was wrong. Children can talk long before they learn phonetics or grammar. Doesn't that prove you don't need them to speak English? Language ability is a skill, not an academic subject: it can only be acquired, not learned. Acquisition follows a fixed order, listening, speaking, reading, then writing, and that order cannot be changed. We studied English at school for over ten years and still can't speak it, because we listened far too little. To acquire English, start by listening, then speak by imitating what you hear. It's like a song: listen to it enough, and before long you can sing it yourself.

Method is everything in learning. It determines how efficiently and effectively we absorb knowledge, and it is the key lever for studying smarter rather than harder, and for turning aimless effort into real progress. This piece has dealt with how to learn non-scientific subjects. In the next, I will turn to how to learn science.