fascination facilitates learning

There is a great youtube video in which a woman named Amy Walker demonstrated various accents. She was brilliant, but especially so in a separate video in which she taught how to learn accents well: You must be fascinated in them, she asserted. If you are not, you will not pay attention to the accents, the speakers, and why they speak as they do. You will not observe, analyze, and practice. When she went on to describe five categories of an accent, she suggested that the listener start with the component he or she is most interested in, and add the rest later.

These ideas–the need for fascination with the material and the suggestion of starting study at the point of greatest interest–are exceptionally good advice. Learning does not have to follow someone else’s starting and stopping points. Once you have absorbed the stickiest knowledge, you have a framework with gaps to fill in, and filling in gaps is interesting because it resolves questions.

Intelligence involves curiosity and persistence, which are practically synonymous with fascination. This alone may be good reason to pursue what most interests you, and find the aspects of the material that fascinate you.

Amy Walker used another pedagogical strategy without mentioning it, by the way, and that was repetition. By the time you listen to the accents clip, you are not likely to forget her name.