Learning as Stepping Stones

Stepping Stones: rocks to step on, to avoid the surrounding mud or water.

When crossing a river, the more stepping stones it has, the better. Walking across six stepping stones feels much better than hopping across three, and hopping across three is better than jumping to one stepping stone in the middle of a river, and then jumping again.

Learning works the same way. We should never worry about the 'amount' of learning needed, only the size of our steps.

Learning a Language

The Paderborn Method of learning a language involves first learning another, simpler language. Esperanto, having distinct phonemes, minimal grammar and small vocabulary, forms a stepping stone.

A similar process occurs naturally across Slavic speakers. They're so similar, that someone who speaks one Slavic language can often speak with someone using a neighbouring language (e.g. Ukrainians and Poles) as long as both speak slowly and patiently, with a lot of careful checks. When Slavic speakers move to another Slavic-speaking country, they may pick up the 'new language' within a matter of months; meanwhile English speakers can live in another country for any amount of time without learning a thing.¹

Computers

I never studied computers, but I've picked up a lot with far more ease and joy than most people I know. People who study computer science always struggle, because someone tells them where to jump next; but where the course goes has no relation to where someone is or where they want to go.

If someone needs to really study how file systems work, they have a long way to go, with much to remember. But I took a better route.

• You can format a USB drive with just two or three commands in the terminal. The last command is putting a file system on it (mkfs.ext4), but you don't actually need to understand the file system.
• When installing an operating system, I used the same command to put a file system on the hard disk. I barely registered any kind of learning; but the process of installing the operating system was easier because I could already see what the command was doing, without learning something.
• When the computer's slow, one fix is to switch file systems to xfs, which is faster. It's the same command as the last one but using the new file system's name (mkfs.xfs).
• When that disk with an xfs file system became corrupted, and lost all the data, I found out why people use the slower file system: ext4 is more reliable.

My journey into the land of computers had a thousand tiny stones, never far from where I was and where I wanted to go.