Learning Techniques #01: How To Learn on Your Own

How To Learn on Your Own     

Do you want to learn something? There are a number of options.

You can go to class, you can find a private teacher, you can do an online distance learning course or you can teach yourself with a self-study book.

Self-study courses have a lot of advantages. You can study when you want. You can go as quickly or as slowly as you need. You can study at home. You can focus on the bits you are most interested-in and, of course, you can save money – selfstudy is cheap. All you have to do is buy the book and start learning.

Every year, thousands of people choose this method. The popular British series Teach Yourself has sold over 60 million copies. For Dummies, another best-selling self-help series, has over 150 million books in print. The US market for self-help books was estimated to be $9 billion in 2006. Yes, $9 BILLION! and that’s just the USA.

Clearly, lots of people are now choosing self-study. However, it is not a new phenomenon. Experts believe that the first self-help book was “The Maxims of Ptahhotep”. This book was written in Egypt in about 2400 BC by Ptahhotep. He wanted to give his son advice on the best way to live his life. Ptahhotep’s idea remained popular for hundreds of years. The first self-study books were in fact self-improvement books – books to help the reader become a better person. Examples include Xenophon’s The Education of Cyrus, Pliny the Younger’s Letters to Trajan, and, most famously, Machiavelli’s Il Principe (published in 1542). These works were written primarily for kings and princes, giving them advice about how to rule.

However, from the eighteenth century onwards, self-improvement books were written for ordinary people. The most influential of these books was Self-Help (1859) by Samuel Smiles, whose opening sentence is, “Heaven helps those who help themselves”. His ideas remain popular today and he was greatly admired by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

 One of the most popular self-help books was How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) by Dale Carnegie. This book teaches people how to develop their self-confidence in order to become more successful. Carnegie’s book has sold over 15 million copies around the world. The 1937 parody, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, by Irving Tressler, was not so successful.

It was also in the late 1930s that the Teach Yourself series began publishing. Many of the early guidebooks were written to help British people survive during the Second World War, and included titles like Teach Yourself to Cook (which included a recipe for curried pigeon), and, rather worryingly, Teach Yourself to Fly. Since then the books have been encouraging people to ‘teach themselves’ just about everything you can imagine from beginner’s Polish to art history, and Buddhism.

These days, you can find self-study books on just about anything you can imagine. So, how many self-study language books do you have on your bookshelves? And how many of those things do you know how to do? 

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