I had a similar complaint, and the need to memorise a great quantity of seemingly arbitrary facts put me off learning languages and to a lesser extent history. Interestingly it seems easier to learn words from context and use for that reason, you can regenerate the knowledge from a memory of how and when it is used. I am also told that once you know multiple languages it becomes possible to infer from relations between them, which is perhaps why latin is still considered useful.
I find that it helps to think of learning a foreign language as conducting a massive chosen-plaintext attack on encrypted communications, in which you can use differential analysis and observed regularities to make educated guesses about unknown ciphertexts.
My ability to learn history improved greatly when I stopped perceiving it as “A random collection of facts I have to memorize” and started noticing the regularities that link things together. Knowing that World War II was fought amongst major world powers around 1942 lets you infer that it was fought using automobiles and aeroplanes, and knowing that the American Revolution was fought in the late 1700s lets you infer the opposite, even if you don’t know anything else specific about the wars.
True, you can derive new information from previously learned information. But patterns like ‘there were no cars in the american revolution’ aren’t going to score you anything or get radically new information. And theres no way to derive a lot of the information.
I had a similar complaint, and the need to memorise a great quantity of seemingly arbitrary facts put me off learning languages and to a lesser extent history. Interestingly it seems easier to learn words from context and use for that reason, you can regenerate the knowledge from a memory of how and when it is used. I am also told that once you know multiple languages it becomes possible to infer from relations between them, which is perhaps why latin is still considered useful.
I find that it helps to think of learning a foreign language as conducting a massive chosen-plaintext attack on encrypted communications, in which you can use differential analysis and observed regularities to make educated guesses about unknown ciphertexts.
My ability to learn history improved greatly when I stopped perceiving it as “A random collection of facts I have to memorize” and started noticing the regularities that link things together. Knowing that World War II was fought amongst major world powers around 1942 lets you infer that it was fought using automobiles and aeroplanes, and knowing that the American Revolution was fought in the late 1700s lets you infer the opposite, even if you don’t know anything else specific about the wars.
True, you can derive new information from previously learned information. But patterns like ‘there were no cars in the american revolution’ aren’t going to score you anything or get radically new information. And theres no way to derive a lot of the information.