Appendix 2: Further Reading

Appendix 3: What to read to find out more

There are four books you can read to find out more about deliberate practice. It will help you think harder about how you can improve your learning. The good news is that they’re all fun. Not dry science, they are written to be read by many people. They are enjoyable, full of stories, good ideas and they describe the science of deliberate practice in a way that anyone can benefit from.

Peak: How to Master Almost Anything by Anders Ericsson

Ericsson’s early research led to the development of deliberate practice. In this book he summarises all the research results through stories and useful tips. It will give you examples of how deliberate practice was used to master memorising large numbers, play music, chess, etc. There are even a few examples of language learning.

It is very easy to read but you can also get a quick summary from this YouTube video.

The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast by Josh Kaufmann

This book answers the question of how long it takes to develop sufficient mental representations through deliberate practice. It is 20 hours. It summarises deliberate practice and gives useful case studies about how Kaufmann learned different useful things like basic programming or the ukulele in 20 hours. The 20 hours is not based on research, just practical experience. Even if it’s just an approximate figure, it is a useful goal to aim at.

You can hear Josh Kaufmann talk about it during his TED Talk where he also demos how he used it to learn the Ukulele. But there’s also a 7-minute summary of the book itself.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

Unlike the other two books, this is not a systematic summary of deliberate practice. But it describes how the author used it to become a US memory champion in a year. It tells a lot of interesting stories along the way and it’s an entertaining read on its own. But one of the main lessons is that you can develop memorization techniques for specific things like numbers or vocabulary through deliberate practice.

Joshua Foer gave a long talk at Google and a shorter TED talk about his experiences.

Fluent in Three Months: Tips and Tricks to Help You Learn Any Language by Benny Lewis

This is a really unfortunate title for a great book. There is so much snake oil that promises fast results without any work in just three months. Lewis is different. He actually defines what he means by fluent. Level B1 on the CEFR. That’s a real stretch goal but achievable with a lot of work. Not impossible. But first the book is full of strategies and techniques that can be used to support deliberate practice. Some of them are referenced here, as well.

You can hear Benny Lewis talk about it in his TED talk. But more importantly he also tried Czech. He had to abort his experiment after 2 months for personal reasons but he recorded a video in Czech. Although he’s reading, his pronunciation is really impressive after 2 months and it is clear that he has at least some understanding of what he’s saying. He also wrote a blog post called Why Czech Isn’t as Hard as You Think. Well worth reading.

Albanian Learner’s Diary by Dominik Lukeš

The last recommendation is not a book, it’s just an extract from a diary I kept while I was learning Albanian. It does not describe deliberate practice but it shows how even someone who looks like they’re good at language learning can feel really stupid most of the time. It also gives examples of goal setting and progress audits.