Saturday, April 28, 2012

Monday, April 16, 2012

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - Part 2




Roots covered in this movie: Bene, Mal, Turpis, Bon, Fide

Words covered in this movie: Benediction, Benevolent, Benign, Benignant, Benefactor, Benedict, Bonny, Bonkers, Bonbon, Bonhomie, Bonafide, Fidelity, Malediction, Malevolent, Malign, Malignant, Malefactor, Malodorous, Malice, Malaise, Malfunction, Malady, Hideous, Turpitude, Apprentice

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - Part 1




Roots covered in this movie: Bene, Mal, Turpis, Bon, Fide

Words covered in this movie: Benediction, Benevolent, Benign, Benignant, Benefactor, Benedict, Bonny, Bonkers, Bonbon, Bonhomie, Bonafide, Fidelity, Malediction, Malevolent, Malign, Malignant, Malefactor, Malodorous, Malice, Malaise, Malfunction, Malady, Hideous, Turpitude, Apprentice

Noxious




Synonyms: harmful, injurious
Sentence: Stay away from the noxious fumes of that solution.

About Rak


This video will help you learn a few words starting with Rak.



Words to learn in this video: Rake, Raki, Rakish, Rakehell, Licentious.

Dearth




Synonyms: scarcity, insufficiency
Sentence: There is dearth of talent in this talent show.

Accolade




Synonyms: praise, approval
Sentence: Heath Ledger's performance in Batman received accolades from the press.

Nascent




Synonyms: developing, emerging
Sentence: Adult film industry is still nascent in this country.

Decorum




Synonyms: civility, politeness
Sentence: The principal asked the students to maintain decorum in the auditorium during the play.

Avarice




Synonyms: greed
Sentence: People say she married him not because of love but due to avarice.

Map of South East Asia



This video helps you memorize the Map of South East Asia. For remaining parts of the map of Asia please refer to Map of Rest of Asia and Map of The Middle East.

Map of The Middle East



This video helps you memorize the Map of The Middle East. For remaining parts of the map of Asia please refer to Map of South East Asia and Map of Rest of Asia.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Build up an aptitude for learning


Arun Rawat 


With the fading of the age of war, human mind has emerged as the single greatest asset on this planet. And though we seem to be moving ahead, we seem to be only heading towards calamity. There are many grave challenges for us and our planet.

To be a highly developed race we need to increase our abilities. Let’s do our bit, for amongst us are geniuses that will take us forward. We may begin by understanding how do we build an aptitude for learning.


Discover yourself – We are all different and unique in our own ways. Since a similar education system is designed for all, it will always give advantage to certain individuals. You change the rules and parameters, and the winners will change.

But knowledge will always make you the winner. Remember the people who have made the slightest difference have done it by discovering themselves.

So, try to discover yourself. Why do you like a particular song? Why are you afraid of spiders? What do you love and hate about your mother?

The more you understand about yourself the more you will learn to focus besides identifying strong points for associations for different things.

Take your hobbies seriously – So you like cooking. What will happen if I cut the potatoes in a different way? Where did a particular dish originate, what is the history behind it all? Why is Chinese food so addictive? How can I make a great burger with the least number of calories? Getting to the bottom of things opens up an entire new world for you and with it countless points of associations. Take your hobbies seriously and discover new hobbies.
The Detective in you – Do not accept everything as it is. Why? When? What? Where? How?... Use the detective in you to find out things yourself. The problem with most of us is that we are so busy thinking about and advertising our problems but we do not have time to think of solutions. Most of the times you may not find the solution but by making an effort to find one you are constantly challenging your brain, hence helping it grow. Questions are your mind’s best friend. There are a million problems in the world. You may have the solution. Begin by solving your own.

Open up the Eyes “Riuhan eye” is Learnodo’s term for the ability of seeing things from multiple perspectives. A vital plus cause it builds multiple associations for anything viewed through the eye.

The “Ooran eye” is another Learnodo term. It refers to the ability to identify and respect one’s emotions. The more you feel for your surroundings and interact with them the more the opportunities for your brain to grow. Emotions are hotspots for memories; it will not take you a millisecond to remember the embarrassing moments of your life, your first kiss, your child’s birth. So stop being ignorant and interact and feel for your environment, you are just shutting the doors to knowledge.



Map of Rest of Asia



This video helps you memorize the Map of Rest of Asia. For remaining parts of the map of Asia please refer to Map of South East Asia and Map of The Middle East.

Brand it Up

Anirudh Rawat


Everyone was puzzled when Chiathon refused to play football in the lunch break. After some speculation one of my classmates came up with a possible reason. It was probably because Chiathon had brought new Reebok shoes and he didn’t want to spoil them playing football in the dusty field of our school. Our suspicion was confirmed in the next few days as Chiathon stopped kicking other students which used to be his favorite past time. The one student who was most relieved by this unexpected turn of events was Ravi, whose one good ball was now safe. Alas he could harbor hopes of getting married someday which would have been impossible with Chiathon scoring imaginary world cup winning goals; with Ravi’s balls suffering agony instead of the goal keeper of the opposite team. Personally I was puzzled as I couldn’t understand the use of such expensive shoes which couldn’t even be used to kick people around.

As I grew up I became even more puzzled with every ooh and aah that followed when anyone brought branded stuff. It was something like “Ooooooo Gucci”. Like suddenly from being human everyone had turned into a chained dog who wanted to pee. Maybe it was an expression of surprise “He doesn’t even know how to swim”. Maybe it was jealousy “His dad must surely be taking bribes” or maybe it was fascination “Only Gucci knows how to make commendable bags”.

When I went to college then people had grown up and couldn’t just come to you and start shouting “I have got Adidas shoes”. Things are much simpler when you are kids. So the problem is that how do you flaunt your branded stuff. I mean how you make people realize that you are wearing Jockey and not Dora. After all one can’t fly by wearing Adidas shoes nor by wearing one’s Jockey on top of one’s pants. So people try different tricks to get their stuff noticed.

Once I was talking to one of my classmates in college. However after every ten seconds he started looking down. Irritated I followed his eyes and realized that he was wearing Adidas shoes. Only after I had complimented his shoes, we were able to have a proper conversation. Similarly some students forgot their Nike bags in class and others kept looking at their Rolex watches every five minutes. One student even stopped showing his hairy butt line as he had got a Jockey underwear which made me wonder that they should change their tag line to “Better than naked”.

Recently one of my friends broke up with his girlfriend and was contemplating suicide. Every now and then he used to come up with an idea about how he was going to die. I advised him “Why don’t you just choose a bus and get trampled by it.” He shot back “Are you insane! You think I am so cheap? If anything kills me it will be a Ferrari!”

Saturday, April 14, 2012

What's In A Name

Anirudh Rawat

Nowadays everyone believes that their son is going to be The One. No I don’t mean Jet Li, I mean Jackie Chan, at least. So it is only natural that parents do quite a bit of thinking before selecting a name for their child. After all if it was not for wise mothers we would have been learning Shannu’s Theory of Relativity and cramming the life history of Pappu the Great. Today however it not just about selecting a cultured name, it should also be unique. Parents go to such great lengths to choose a peerless name that some of the names sound like tongue twisters.

Anyways, all was not the same a few decades ago. Parents were less judicious then, which has led to so many Shwetas, Ankits, and Saurabs that there are at least a dozen of them in each class. To counter this problem teachers usually come up with strange tactics. There were three Saurabs in my class and two of them had the same surname. To differentiate between them one of my teachers used to call one ‘Saurab’ and the other one ‘The Saurab’ as if one was a proper noun and the other a common noun.

If less thought was given while selecting an official name then you can imagine how nicknames were chosen. I believe nicknames were given in one of those moments when the parents were thinking that their child was the cutest living being on the planet. Like when a dad is doing boogie woogie wush to his child and then with the indescribable feeling, crops up an indescribable name.Tinku!

Nicknames in my generation are so common that there would perhaps be only one moniker for a million people. The one topping the charts is definitely Chotu. There are Chotus in every nook and corner in India. There are so many of them that their population would be greater than the combined population of a few countries. Perhaps they could get together and along with Chotis form a new continent Chotuland where they could produce more Chotis and Chotus. There are so many Chotus because all parents of the 70s and 80s named their first child Chotu and if he got lucky then the name shifted to the next one. I was that next one.

All through my childhood I lived in constant fear that my nickname would be discovered. We all know that a spark is not even necessary to start a fire in school. I was especially nervous when I was in a dhaba as all dhabas have a Chotu. I made sure not to look back when someone shouted, ’Chotu! Chotu!’ Only a Chotu will understand how difficult it is to fight one’s natural instincts in such situations.

Once in class 5 I remember I thought that my secret had been revealed. I was coming back from school along with Ksitish and making fun of him as his surname was Chaddha. To get back at me he said,” Your countenance resembles that of my servant Chotu.” My heart was in my mouth. Surely he must have heard mom call me Chotu, I thought. For the next few days I kept his mouth busy by giving him wafers at will. I waited for the bomb to drop but it never happened. Probably it was just a co-incidence.

For a brief period my mom started flip flopping my name between ‘Raj’ and ‘Chotu’. To encourage her to use my new name I used to pretend that I didn’t listen to when she called out ‘Chotu’. But even if she whispered ‘Raj’ I used to immediately be present before her albeit I was light years away. Someone has rightly said that old habits die hard and soon it was back to the same name again.

Meanwhile in school I used to get jittery whenever the topic of pet names was discussed. One day, tired of sharing the burden alone I shared my plight with my best friend Ankit. Having the habit of always trying to sound witty, he said,” What’s in a name? That which we call a rose; by any other name would smell as sweet”. Irritated I replied,” if Shakespeare was born in India and his name was Chotu, he would have never said that.”

How to Memorize Maps Quickly

Anirudh Rawat

Learnodo Newtonic will unravel how to memorize maps quickly by forming associations in your mind so that you retain what you learn with minimal effort.


Country roads take me home!

When I used to visit my grandfather during holidays, I often sat outside the house on a chair enjoying the scenery and the weather. During this pass time, sometimes I used to pass time by looking at the clouds. I tried to make figures from the clouds and occasionally a scenario popped up, like a cat chasing a mouse. Even now I remember vaguely some of the things that my mind had created from the clouds. More importantly, the clouds that were random disappeared from my memory immediately. They remained unconquered.


How to memorize maps quickly? That is the question???

Our mind can easily relate to shapes we already know but it is very difficult for it to register and remember shapes that are random. You would easily locate a country on the world map if it was shaped like a bird or a box. Unfortunately the shapes of the countries of the world are not something we can associate to. But fortunately we have grouped them together to make crocodiles, birds, knifes etc. – basically things our brain already knows and can relate to. Forming recognizable shapes is of utmost importance in memorizing maps quickly.


VIBGYOR! Does it ring a bell???

You would say – But what about the names of the countries? How do we memorize that? Psychology says that our retention can be vastly improved if we make memory connections of what we are learning. The simplest example of this is mnemonics that most of us have used in our student lives. A famous one is VIBGYOR, which gives us the colors in the spectrum (Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red). So after dividing the world map into recognizable figures, we have used mnemonics to help you remember countries in that part. An example is the stretch of countries below North America usually referred to as Central America. Try remembering them from top to bottom using this mnemonic:–

Belly  Guarding  El Salvador  Honestly  Nicely  but  Costing  Panama  dollars.

·        Bel – Belize 
·        Gua – Guatemala   
·        El Salvador    
·        Hon – Honduras   
·        Nic – Nicaragua  
·        Cost – Costa Rica  
·        Panama

How To Memorize Maps Quickly Using Mnemonics



Now you know which countries you have to cross if you have to travel from Belize to Panama.


Killing Bill finally!

So now you know how to memorize maps quickly.  You can watch our videos to memorize the political map of the world. It will still take some work but much less than filling the map again and again to remember it; besides learning through repetition is boring. We have given the whole exercise a general idea so that your brain can club the parts together. Get ready. The War of The Worlds is on!

Maps:-

Europe
Africa
Asia
Middle East
South East Asia
North America
South America


More Articles
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How To Learn Words Easily
How To Expand Your Vocabulary
Build Up An Aptitude For Learning
Understanding Intelligence

Understanding Intelligence

Arun Rawat


What is intelligence by the way? 

To put things simply one may say it is the ability to learn about, learn from, understand and interact with one’s environment. If you think, it is this single simple ability developed across millions of years has made us the masters of this planet. So, to say that one must make efforts to increase one’s intelligence will always be an understatement.

But before we take the leap, we better understand how our mind actually works. The simplest way is experimenting on oneself. Let me begin with an example.

It was raining yesterday when my brother blurted out something completely out of context. “Friends, romans countrymen” he said as he whistled his favourite western tune. “What was that all about?” I remarked bringing the anomaly into focus. At first, he seemed surprised himself but within a few seconds he knew exactly why he uttered those words. Let’s trace his thought…

-          It was sunny as it was raining yesterday (stimulus for thought)
-          The above phenomenon of a sun shower is often referred to by the phrase “A fox’s wedding”
-          16 years ago a boy in his class had recited “A Fox’s Wedding” by Harindranath Chattopadhyay in the school elocution.
-          It was a year later that my brother was to recite in the school elocution. And he had recited Mark Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar. The speech famously begins with “Friends, romans countrymen.”
 
That was a small example depicting the brilliance of the human mind. How years later it can still remind you of something you had not given the mildest of thoughts. So indulge in this small experiment. Any given day we think of a thousand things. If you pay attention many of them make us wonder that what made us think of them after all. Try and grab a thought and analyse it. The results are sure to blow your mind.

Once you have crossed the bridge you are sure to respect the tremendous ability within you. Few questions will arise. Let’s analyse the important ones.

-          How is this related to intelligence anyway?

Firstly let us analyse the vital traits of an intelligent mind.
1)    It is a bank of information and knowledge.
2)    It learns things very quickly.
3)    It retains most of which it learns.
4)    It quickly processes the information within it and comes up with simple solutions.

With our example we are trying to tell you that the brain stores information in packets, by associating various things. To make it work effectively we need to build associating points. You may compare the information in your mind to the electricity substation kilometres from your house. The electric poles around your home are the associations that may bring you the thought. Increasing the poles will increase the number of ways the information will travel to you.
Learnodo Newtonic helps you with the three vital traits, building a knowledge base, training your brain to learn and most vitally to retain most of it. The final step will automatically be taken by you.

-          Why does my ‘oh so brilliant’ mind forget the simplest of things?

The best possible answer lies in the following questions - why is it widely accepted that you will excel in things that you are interested in? Why as a sports fan you can remember the stats, the player profiles, details of matches played decades ago at the back of your hand and forget a simple maths formula?
The mind will find it simple to remember things towards which you are naturally inclined or things that you find interesting. Since it is impossible to be naturally inclined towards everything, your best bet is to try to look at things from a more interesting perspective. Take a cue from Learnodo Newtonic.

-          I am weak in my group. How do I increase my ability?

First of all, no one is weak. Remember that intelligence cannot be measured by examinations or marks. They are just tools designed for the functioning of stale education systems. It is vital to disassociate marks with knowledge. While gradation may be important in the current system view it as only a way to move ahead in life. Value knowledge, for its benefits are immeasurable.
Your problem may be that you do not bother to stimulate your mind. Begin with things that interest you and try to get to the root of things. Associate other things to what you like. Follow Learnodo and learn different ways to associate things.
We at Learnodo Newtonic wish you the best in your endeavour. To find out about how to build aptitudes for learning follow this article.