Translate

Powered By Blogger

21.4.17

Having the English Soncino was a big help and for my first five years I used that as an aid.

I do not have any magic system towards learning. When I was in yeshiva I found  certain people helped me to understand the Gemara. That was the Tosphot HaRosh, the Maharsha and the Pnei Yehoshua. I did not feel in any way ready for the big leagues like Reb Haim Soloveitchik though that was the bread and butter for most people. Having the English Soncino was a big help and for my first five years I used that as an aid. Having a good learning partner is also a great help. But when it came to Physics I did not really have any idea how to get started. It seemed a lot depended on finding the right book for me. But in terms of Physics, one way I managed to get through my courses at Polytechnic Institute of NYU was by a method I had seen mentioned by the Ari (Rav Isaac Luria Ashkenazi) and the Ramchal of saying the words forwards and backwards. This was an amazing help for me, and and I think once a person has gone through a book a few times straight with no review, then it is  a good idea to go back to review it with this method. I think a lot of people give up on it because they are not aware of the method by which they could open the lock.


[For fast learning what I did for a while was to do a half a page per day with Rashi Tosphot, Maharash and Maharam. That was for fast learning and only took about 40 minutes per day. I do not recall if I was learning also with my learning partner at the time. That would have been in a different session and his path was to stay on it until it was clear. We learned only about an hour a day, but he refused to budge until every last detail was clear. I think the average time on one Tosphot with him was about two or three months [sometimes more -up to I think six months.] He used to think up the most amazing questions with seemingly no effort, and sometimes great answers also. Some of the answers on questions in my two books on the Gemara I came up with only after years of thinking about his questions.][e.g. Bava Metzia page 97, the answer to the question there I thought of only after learning Rav Shach's treatment of the Gemara in Nida page 2b. The learning with my learning partner stopped after Bava Metzia page 104 but then picked up again later when we did the Gemara in Sanhedrin 63 and other Gemaras.]