One of the most common questions I get from students is: “What’s the best way to retain what I’m learning?”

Students may think they understand the lessons and concepts being taught, but later struggle putting it all into practice. Writing good code takes a lot of time and effort, so the best way to retain the information is through practice and repetition –– easier said than done, right?

Let’s go over some helpful tools and methods you can use to better retain what you’re learning.

It’s Easy to Forget What You Don’t Understand

Often, even when you think you have a good grasp of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript concepts and techniques, they’re difficult to put it into practice. And sometimes, no matter how clear the explanations in the videos or tutorials, you can’t get anything to work when you try it later on.

Don’t Just Watch or Read
Be an active learner, not a passive learner. It’s difficult to retain information through passive learning. You may think that watching a video or reading a tutorial over and over again is enough to lodge the information in your head forever. While some of it will eventually stick, it’s not the most effective way to learn.

Even though you’re focused on what’s being taught in the lesson, you’re just seeing or reading abstract concepts. To really get it, you need to run into difficulty, make mistakes, then identify and correct them. So converting that knowledge from abstract to practical is important because it’s no longer something someone else has told you.

Start building something right away: A single-page website, a small website component, get involved in a project –– anything. It doesn’t matter what it looks like or how it works as long as you keep doing it while raising the bar, you’ll gradually get better. I promise!

Online Coding Tools

These days, online code editors like CodePen, JSFiddle provide designers and developers a quick way to communally experiment with code. This is a helpful way of implementing a concept you just learned. To ensure you’re getting it into your long-term memory, try coding at different times during the day, without looking anything up beforehand.

Developer Tools

When visiting websites I like, I always use Chrome DevTools (or Mozilla’s Firebug) to inspect the code and see how certain parts of it were built. I’ve learned some neat things doing that. Also, viewing –– or “borrowing” –– another website’s HTML and CSS, then changing it around to build something different can really help when learning to code.

Share Your Knowledge

“But I’m not an expert!”

It doesn’t matter. You will always know something that someone else doesn’t know. Plus, you’ll retain more when you synthesize then teach the information and, down the road, it might even establish you as the “expert” in a given topic.

I’m always impressed by people who have blogs where they write about what they’re learning. It’s no coincidence they are the ones who find successful work in the industry.

Be Patient, Confident and Don’t Worry About Memorizing

It’s important to be patient because it takes a while to wrap your head around code, but the more you do it, the more it starts clicking.

Don’t worry about memorizing every tag, selector, property or value available. A solid understanding of the concepts –– and a reliable reference –– is more important. I probably don’t know every CSS selector off the top of my head, but I sure know how they work and where to reference them.

Finally, to retain new concepts, you need to be confident and refrain from being pessimistic when you struggle. Pessimism leads to giving up.

Practice and more practice it is.

well said