It appears I'm in the minority here somehow, but I am a strong auditory learner. Like to the point where I sometimes suspect I'm borderline dyslexic, but I don't have any of the usual symptoms of it. Meanwhile, I can listen to audio at 3x speed with ease.
With a regular book for example, I'd take about nearly a year to finish just 1 probably, if I can even stand to read it consistently, and even then I wouldn't remember most of the information from it, making the entire time spent on it seem like a large waste.
With audiobooks on the other hand, I can read a large book in about 2-3hrs, and have read about 25 books per year because of them. I even use text-to-speech on ebooks for titles that don't have audio versions -- it's just that much more efficient for me. I can go out for walks while listening, do laundry, cook, whatever, and still get my learning fix, all while retaining about the same [albeit poor] amount of information as I would with reading normal books.
Now whenever I can, the first thing I do when trying to learn about a topic, is go to youtube and watch long lectures on it at 2x speed, or download them and watch them at 3-4x speed. That seems pretty efficient to me if what I want is a good overview of something. If I want to reference back to specific factoids, then text is better of course, but for a completely new subject I'm not familiar with at all, audio/video is a godsend for me. Dense texts like wikipedia might as well not even exist as learning materials for me, cause they just cause me endless headache trying to parse them if I don't know what I'm looking for ahead of time.
Off-topic: I wonder sometimes at the use of "read" for audiobooks. I don't mean it as a slight -- 25 books a year is honestly more than I take in in any medium, unfortunately -- but it feels like the wrong verb for the action. "Listen" doesn't really feel like it conveys the active retention process generally going on, either.
With a regular book for example, I'd take about nearly a year to finish just 1 probably, if I can even stand to read it consistently, and even then I wouldn't remember most of the information from it, making the entire time spent on it seem like a large waste.
With audiobooks on the other hand, I can read a large book in about 2-3hrs, and have read about 25 books per year because of them. I even use text-to-speech on ebooks for titles that don't have audio versions -- it's just that much more efficient for me. I can go out for walks while listening, do laundry, cook, whatever, and still get my learning fix, all while retaining about the same [albeit poor] amount of information as I would with reading normal books.
Now whenever I can, the first thing I do when trying to learn about a topic, is go to youtube and watch long lectures on it at 2x speed, or download them and watch them at 3-4x speed. That seems pretty efficient to me if what I want is a good overview of something. If I want to reference back to specific factoids, then text is better of course, but for a completely new subject I'm not familiar with at all, audio/video is a godsend for me. Dense texts like wikipedia might as well not even exist as learning materials for me, cause they just cause me endless headache trying to parse them if I don't know what I'm looking for ahead of time.