I am very good auditorily. I learned basic conversational Chinese through audiotapes and a twice-weekly tutor in three months, and at the end of a year working in China, I traveled on my own and did very well in day-to-day transactions and conversations. However, reading is much, much harder for me because I do not have a good visual memory.

For speaking or listening, even if I haven’t spoken Chinese in years I can pick it back up very easily. But I lost almost all my ability to read Chinese when I stopped practicing. Right now I am trying to relearn to read Chinese and I can tell you it is at least ten times harder for me than speaking or listening.

It seems like you treat Gardner as a deity rather than a scientist; it would be interesting if you could provide something more concrete. It is in the nature of the scientific process to criticise what other people have published if there is reason to do so (and there is, see Greenfield’s quote for instance). I did quite a lot of reading before writing this article and there seems to be a lot of “common sense” and pseudo-science supporting the ideas behind learning styles, but very little hard science. And for the record, since this isn’t a blog about neuroscience, the picture wasn’t meant to depict brain activity related to various ways of learning, it was only a desperate attempt to make the article less dense and more pleasant to the eye. 🙂

Thanks a lot! 🙂

More or less. I think MI is a clever way of taking something which normal people just call “ability” and relabel it as “intelligence”. The language we use to describe things is of course important and might in some cases be very powerful. For instance, in this case it tells people “you are intelligent too”, even if they aren’t in the traditional definition of intelligence.

Although I recognise the value of that and think that different kinds of abilities should be recognised as important, I don’t think that this is a scientific endeavour. That’s why I said that it’s political rather than scientific. The lack of empirical evidence further puts the theory into the non-scientific category. This alo reflected by the massive criticism against MI from the scientific community. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary if you’re interested.

This is more or less the same experience that I have. I didn’t think you disagree, I just wanted to clarify my own standpoint in case someone read the comments and misunderstood the tone in the original article. 🙂

So, you mean multiple intelligences are just being politically correct? Hmm, yes, indeed. I see. “However, as is the case with learning styles, it is important to realise that there are many different ways of doing things and that different things will work for different people at different times.” Wow, it’s a very “different” tongue twister! XD 換句話說就是人別「畫地自限」，哈。

I didn’t mean to disagree with you (I also agree with the article itself), I just wanted to strongly agree that motivation is very important.

Actually, the tactile/auditory/visual learning styles thing never made much sense to me. I tried taking some of the tests which would determine my ‘style’, and the results were all over the map. Furthermore, these ‘styles’ didn’t seem to describe anybody I knew well. So I’ve been ignoring this ‘styles’ thing for a long time.