Founder's note
Why I built this.
I struggled with learning for most of my youth. I did okay at school, but it was exhausting — sitting through the lectures, studying the way everyone else seemed to study, and always feeling like the effort I put in was out of proportion to what I got back.
Learning Japanese, and then going to Japan, is what opened my eyes. There are different ways to learn, and it turned out some of them I genuinely loved. Immersion. Talking to people and listening to them. Watching TV and listening to the radio. Flashcards. None of it looked like the studying I had been grinding through for years, and all of it worked better. There was so much more to this than textbooks, and once I discovered what actually worked for me I could enjoy learning instead of treating it as an obligation. I could make it fun.
I have been a lifelong student ever since, and I love learning, which is not a sentence I could have written at school. I have also spent a lot of time on how other people learn. For my kids. And I am not a teacher by trade, but I have spent most of my working life training people and speaking to rooms full of them, and you start to notice things. Who is still with you and who quietly checked out ten minutes ago, and how little that has to do with how clever anyone is.
Nobody ever told me there was anything to find out. I wish I had known this before I started, and that is the whole reason this is here. It is free because I don't think anyone should have to pay to find out how their own head works.
What it actually measures.
Twenty questions, about three minutes. It gives you a score for each of the three ways people take information in — by seeing it, by hearing it, or by doing it. You use all three. Most people lean much harder on one, and that lean is what the questions pick up.
You get all three scores rather than one label, because the order is the useful part. Finding out I learn faster by listening than by reading changed how I studied. Being handed a one-word verdict, as though that settled it, would not have.
Your strongest one is not a limit and it is not a diagnosis. It is simply the way in that takes you the least effort, which matters most when what you are trying to learn is hard.
How You Learn is made by Catalyst Code. We build tools for learning, including three apps for Japanese — SimplyHiragana, SimplyKatakana and SimplyKanji. They all come from the same idea as this one. Learning should be something you enjoy rather than an obligation, and when it is fun, you keep going.
If learning has always felt like more work than it should be, it is worth three minutes to find out whether it is the method rather than you. It was for me, and it made the whole thing a lot more enjoyable.
Free · 3 Minutes · No Sign-Up
Sensory modality framework by Walter Barbe & Raymond Swassing (1979). Cognitive foundations from Jerome Bruner (Harvard, 1966).