031: The 50% Hieroglyphs Rule

Have you ever felt like you can’t move on to the next chapter or lesson until you’ve mastered every single hieroglyph in the current one? You aren’t alone, but you might be accidentally slowing down your own progress.

In this episode, Dr. Melinda Nelson-Hurst introduces her signature 50% Rule, a counterintuitive strategy designed to help you break through what keeps so many students stuck.

By leveraging the way your brain actually processes new information, you’ll learn how to stop repeating the same exercises and start making meaningful strides toward reading ancient Egyptian texts in museums and on your next trip to Egypt.

In this episode, you will learn:

• The Secret to Escaping the All-or-Nothing Trap: Discover why waiting for 100% mastery before moving forward is actually a barrier to learning and how to finally get unstuck.

• The Power of the 50% Rule: Learn the exact criteria you need to meet before giving yourself permission to move to the next lesson – even if you still feel a little shaky.

• How to Use Spaced Repetition the Right Way: Understand why repeating the same lesson daily isn't as effective as moving forward and circling back later, and how this technique mimics how our brains naturally learn.

• The Art of "Interleaving" Your Studies: Explore how mixing up different topics, skills, and types of practice creates a deeper resonance in your memory than focused, repetitive study.

• Why You'll See Ancient Texts with New Eyes: Find out why returning to an old lesson after learning something new makes the material feel easier and reveals insights that were invisible to you the first time around.

• Strategies to Prevent Burnout: Learn how the all-or-nothing mindset often leads students to quit entirely, and how the 50% Rule provides a sustainable path to long-term success.

Ready to stop spinning your wheels and start hearing the voices of the ancient world? Tune in to learn how to apply the 50% rule to your hieroglyph studies now.

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Download my free guide, Half-Hour Hieroglyphs to get started with hieroglyphs now.

Learning hieroglyphs is a challenge if you don’t have a tried and true system to follow. This free guide will teach you how hieroglyphs work and how to use them to write names the way the ancient Egyptians did.

Grab the free guide at https://voicesofancientegypt.com/guide

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Voices of Ancient Egypt, the podcast for people who don't just want to learn about ancient Egypt, but want to understand it on a deeper, more meaningful level. I'm Melinda Nelsonhurst, an Egyptologist with a PhD in the field and years of experience teaching at the university level, working in Egypt, and training students around the world to read real ancient Egyptian texts. I've spent decades studying this civilization in a traditional academic setting, so you don't have to. And so you can access knowledge that's usually locked behind academic walls. This podcast brings ancient Egyptian history, beliefs, and language to life and shows you that learning hieroglyphs is possible no matter your age, background, or schedule. So whether you want to read hieroglyphs in museums, on social media, or on your next trip to Egypt, you'll find the tools, stories, and encouragement to make it real right here. Let's hear the voices of the ancient world together. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Voices of Ancient Egypt podcast. I'm so happy to have you joining me today as we get into something I like to call the 50% rule. You've probably never heard of this before because I just made up that name for it. It's something I've been telling my students for quite a while, but I had never put a name to it before. And I decided to put a name to it and have a podcast episode about it because I realized that this is something I have repeated to my students over and over and over again because this is where so many of them get stuck. And you've probably experienced this as well, or at least very many of you, I'm sure, have. I know I have also too. And this is actually somewhat related to the recent episode we had about the power of questions to get us unstuck. Today we're going to talk about another area where I see my students getting stuck, as I mentioned, and this epiphany that they have when I tell them about my 50% rule. And when I did this on a recent coaching call with my students in scribal school, and I tell my students in master scribes this all the time, too. And the basic principle here is that you don't want to stay stuck just repeating like the same lesson or same exercise or something over and over again and not moving on. I see this happen all the time where my students just refuse to move on to the next lesson or the next module because they feel like they don't have absolutely everything down from a lesson. And this is a natural feeling for many of us, especially since I think that a lot of my students are similar to me in that they are what might be called perfectionists or perhaps recovering perfectionists. That's what I sort of think of myself as, where we have this sort of all or nothing thinking about things, right? So we feel like either we have it all down and it's we get everything, we understand every little bit, it's perfect, or it's not good enough. And we're not ready for anything else. We can't move on, we can't do the next thing. But the reality is that's actually not how the brain works. Okay. So when you're learning something, it's very unusual actually to get 100% stuff down the first time you go over something. I don't know if that actually even ever happens to anybody, but if it does, it's pretty unusual. And it what's more likely is that you get some percentage of it, right? And that's totally natural and normal, and it's how it's supposed to be. It is how our brains work. We learn through a few different things. A lot of different things come into play with learning, like connecting to other things that we've learned, for example, and also repetition. So in learning research, there's something they call spaced repetition, which is simply the idea of learning something or being exposed to it repeatedly over time. Now, when I talk about spaced repetition, I always tell my students the caveat of don't stay stuck on the same thing, because sometimes when I tell them about this, they think I mean just keep doing this lesson over and over again, but like wait a day in between or wait a week in between or something and just, you know, do that spaced repetition with that same lesson over and over. But that's not actually what I mean. Now, if you've just started with it and you feel exceptionally shaky, like you really still just not getting much, then yes, you might want to repeat it again. But what I tell my students is to follow this 50% rule. So if you've gone through a lesson and you've done the exercises, you've checked the answer key, and you basically feel pretty good about 50% of what you did, or maybe even more. You are ready to move on to the next lesson. Do not stay stuck repeating that lesson over and over and not moving forward. Now, this doesn't mean that you're never going to touch that last lesson again that you did 50% on, right? Absolutely not. We are going to come back to it. But it is much better for your learning, much better for your brain to move on to the next lessons and then later circle back to that one. And this builds in another thing that has been studied fairly extensively in learning research. And this is the idea of interleaving. So when you do this and you move forward and you cycle back, this is not the only way to interleave, by the way, but this does come into play as a type of interleaving. So interleaving the term comes from the idea of putting uh papers in the middle of like a stack of papers that are already together, right? So it's the idea of taking this like big bunch of papers that are in order and opening up and sticking some papers in the middle here, and then maybe you go to another section, you stick some papers here, right? That's interleaving things. So, but what it means in terms of studying is this means like mixing up what you're studying. This could be mixing topics. So maybe you're studying hieroglyphs and something else, and you mix them up. Um, you go back and forth between them. It could be mixing up skills, which could mean different aspects of we're talking about Egyptian, this could be different aspects of hieroglyphs of the language and of reading hieroglyphs. Maybe you're learning different parts of the language and so forth, and how to apply those skills to different objects. Or it could be different types of practice, different types of exercises. And all of this is good for you, whether you do it in within the same study session is good, but it also applies to successive study sessions. So if you're studying three times a week or five times a week, whatever it might be, in one session you might work on one thing and then in the next session work on something else. And so, in addition to this kind of moving forward and coming back being spaced repetition, it's also a type of interleaving. And this just makes the learning so much deeper and your level of understanding will change. So I see my students do this all the time. And it's not just my beginner students. I see this with my advanced students and master scribes as well. And luckily, my students and master scribes, I think much of the time these days have learned from me to do this, right? And to circle back to things over time. But I still, I still tell them all the time because it still comes up, right? Because it's our natural instinct to feel like I can't move on if I haven't got this like to a like higher level than this. And so we still follow into it even when we know it's not necessarily the best way. This happens to me with things I'm learning as well, or things I'm working on. So it does come up a lot. But a lot of my students now have gotten in the habit of sort of doing this where they move on, they go through more modules with, you know, lessons in them. And then they periodically they have kind of like their own little schedule where they're also always mixing in some study sessions where they're going back to some previous lessons in an earlier module that they haven't done for a while. And so they'll go back and repeat that during some of their study sessions while they're also moving forward on others. So I have some students who, when they submit questions for a coaching call, they'll be submitting questions on like the most recent curriculum I've added to the program and questions on curriculum that was like from three modules before that, right? And that's because they're doing this spaced repetition and this interleaving. And what happens is you'll notice I said they're submitting questions, right? Even though they've done those lessons before. And that's because what happens is when you do it this way, you gain a much greater level of understanding when you come back to it later. If you just repeat it over and over again, like back to back, you will gain some from that, but it won't be as much as when you allow yourself the space and also the varied experience of studying those other lessons that you'll get when you do that. Because when you do that and you come back to an earlier lesson, it's like you see it with all new eyes now. You're at a different level than you were before. Even though you didn't maybe 100% get the stuff at the time, right? And you moved on. Now, when you come back to it, oftentimes my students will tell me, like, wow, this felt this was like so much easier this time. Or they might even say, maybe they don't feel like it was necessarily easier, but it was different, right? And there were different things that stood out to them this time. And now they are, even if it wasn't easier, they're understanding it on a deeper level. And now they have a completely different set of questions than they had for me the first time around. I see this happen all the time. And I was just telling actually my gradual school students who are just starting out in the first module or two in there, and some of them were worried about like, oh, I don't have a hundred percent of module one down, I can't move on. So we were talking about this, and I was telling them that even my most advanced students have this happen too, and that they go through this process, and that what happens is they understand that stuff at a much deeper level the next time around. And then they'll do it again, again later at some point too. And every time they go through, they just have all these questions for me that come out. And it's because there are things that just never would have occurred to them the first time around, or maybe the second time around, because they just it wasn't in their brain with that level of depth and resonance. Whereas now when they go through it, they're like, oh, okay, this is clicking, but now I'm wondering about this other thing that I never would have thought of before. And I see this happen with my students all the time. So no matter what level you're at, whether you're just starting out or you're like intermediate in something, or maybe you're even advanced, this is a technique that can work for any level and probably pretty much anything you're studying as well. But I, of course, have the experience of it with hieroglyphs since I have taught hundreds of people how to read hieroglyphs in my programs, Scribal School and Master Scribes. And I would encourage you to implement these methods yourself with whatever it is that you might be working on. And whether you're in a program for learning something or you're learning via books or videos or something like that, and to make sure that you are doing this combination of space repetition and interleaving by not letting yourself get stuck in that all or nothing trap, right? Because anytime we get into all or nothing thinking, and trust me, I do it all the time. I have a coach as well. So my students who are learning hieroglyphs have me as their coach to help point this out with them. I have a coach also, and she points this out with me quite frequently with things that I am getting stuck in this all or nothing thinking, that if I don't do something, you know, exactly a certain way, it's not good enough. And I it can't, you know, it can't be done. It's I can't finish it, I can't move on to the next thing, whatever it might be, right? And she points that out for me. This came up kind of in that power of questions thing, right? Of having that outside set of eyes and ears that can see and hear sort of what's going on, somebody who's not stuck in your own head, because if you're anything like me, you probably get stuck in your head about these things. I certainly do, and many of my students do as well. And so it can also be really helpful to have that second set of eyes or ears to also help you with figuring out when you're getting stuck in this all or nothing thinking, and then help you realize wait a minute, I just need to pause and apply the 50% rule here. All right. So next time you feel that you just don't have enough of something down to move on, ask yourself if you've met the 50% rule. Or if you're not really sure what's going on, you just feel really frustrated, maybe you need to talk to somebody else about this, and then they might be able to see for you, especially if it's a coach who knows how to look for these things, might see that you're getting stuck in this all or nothing thinking and remind you to look at this and say, wait, do I really need to be stuck here? And then you can be, oh, like, wait, I remember now. 50% rule, right? And apply that rule and say, okay, did I get 50% of it reasonably well? If yes, it's time to move forward. Just make a and make a note that you're gonna come back to those lessons again at some point. And maybe you could even set a time on your calendar now as to when you're gonna do some study sessions related to that. And you can interleave those, of course, with your other study sessions, working on later curriculum that you're working on. And then you can just learn on this higher level and prevent that stuck feeling that oftentimes, honestly, one of the reasons I wanted to share this today is because when people get stuck in that phase of feeling like they just have to repeat the same thing over and over again, what happens most of the time is instead of just repeating it over and over again, you know, indefinitely, is there comes a time where they're like, I'm just not getting this, I can't do this anymore, I'm busy, whatever. And they put it down and they stop making progress. So it's so important to apply this and make sure that you are making that progress at whatever speed works for you. And you're doing that circling back, you're doing that interleaving, you're doing that spaced repetition rather than allowing yourself to convince yourself with your all or nothing thinking that um this just isn't the time, or you're not good enough at this, or whatever it might be, and staying stuck in that mode. And I think you will make so much more progress with this when you apply this rule. I can't wait to see all of the progress that you're doing here. I would love to hear. You can reply to an email of mine or send me a message on Instagram. I'd love to hear what parts of this episode resonated with you and how you're going to apply the 50% rule in your life. Until next time, stay curious.