Here’s an example: If you’re learning Chinese characters, you will learn that 火 means “fire.” That’s regular learning. You may also learn that Chinese characters are often organized by something called radicals, which indicate what kind of thing the character describes. The character 灶, for example which means “stove,” has a 火 on the left-hand side to indicate that it has some relationship to fire. Learning this property of Chinese characters is metalearning—not learning about the object of your inquiry itself, in this case words and phrases, but learning about how knowledge is structured and
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