Listening to something repeatedly is better than listening to many things

I have found that listening to a good audio program several times is often better than listening to a large number of audio programs because it allows me to internalize the program and understand it well.

I recently lost my MP3 player which I have been attached to for the past four years. It was an iRiver that only holds 1 GB of memory.

I preferred it over an iPod because of its voice recorder, which I need to record thoughts that I get while I am in the gym or driver, and also because of its convenient neck strap that keeps my hands free.

Because of the limited storage, it couldn't hold very many audio programs, so I would often listen to the same audio files again and again until I had time to swap them with some of the other thousands of programs I had on my computer.

Although this was constraining, it offered me the benefit of fully absorbing some of the good audio selections that I would listen to over and over again. I learned something new every time I listened to the same audio program. It also improved my English language because I would memorize the structures of sentences.

Sometimes I memorize something without really understanding it, but when the time is right and something in life motivates me to do so, I will retrieve it and reanalyze it .

My new Creative Zen has made me disoriented. It has 32 GB of memory. I'm finding it hard to stick to listening to one thing because I want to explore what else is there.

I also recently burned 250 audio programs (audio book samples) on a CD which I listened to in my car (my car CD player reads data mp3s). Although this allowed me to explore what is out there, I think it would be better to choose the ones that I find beneficial and enjoyable to listen to and make a playlist of them to listen to repeatedly.