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Hi everyone. I feel kind of desperate and I didn't know where to ask for help and I found this forum.

I just started Law School 3 weeks ago and I've found out I do not know how to study. I spend hours on end trying to understand the subject and then I forget it the next day, wich is incredibly frustrating. I use the Pomodoro technique wich allows me to study for long periods of time without getting bored or tired, but that doesn't help me if I cannot learn the things from my textbooks. Last Saturday it took me 4 hours to learn 2 pages worth of content wich I forgot the next day. I am afraid I will not be able to keep up and fail. And I am not just reading my textbooks again and again and again.I try to read the textbook then I find the more important stuff( 90% of everything seems to be important) then I try to explain it to myself in an simpler fashion then I recite it and see if I understood the concept.I even make tests for myself wich I try to answear at the end (I never actually managed to finish an entire chapter because it takes me about 25 hours to finish one and by the time I reach the later parts of the chapter I forget the early parts). I feel like I am a failure .What can I do to study faster and retain more information,how do you do it or how did you do it when you were a student? Its not like I want to learn an entire book in 30 minutes and then play video games or watch football, I would be very happy to spend all of my free time studying but the problem is it seems counter productive because so far I ve spent about most of my time studying and my way of studying doesn't seem to work at all so all that time is wasted time.

Which school started in October?

Anyway, stop trying to retain material. Your job isn't to regurgitate case names and fact patterns on exams; your job is to understand the broader principles of law and know how to apply them to totally new fact patterns. You're only three weeks in, so it's totally normal to be frustrated at this point. Don't drive yourself insane trying to memorize everything you read, and instead focus on pulling out the rules. Brief cases (because I didn't see that on your list), and remember that you aren't preparing for class like you would in undergrad.

cavalier1138 wrote:Which school started in October?

Anyway, stop trying to retain material. Your job isn't to regurgitate case names and fact patterns on exams; your job is to understand the broader principles of law and know how to apply them to totally new fact patterns. You're only three weeks in, so it's totally normal to be frustrated at this point. Don't drive yourself insane trying to memorize everything you read, and instead focus on pulling out the rules. Brief cases (because I didn't see that on your list), and remember that you aren't preparing for class like you would in undergrad.

Thank you for your answear. I am European.Our professors tell us that our textbooks are a summary of a summary and if we try to summarise it even more we will lose important information.They are also very old (78-80) and the way they hold their lectures is very out of date .They dictate and we write, so a course is more or less them reciting their textbooks while we note down everything day say.Anyway thank you again for you advice !

Sorry, I take back everything I just said. I have absolutely no idea how European law schools teach, and you're likely doing very different coursework than U.S. students, especially if you're not in a common-law jurisdiction.

You can try posting in the "Non-U.S. Law Schools" forum on this site, but you would probably be better off finding a forum geared to your specific country.

I don't think anyone on this site can help you - based on your name I would guess you are Romanian, and law school is an undergraduate degree over there.
The vast majority of people here are applicants/students/alumni of US law schools, which are graduate programs and likely use a vastly different method of teaching than your professors. The non-US law schools discussed are probably mostly Canadian, maybe a couple of UK ones thrown in.
Your best bet would be to talk to upperclassmen at your school, and ask them for advice.

Piggy11 wrote:I don't think anyone on this site can help you - based on your name I would guess you are Romanian, and law school is an undergraduate degree over there.
The vast majority of people here are applicants/students/alumni of US law schools, which are graduate programs and likely use a vastly different method of teaching than your professors. The non-US law schools discussed are probably mostly Canadian, maybe a couple of UK ones thrown in.
Your best bet would be to talk to upperclassmen at your school, and ask them for advice.

I was mostly interested in what study methods do you use to absorb large amounts of information.That is pretty much it.But you are right I should have searched for help somewhere else but I really could not find anything else.I guess I could also ask some med students. And yes, I am Romanian.