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How the words we teach English language learners changed

pudding.cool

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Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#151
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime ? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans. I doubt we're perceptibly different (in any genetic sense) than Homo sapiens from 200,000 years ago. I'm not sure the change from that point is perceptible. > Jesus Freaks That people accept that language on HN would seem to tell us a lot about the population here.

> I doubt we're perceptibly different If you're around various ethnic groups long enough, you'll start recognizing which group a person you are unacquainted with belongs to. And I don't mean the obvious differences. Sort of like "My Fair Lady" where the linguist could tell where a person came from by the way they spoke.

Are you claiming there are evolutionary differences to race?

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasing precision is good to the end that is disambiguation. The problem is that that end is not always what language is good for. Metaphor is an incredibly useful tool, because it allows us to convey meaning with imprecise definition, but precise implications. The meaning of an expression is its implication, not its definition. The implication must be decided by the reader. This is either done by strict definitio…

Yes that makes sense, and I think I mostly agree with you. The point about metaphors is a good one, but what I would say is that often the most precise way to communicate something is through a metaphor. If the goal is to convey a mood or a feeling, there's no way to take the metaphor and make it more precise using more words, because an essential part of it is brevity. The intended effect is lost if you try to turn…

> the most precise way to communicate something is through a metaphor.

> I think this is exactly your point

Yes, it is.

Another useful word would be "direct", or maybe "concrete". A metaphor allows us to get right to the point, instead of going up the ladder of abstraction. Alternatively, we can use well-defined abstractions, like formal mathematics, to be precise in an abstract way.

I tried to lay it out, but I'm (ironically) using objectively defined abstractions to do so...

Metaphor is what allows a story's implications to be taken out of an expression, and placed into the interpreter itself. An interpreter that arbitrarily decides what an expression can mean does so by bringing its own implications. This way, instead of forcing an expression to articulate those implications, the expression can imply them instead. The interpreter fills in the gap.

If we formalize a story's implications, that means we create a decided interpreter: a collection of assumptions that impose a specific perspective on the reader. This is how programming languages work: any expression has a clearly defined meaning, because it will only be given to that language's interpreter. The disadvantage is that you cannot write ambiguous expressions, because ambiguity would require the potential for more than one perspective, which would require more than one interpreter.

My idea is to create many ad-hoc interpreters, so that any of them can be chosen to interpret a given expression. This way, the chosen perspective is computable, while the expression can be ambiguous and metaphorical. The only "hard" problem left is the selection of interpreter, which I expect to be manageable.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#154
post #49

I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once. It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer. If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc. If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand. If it's for reading t…

Beware though that only learning words may leave you confused as in my experience Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references. For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors. It always made me question if Americ…

Have a butchers at my China who thinks the seppos are less precise.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While if you are living somewhere, it's really important to know a lot of basic supermarket items that you wouldn't prioritize for other usages. Why? Having spent a good amount of time living in Shanghai, I found it important to be able to understand menus. But there's no pressure to know the words for supermarket items; you can just go to the supermarket and look for the item. Otherwise your point is correct; all…

>(2) Word frequencies are still the wrong concept. If you want to understand a particular document, you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document. (You'll be able to learn some of them from their use in the document.) If you decide to learn a list of "frequent" words, you're unlikely to be able to understand more than a couple of isolated sentences in any given document. The point of lea…

> If you have a document in front of you, would you rather have to look up every word in a dictionary, or only every other word?

I've been in this situation. There's no real difference between the two circumstances you describe.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English tends to just borrow/steal words from other languages if they're useful enough. It could also be something to do with the lack of consistency of english rules so it's not so easy to create new words.

You can wordificate cromulent lexemes with abandon. The English language don't care.

any noun can become a verb if you don’t care enough

— https://blog.linguisten.de/post/183704949120/any-noun-can-be...>

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, memorize many noun most important. Grammar less Important. Can do food, can do travel, can do tax. Because, noun most important.

Working with ESL people makes it clear that grammar isn't so important. One of my friends would say, instead of "go shopping", would say "make some shoppings". Instead of "it's time to go", he'd say "time for go". All words that started with 's' were pronounced 'ehs', as in "gas ehstation". The other people at work soon picked those lines up, and we used them regularly amongst ourselves. I still use them decades late…

Put volume!

— Trevor Noah, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtz0WZSNcPA#t=43s>

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#158
post #63

I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once. It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer. If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc. If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand. If it's for reading t…

> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed. Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing…

Its um like you know whatever

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#159
post #49

I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once. It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer. If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc. If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand. If it's for reading t…

Beware though that only learning words may leave you confused as in my experience Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references. For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors. It always made me question if Americ…

> For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors.

First, most native English speakers have an execrable vocabulary. I seem to remember that most people use less than 2000 (generally much less) unique words when they talk to each other. There is a high probability that they simply don't know the right word.

Second, using the same word over and over again gets monotonous. Using colorful idioms and metaphors is often necessary to keep people's attention. This is triply true in this day and age of mayfly-like attention spans.

Finally, if I'm teaching something, I'm probably trying to give you 3 or 4 different ways to think about the subject in the hope that one of them resonates and clicks so you understand. I don't know a priori which one that will be, so my vocabulary needs to shift in the hope of getting the point across.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being proficient in a language is really less about memorizing words than it is pronunciation and grammar. Memorization itself is pretty easy.

No, memorize many noun most important. Grammar less Important. Can do food, can do travel, can do tax. Because, noun most important.

I think we have different definitions of “proficient”. :)
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