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Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language

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Re: Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language

#111

Post by [deleted] »

friedegg wrote: post #27
melling wrote: post #21

My feeling is that you need an incredible amount of repetition. I never really learned Spanish well until I took immersion classes in Guatemala then continued on backpacking through South America for several months. A decade later I still struggle to retain what I learned. I’ve built many language learning Android and iPhone apps over the years. I still don’t have a great formula but I think my latest iPhone apps are…

There is a learning method called Spaced Repetition, which involves repeatedly quizzing yourself, with a decreasing frequency as you learn them. So, if you always know the word for dog, you'll get that one less frequently than the one for cat that you have more trouble remembering.

[deleted]

Re: Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language

#113

Post by gjm11 »

indigochill wrote: post #36
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the bible is... contentious I'd say because there's a lot of differences between even English translations. I mean I guess the gist of it and the stories are roughly the same but it's definitely not a 1:1 translation between languages.

There's no such thing as a real 1:1 translation between languages anyway. Some words may map that way, but languages as a whole reflect their cultures. A common example from the New Testament is that English has just one word for "love" whereas Greek has several. We compromise by adding some adjective, like "brotherly love". When learning a language, I've heard its best to not learn a direct mapping to a word in your…

English has plenty of words for "love" too, even if the distinctions it makes aren't quite the same ones that ancient Greek does. For instance: Liking, caring, lust, enjoyment, admiration, friendship, attraction, affection, worship, loyalty, infatuation. All of them are aspects of things we could refer to as "love", just as much as ἀγάπη, φιλία, στοργή, and ἔρως are in Greek.

(I'm not denying that it's enlightening to look at another culture's words and see how they divide the world up differently from ours, and direct attention to things ours might miss. But I get the impression that ever since C S Lewis's "Four Loves" many people think that the ancient Greeks had a richer variety of understanding of human affections than we do because they had four words for "love" and we have only one, and I think that's all wrong.)

Re: Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language

#114

Post by sonusario »

pteraspidomorph wrote: post #78
pessimizer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd bet the tradition isn't the same in Catholicism (which I have no experience with.) Protestantism is largely an outgrowth of insisting that the Bible be distributed, and in a language that the locals could understand. The Roman churches expected you to be dependent on the priest's communications of what the Bible said.

The catholic church in general is, incredible as this may sound, more open to evolution. It just takes a very, very long time, but there have been dogma updates and clarifications throughout the centuries, and even admissions of being in the wrong. I fully expect the church's stance on some highly divisive issues of today to further evolve in the coming decades. Rather than insisting stories from millennia ago writte…

> It just takes a very, very long time, but there have been dogma updates and clarifications throughout the centuries, and even admissions of being in the wrong.

Clarifications, yes. Changes in dogma, no. Catholic doctrine has not changed since the death of the last apostle, John. It has developed, in the sense of being expounded upon for an increase in understanding (clarification), but it hasn't changed. Clarification often occurs in response to attempts at changing doctrine or promoting something which is contrary to doctrine.

Re: Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language

#116

Post by magashna »

csallen wrote: post #96
mikysco wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took me song long to realize this. Just * do it is so often a more effective/efficient methodology than "optimize first". Once I have a strong understanding of scope, marginal adjustments carry more weight when starting something new.

Yep. This applies to so many things. Watching your diet? Lifting weights? Learning to code? People will emphasize so many tips, micro-optimizations, recommendations, etc. that can be intimidating and add a ton of work to your plate. But simply showing up every day is 95% of what matters.

Just do it™

Re: Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language

#117

Post by zzzcpan »

abdusco wrote: post #110
zzzcpan wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best method is the one you actually do. Doesn't apply to languages. I studied French for years "actually doing it" but using a typical traditional methodology with teachers, grammar, forced word repetitions, etc. It's like it didn't even happen. But using a very different methodology for English took me just about six months to go from understanding nothing to understanding almost everything.

Can you expand on your "very different methodology"?

Sure. I was watching tv shows with english subtitles and was looking up every word I didn't understand in a dictionary for an hour or more every day. Some days much more, if the show was interesting to me, so it was kind of motivating. At the beginning pausing video and switching between media player and dictionary proved to be a bit too exhausting, so I also wrote a tiny program that did that with a single hotkey before I really started doing all this. A few months later I got to comfortable enough level to start reading a book, it was a bit harder with a book, because not only there was much more new words, you also need to listen to pronunciations to make sure you don't learn the words incorrectly with your own pronunciations, luckily my dictionary program had that built in. That's about it.

Re: Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language

#118

Post by shrikant »

notyourloops wrote: post #23

I learned how to turn a stream of nonsense (from my perspective) into words by listening to hundreds of hours of Spanish TV that I didn't understand. Spanish audio + Spanish subtitles (to figure out how to parse sound, and to map sound to writing), and then Spanish audio only (prevent reliance on reading). Surprisingly effective. Incomprehensible input appears to be quite valuable. At some point I'll try applying my…

My technique was to pick a TV show that I basically knew all the lines to (Friends, in this case), and then watch it in Spanish with Spanish language subtitles.

This way I already know what the English meaning is, and I can also map the sounds to the written script.

Re: Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language

#119

Post by pwinnski »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #105
pwinnski wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of that 70% is a large chunk who never even attend church, who claim to be Christian for reasons unclear to anyone. It turns out about 27% of Americans[0] read their Bible several times per week, with more than half of those reading it daily. [0] https://www.barna.com/research/state-of-the-bible-2018-seven...

TBH I'm actually impressed it's even that high. I'd speculate that the 27% (if self reported) ~~is~~ would be far lower if consistency over a period of time was checked. Regardless, I feel the need to reinforce, this is just human nature, not a comment against christians.

There are many, many social pressures applied in most protestant churches, which contributes to the high percentage. From childhood, kids are told, "read your Bible and pray every day." Human nature is what it is, so even the "every day" crowd likely misses days here and there, but anecdotally, people take this very, very seriously.

Re: Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language

#120

Post by JoshTriplett »

zzzcpan wrote: post #117
abdusco wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on your "very different methodology"?

Sure. I was watching tv shows with english subtitles and was looking up every word I didn't understand in a dictionary for an hour or more every day. Some days much more, if the show was interesting to me, so it was kind of motivating. At the beginning pausing video and switching between media player and dictionary proved to be a bit too exhausting, so I also wrote a tiny program that did that with a single hotkey be…

> At the beginning pausing video and switching between media player and dictionary proved to be a bit too exhausting, so I also wrote a tiny program that did that with a single hotkey before I really started doing all this.

That sounds like a great idea for a service to help learn languages: subtitled videos with links from each word (or idiomatic phrase) in the subtitles to dictionary definitions.

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