Why I'm Learning Morse Code • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#71

Post by jloughry » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 9:57 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #55

jloughry wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encourage any hacker to take a look some time at the beautiful 'bugs' still (!) made by Vibroplex [1]. I have wanted to learn Morse ever since I read The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage [2]. I know people use keyboards nowadays---and even software to read Morse and translate it automatically into text---but I want to learn to send it by hand. Do you recommend a straight key or a bug to begin with? (I just love t…

> Do you recommend a straight key or a bug to begin with? I'm biased because (before the computer era) I never used anything but a straight key. I recommend a normal telegraph key for beginners -- they're easier to control and they produce an appreciation for the simplest possible form of radio and wired communication: This picture -- http://www.mtechnologies.com/ameco/k4a.jpg -- is of a real antique, but one still a…

It's astonishing that they're still being made. I'm going to buy one before they become extinct. Thanks for the pointer.

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#72

Post by bigiain » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 2:16 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #66

bigiain wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dust, mist, and/or Rayleigh scattering means I wouldn't need to be in the beampath to "see" it, but I guess if you've solved the problem of aiming a collimated laser beam from a moving ship to another moving ship, and reliably hitting the "receiver" at the far end, you can probably do it at low enough power levels to make that very hard…

Or do it with infrared.

Doesn't help - the quadcopter's cameras don't _need_ to be only sensitive to the human-visible spectrum.

(having said that, Rayleigh scattering is frequency dependant, if I recall my high school physics correctly, IR will scatter lees than visible light – I doubt thst matter though, in ship-to-ship communication there'd be more than enough mist/water in the air to scatter enough IR for a suitable camera to see the beam)

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#73

Post by e12e » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 11:29 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #52

e12e wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think* that for those of us that don't have any language learning disability, or "glyph" learning disability -- all symbolic communication is best understood as flow of words/phrases, not symbols -- at least when you're talking about fluency/proficiency/literacy. I believe that's simply how our brains work. Yes, spoken language is technically built out of phonemes (sounds that we can distinguish, and which carry me…

> (hence most Japanese's problems distinguishing between r/l -- two sounds that are almost identical, and do not carry distinct meaning in Japanese, but do in most(?) European languages) As someone who watched a fair amount of anime with Japanese audio and has some very basic linguistic training, I want to comment on this idea. It's not totally clear what you mean by "two sounds that are almost identical, and do not…

I've spent a year in a host-family in Fukuoka in high-school as an exchange student, so I do in fact speak rather fluent Japanese. And I took most of an introduction course in phonetics (and about a year of Japanese) at university (the Japanese course was very basic though).

You do indeed describe the thing I was getting at: the phonemes (sounds that carry meaning) are different in eg: English and Japanese -- but the sounds are (often) there -- they just sound the same to a person that isn't "used to" distinguish between them. I seem to recall there are some now (almost extinct) dialects in Japan that used to distinguish between "ji"(ざ) and "ji"(じ).

The reduction in phonemes is common in all languages, in Norwegian the current struggle is against kids that pronounce "kj" and "s(k)j" sounds the same ("kjenne"=to feel, "skjenne"=to shout (at)).

Teaching exchange students that come Norway some basic Norwegian is also interesting: Many Asians struggle with r/l and v/b (complicated by the fact that most Norwegians believe r and l are "completely different" sounds; when they are in fact very close, and are articulated very closely - similarly with "b" and "v"). Most English speakers have a hard time pronouncing a long Norwegian "ø" -- even if it sounds approximately like the "oe" in "does" -- and they can distinguish perfectly between "He does", and "the does (female deer)...".

I didn't mean word-images in the sense that we don't look at the whole word, I meant that we read the word "as one" (not letter by letter, sound by sound).

Clearly I didn't do a very good job of getting either of points across ... :-)

Re: Why I'm Learning Morse Code

#74

Post by e12e » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 11:38 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #65

iopq wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way that you perceive "a" and "A" to be the same grapheme despite seeing different shapes, Japanese speakers consider [r] and [l] to be the same phoneme /R/ despite hearing different sounds. The same way that you might write A or a or even α to write the letter we pronounce as "aye", a Japanese speaker might choose to pronounce [r] or [l]. A Japanese speaker won't be able to tell that they're saying [r] in a…

> A Japanese speaker won't be able to tell that they're saying [r] in an English word that has an /l/. There's an interesting phenomenon here. As previously mentioned, my mind has partially assimilated to losing the s/sh distinction. I had a chinese tutor who merged those two sounds, and it stopped bothering me. The same tutor also merged n/l and r/y. I didn't assimilate to those; hearing n where the word I knew used…

Of course it is possible, but it is quite difficult. It is easier for children, and generally gets harder with age.

But it also holds true that it gets easier to learn new languages, if you do it a lot. I've heard a lot of people say that it gets easier after the fifth language. I'm only up to four (Norwegian, English, Japanese and French - with a basic understanding of other European "dialects" - German, Spanish, Italian -- and of course "Scandinavian dialects" of Swedish and Danish) -- and I can imagine that if I learned one more "truly distinctive" language, like Finnish, or Mandarin -- I'd start to know more of the "possible ways" we use sounds -- and it would therefore be easier to choose "the right subset" for a new language.

In addition to mimicking accents, singing can be a very useful way to train pronunciation.