Avoiding the Adjective Fallacy | Hacker News Reader

Avoiding the Adjective Fallacy

betterexplained.com

54 pointsgkop14 comments

There was a fairly decent discussion about this last time around:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10296505

Brilliant! I had a lot of trouble with math, until the second year of an engineering degree, when it all clicked. If only I'd understood what was happening with math was so much more than a series of abstract rules applied to a problem I did understand.

When we had to model a DC motor mathematically it all started to click, the math was simply a tool for greater understanding and prediction.

But sadly at the high school level it was just learn this and repeat it first in the homework then in the exam....

> But guess what students learning English are taught?

Well... kind of. The teacher did show a similar chart, then we did a few exercises based on it, but it was more about "see how it sounds better now? you'll apply it automatically after a while". It was definitely not something we spent a long time analysing / practicing.

It's good to know why some things sound wrong.

One of my physics professors said that a key skill of good physicist is to be able to characterize a system quickly, prior to bringing in numbers or perhaps even equations. I’ve applied that to a lot of things.

It’s a proxy for developing good intuitions, but also for realizing that formalities often follow from intuitions, and not the reverse.

Language (OP) is organic, and formalities follow.

Just out of high school I was visiting some folks in the Amazon basin who did oilfield support work. (Long story.) They were talking about some building modest but non-trivial piece of engineering, like a big tank. One of them, a grizzled old guy who looked more like a motorcycle gang leader than an engineer, talked through the problem in just the way you describe, doing estimates of dimensions, weight, support structure, materials needed, and the like. No calculator, no paper, nothing but what he had in his head from years of experience.

I had assumed that kind of work was done very formally, with equations and blueprints and the like. It blew me away to see somebody do something so familiarly, and I'm sure he was spot on. It definitely inspired me when I went to college.

That cuts both ways: https://xkcd.com/793/

There's a difference between acquiring language and learning one as an adult. Children don't need to apply rules to learn a language- they acquire it unconsciously. Adults actually DO need to learn the rules. At least, that's what I remember from Linguistics 101.

Here's my preferred way to chop a circle up to determine the area: http://www.drcruzan.com/Images/Mathematics/Circles/AreaByRea...

> Children don't need to apply rules to learn a language- they acquire it unconsciously. Adults actually DO need to learn the rules.

This has been called into a lot more question recently. Anecdotally I don't buy it based on my experiences. I think think children are probably only better at learning new sounds and developing a native-sounding accent.

I agree. They both learn rules, but mostly unconsciously. Adults generally bring a lot of baggage. They already have a language with which they will compare the language they are learning. A lot of classes focus on teaching the rules of grammar and pronunciation in a direct way.

I would guess that most second language learners that learn well do so through interaction with speakers of the target language with an attempt to imitate the native speakers. Through imitation you pick up on the patterns and get a feel for what is correct, but you aren't necessarily listing formulas in your head about how to create those sentences. Prosody is an important part of speech and second language learners can attain that as well, but it is general not formally taught or generally documented in a rule format for most languages, mostly learned through observation and imitation.

What is meant by "rules" is, of course, dependant on the definition, but in the field of SLA (second-language acquisition), "rules" are commonly understood to be like rules presented in language classrooms, and separate from "some kind of internal systematic (implicit) knowledge of language".

What's the role of rules in language acquisition is being debated. Check this essay Against "rules" by SLA researchers Jason Rothman and Bill VanPatten.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263791085_Against_r...

EDIT: This non-expert article by the same author is more approachable: https://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/images/TLE/TLE_Oct...

Not true. Adults are ABLE to learn rules, but they don't NEED to learn them (there's plenty of evidence of adult language immersion).

Also, doubt exists whether knowing some rules explicitly is of any help when trying to use language in a realtime timeframe. And there's also continuous debate whether it's even possible to "transfer" rules from explicit knowledge into an "automatized" linguistic skill.

Some researchers note that "rules" as presented on language classes have nothing to do with the inner representation of language, and are thus of no help. (Except when explicitly "thinking" about language.)

I agree. This has always been my feeling about learning a second language as an adult. English is my first (only) language. I've been making a half-hearted effort to learn Spanish the past few months. Recently someone was trying to teach me a handful of rules and I kept trying to tell them 'I don't care, it doesn't matter if, at this stage, I use the wrong verb ending, or even if I say araña (spider) instead of naranja (orange), it won't matter so long as you know I'm trying to ask for an orange to eat or tell you there's a spider outside by the door, understanding has been achieved - that's what's important. We are all just trying to understand each other.

Maybe children have an advantage because they aren't able to talk properly when they are young due to physical growth limits, so we make a lot of effort to teach them.

It takes children 5 year to reach 95% - 100% language fluency, and will go on to learn many new words over the next 15 years, and some will go on to study their mother tongue, read, and learn more about their and, other languages, all their lives.

By 5 years of age, anyone (including unfamiliar listeners) should be able to understand the child’s speech in conversation 95-100% of the time.[1]

I'm willing to bet $100 dollars anyone in full language immersion will reach at least that stage of fluency in 5 years. And remember, children can be very talkative, so they're always making mistakes and learning.

I guess adult language learning is how it is because adults are generally too busy to make that sort of commitment. It then follows as self evident that children and adults learn languages differently. Adults solution space is constrained. We have to try to learn a language around busy adult lives.

Children's brains are also still developing, so there's going to be some physical differences also, it's not clear whether that should be an advantage or disadvantage. Maybe being able to map a second language to what you already know is an advantage, we already have a framework.

1. http://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/library/2013Facts...

este es falso, en mi experiencia. yo nunca he aprendido ninguna regla formal de español, pero puedo hablar más o menos fácilmente en esa lengua – algo que aprendí solo por hablar y leer, como cualquier niño. pero empecé cuando tenía 30.

I believe this article misses its own point. I'll keep it short.

“I” is a lie. There is no “I”.

The brain has two halves, right and left. The right side is spacial. The left side is lingual. Generally.

Both halves of the brain receive stimuli from our senses and build models of the environment that are optimized for their respective roles.

This gives each of us two models which we use to navigate our environment: a spacial model and a lingual model. These models each run in their own hemisphere and are very different from each other in both function and form.

The spatial model is innate. We are born with it. The lingual model, we acquire. (We must learn language before we hit puberty or we lose the capacity to do so. Search for “linguistics Genie” or “linguistics wolf boy” for details.)

Rather, this article is a commentary on the fact that practically all schools fail us.

In school, we sit in class, exposed primarily to lingual input. We consequently build an effective lingual model of explicit rules of our world. But but we are left to our own devices to build our spatial model, which we do from our own activities while following the “explicit rules” we know.

Every once in a while, we stumble upon some visual/real world representation that allows our spatial side to realize a concept that is well known to the lingual side.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com