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Comment by pook | Hacker News Reader

Mind you, the Korean loves America. The Korean practically writes a love song to America every chance he has. But there are certain things about contemporary America drives the Korean crazy, and this is one of them: the idea that the process of learning is somehow supposed to be fun. Just drop it. Forget it. What is fun is the result of learning – the infinite amount of fun when you finally put the finished product to use. And truly, that applies to second language acquisition as well as anything else. Your horizon will expand beyond the limit of your imagination. You will gain perspectives that you couldn’t have even dreamed of. Don’t be a whiny bitch. Your sacrifice will be worthwhile.

This should be shouted, at top volume, to everyone entering university. Great advice.

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I suppose you learned everything you know about Emacs by rote memorization and repetition of the manual, and absolutely no exploratory playfulness?

I suppose the gripe I have is not "wrong; humans can learn languages by immersion!" but "why the societal crosslink between deliberate learning, and not-fun?".

Is there no way to learn 30,000 words by any motivation other than fearing for your life from a disappointed father?

The line blurs more when he says "Immersion doesn't work" then describes his learning method which is ... (wait for it) ... completely submerging himself in the language he is learning for hours and hours, reading it, writing it, speaking it, paying attention to it - all in a country and in a school where everyone spoke it ... immersing himself in it.

I cite: http://www.fluentin3months.com/studying-will-never-help/

"""Studying will never help you speak a language, but (as long as you do it right) studying will help you speak a language better.

Most people don’t see the difference here. That one crucial word changes absolutely everything you need to take into consideration.

If you already speak but your conjugations aren’t great or you need to quickly increase your store of vocabulary about a specific topic, then by all means study. Need to pass a test in school? Sure, study for it. When the goal is to pass a test or improve your grasp on something specific, then study is the way to go.

But if you don’t speak the language confidently right now, then it’s time someone broke this news to you: studying is not the way to get this confidence!"""

(But they are aiming at slightly different targets - Benny aims to be conversationally fluent in 3 months, The Korean to gain college level mastery in two years).

Agreed, the part about immersion not being helpful was strange. He was immersed in English, both in school and probably in large parts of daily life. He simply turns on the TV to get English at home, all signage, newspapers, documents, are in English.

More importantly, being immersed provides an emotional reward for learning. If I learn these words, I can express these ideas and talk to people! This is different from just learning at school.

Edit: One thing I find odd about your post is the emphasis on confidence. It sounds like a correlation/causation fallacy.

I think that when he says "Immersion doesn't work" he really means that "Immersion alone doesn't work". Of course immersion is helpful, but it doesn't produce results by itself (at least not in Korean; maybe a language with more cognates with English would benefit more from immersion alone). Non-immersed learners sometimes use the prospect of immersion as an excuse, along the lines of "Once I'm immersed in the language, it will be much easier to really study effectively, so it'll be a more efficient use of my time to take the studying easier now."

I've made both of these mistakes myself (overestimating the value of immersion and slacking off study when not immersed). When I first went to Korea, it was a huge ego boost since it felt amazing to actually be using the language. Because of this ego boost, I felt that "book-study" was suddenly beneath me and stopped. After a few months of immersion, though, I realized I was learning more slowly than just going through flash cards, so I picked them up again. Even though immersion was useful for me, it was really only effective as a compliment to other study.

Calling people "whiny bitch"es if they don't want to suffer or sacrifice, and don't accept that suffering is an insoluble problem, is an anti-human sentiment expressed in a crude and unintellectual way.

Many philosophers have taken contrary views. Ayn Rand is not a whiny bitch for criticizing sacrifice. David Deutsch is not a whiny bitch for applying Karl Popper's epistemology to education (http://takingchildrenseriously.com/), or for saying in his TED talk that problems are soluble (soluble means without suffering, and problems includes the problem of how to learn something). And so on. Criticism of their position would be interesting, but calling them bitches isn't.

Seems to me like you have a very different view of "suffering" than Rand (I don't know the others in your post so I can't comment on those). Rand criticizes suffering as a moral objective, but her morality very much requires "suffering" in the sense that it is used in the article (even if in her terms it's not "suffering" because it's merely living up to ones' morality). Doing hard labor in a quarry rather than being an architect which if being an architect is one's true calling is not suffering in Objectivist terms but it most surely is in the context of the article.

Roark chose to do hard labor because he liked it well enough. What he was doing was choosing not to work for other architects because, for him, that would have been suffering, even though it would have furthered his career better. He went to the quarry out of a refusal to sacrifice his values no matter how convenient it would be.

Do you remember how Roark interacted with his school?

I don't remember anywhere saying that specifically; I interpreted things as if he only went to the quarry because it was the only work he could find. It was out of necessity, as a stop gap until he could establish himself as an architect. The fact that Rand choose a menial job, and the way she described the hardship of the labor, I see no reason to interpret it as meaning that he liked the work. I'm not a Rand scholar though and open to being convinced of the opposite. So yes, he went to the quarry out of refusal to sacrifice his values, but that doesn't support the position that he didn't suffer. Actually it's exactly what I said in my previous comment.

Besides, my point was that there are several sorts of 'sacrifice' and 'suffering'. The kind that Rand criticized is altruistic suffering - suffering to take the load from someone else. She has no qualms with 'suffering' in a physical sense or even in the sense of prolonged delay of self-realization or gratification if that is required to remain true to one's moral values.

Roark had job options working for other architects; the quarry was not the only work he could find. This was explicit in the book. I don't recall anything about Roark finding the quarry upsetting (i.e. it causing him suffering). If he was suffering -- which I think he wasn't, he was too strong -- it was because of the world in general, and the badness of the architects and clients he'd left behind, not due to the quarry which was nothing compared to them.

Do you think the people in Galt's Gulch suffered in their education? As I recall, they did things like voluntarily attend Galt's lectures (and pay for it, I think). No suffering in sight...

I think he's funny. And his point is less about the need for sacrifice (in general) and more about the need for future time orientation.

Eh, it's definitely good advice but at the same time it's far from ideal.

It's like cold fusion. It doesn't work, but it really would be damn handy if it did, so we keep on trying to get it to work.

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