The New Old Way of Learning Languages (2008) | Hacker News Reader

The New Old Way of Learning Languages (2008)

theamericanscholar.org

58 pointsoskarth44 comments

Huh. Didn't know this had died out; guess I'd never thought about it when I was learning German back in college. But, then....

> What is withheld is the information on the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences the students are reading.

This is not how I learned German at Idaho State University in the 2002-2003 timeframe.

Anyway, a Hebrew / Green interlinear is a very standard Bible study tool. You can find a online example at Blue Letter Bible online. They have middling worth, in my opinion. You can get an idea of what the sentence is, but you lose substantial information, possibly even the key nuance of the sentence. It would be interesting to see what an interlinear would look like for a generally factual newspaper article, as opposed to the more symbolic religious texts.

If someone is interested, I can probably translate a German newspaper paragraph into a stab at an interlinear reading (email me the request, as I have a lot on my plate and won't really be able to update it on HN).

It's still standard for dead languages (cf. Wheelock's Latin, any Biblical Hebrew text, Koine Greek, Classical Greek, Aramaic, etc.). Modern languages have tended to shift into a focus on conversational use rather than scholarly reading. There're fairly obvious reasons for this.

I understand the (good) reason why, say, a Greek or an Armenian would want to learn one of the "world" languages. There are also other specific reasons, like learning to speak the language of the next-door tribe... But how would an average English-speaking person (not a scholar, a spy, or, perhaps, a diplomat, a migrant, etc.) benefit today from learning any other language? Isn't this just a waste of brain cells (and time)? What would we have lost if - which is no doubt what is going to happen in the (possibly somewhat distant) future - there was only one spoken language?

Same reason everyone should travel: it's the best way to know more about yourself. It's like the story: two young fish meet an older fish, who asks them “How's the water?” The younger fish look at each other and say, “What the hell is water?"

There's pretty decent evidence that languages have a big impact on how we think (weak spair-worf hypothesis). It's but one easy way to introspect.

Anyways, I don't know if it should be required, but it's probably more useful than calculus or english literature, both of which most people also don't use.

>It's but one easy way to introspect.

So much this! Not all languages are "equal" in their ways how they can express/define certain concepts, thus knowing more than one language helps you define better what's going on.

A thing I personally really enjoy is reading Wikipedia articles in different languages for a more "complete" picture of the topic because that works a little bit like triangulation: What one language might leave out another language might explain in more detail also highlighting different cultural influences and giving me the feeling of having a rather universal understanding of certain concepts, which doesn't hinge that much on merely memorizing terminology as terminology keeps on changing while the underlying principles don't.

What you're describing has actually been the most rewarding thing for me - learning a new language is a window on a different way to think about things.

> weak spair-worf hypothesis

That’s “Sapir–Whorf hypothesis”.

Worf is weak, to kill him would be without honor. Spare Worf hypothesis.

To meet and communicate with others in their native language. 2 of my immediate colleagues are native Spanish speakers. another dozen within earshot are as well. My girlfriend is a native Spanish speaker, and her family barely speaks English. Even though she's fluent in English, she's often less expressive (as a non-native speaker) than in Spanish. My efforts at learning Spanish are: 1) to communicate with non-English speaking Spanish speakers; 2) to give the bilingual speakers I know a better way to communicate with me.

And then there's just the connections within families of languages. Learning Spanish (really relearning, high school originally) and Latin (college), connects me more easily to the rest of the Romance languages even if it is just their written and not spoken forms (I can "read" [0] Italian almost as well as Spanish/Latin at this point, but cannot speak it beyond a few phrases or listen to it beyond a few more).

[0] Really mentally translating. No fluency, but sufficient ability to parse and identify language features and roots to understand the gist of a text I'm provided.

A tangible benefit for a young English-speaking native to learn, for example, German, French or Norwegian would be the ability to obtain university education for free (or near free ~ $50-$100 per semester, compared to $10k-$50k for USA or UK)

One reason is that there's a variety of research showing that learning a foreign language is one of the few practices that can increase your intelligence and delay dementia.

Another reason would be to have an experience that is a basic part of our human heritage. Never speaking a foreign language would be kind of like never dancing. Sure it's not necessary, maybe it won't make you money and not everyone will get into it to the same degree, but do you really want to die without having at least explored life a bit more?

What I most enjoy about learning languages are the insights that make me say "Whoa! I had no idea that you could do that!" One particular example was when I came to really understand the distinction between the preterite and imperfect in Spanish; another came when I got to grips with Latin's ablative case.

If you want to learn another culture, learning the language is really the only way to do so. You can kind of get an idea from the outside and translations, but......that's like kissing someone through a scarf.

I am not particularly well equipped to answer this, and would welcome someone doing a better job, but I don't want to see this stand as the top comment and not see a strong counter-argument. In any case, the simple argument for why languages are important goes something like this:

A different language is more than just a different way of sharing information; it's a different way of interacting with ideas, and it reflects a different cultural history, and a diversity of cultural histories is fundamental to maintaining our heritage. When we lose languages (and we _do_ lose languages, all the time) we lose histories, traditions, and knowledge, and we also lose a specific and irreplaceable tool for looking at the world.

It also unlikely that we will ever cohere on a single spoken language, especially as tools like good neural-machine translation become much more powerful and more readily available.

- http://www.endangeredlanguages.com

Reading texts in their original languages is just better than reading translations. You get jokes and turns of phrase that just don't work outside the original language. Whether this is "worth it" is up to the learner, of course.

I'm not fluent in another language, but learning the basics of Esperanto gave me repeated views onto English and language that I'd never thought of before. A more linguistic or brighter person could probably notice the same things just by considering English, but when contrasted with another language they stand out.

e.g. seeing ESL people write online, they often phrase questions as 'why a thing is happening?'. It always looked a strange word order, but it's a transliteration of the word order in a question in some European languages. Seeing that, feeling that, makes me write that sometimes as well now because now it feels comprehensible, rather than wrong.

Or, how we can say Quick, Rapid, Fast. And we can say Quickly, and Rapidly - but not Fastly. Why not? I used to be a lot more fixated on a 'correct' spelling and word use, and I tend more towards 'I want to continue the pattern, even if it makes a non-dictionary word'.

And it really makes it clear what you gain and lose in translation - and how much of a disadvantage that puts non-native speakers, but also in the sense of things you can't translate perfectly would be lost in your one-language world. For example (and I'm probably going to screw this up) ĉu vi bondormis? translates very cleanly into English as did you sleep well?. But bonlegu! - how does that translate? Like bon voyage, but for reading a book? I wish you an enjoyable read!? enjoy! ? enjoy reading it! Even with one single compound-word there isn't a direct translation, so you have to face questions like 'which bit is important?' 'what is it that I'm trying to communicate?' 'what would a native English speaker say in this situation, is there a completely different idiom which applies?'. Worse and worse for longer and more complex sentences.

And that - 'what am I really trying to communicate when I say X in English?' - is also a fun question to face.

Small, casual things, but backing up the other comments saying that it's some fairly easy introspection back on yourself which is one thing that can come out of it.

Agreed. Having learned Esperanto, I now write clearer English (fewer idioms, more precise helper words). Or at least, I think more about what I'm writing.

many countries do not have populations especially proficient in English.

Hamilton also revised the word order of the original text to conform to the word order of modern languages, overcoming perhaps the greatest difficulty for modern students of classics.

Well now that's just silly.

It gives you have a book written in English, with some incorrect, or at best stilted, Greek written above it. OK can you with vocab -- if you don't fall into just reading the English.

Surely it is better to have word-by-word English transliterations as cribs for an untampered Greek sentence.

The idea is that you would graduate to full unaltered Greek after mastering the easier more natural word ordering, much as the point of learning to ride a bicycle with training wheels is to graduate to leaving them off.

You'd need two editions of the translation, the training one and the unaltered, which seems like wasted effort when having one translation with Yoda-style English would be adequate for both groups of readers. It's easy enough for a native English speaker to read a jumbled sentence when it has enough punctuation.

Your sentence above, for example, could be "The easier ordering of words, more naturale; master them so after, graduate, the idea is, you would to Greek, unaltered and full -- (just as) learn-ride a bicycle with wheels-training, then graduate to no-wheels, is the point" if that's the word order of the original language. It would also cause the reader to think in the word order of the translated language, to discern its thematic structure as well as its semantic structure.

I read long ago that the TV vocabulary is about 2,000 words, high school vocabulary is 10,000 words, college is 30,000 words, and there were a million words in the English language.

What this meant to me is that in order to be passably fluent in a foreign language only about 2,000 words need to be learned.

> 2,000 words

That's about right.

It is easy to learn 2,000 words. Problem is, it takes enormously long time to learn how to break the live stream of sounds - which is what the human speech is - down into individual words, so one could, then, apply the knowledge of the vocabulary and possibly understand what is being said.

Seems like you could learn ~1k words and then just massive exposure, let your brain do the hard work. 1k words to give a decent chance of every other word to be one you can recognize, letting your brain better begin to determine those word breaks...?

It is easy to learn 2,000 words.

I don't think it's easy.

> Problem is, it takes enormously long time to learn how to break the live stream of sounds

Check out https://www.mimicmethod.com for a pronunciation-first approach to language learning.

2,000 words isn't even close to enough. When learning Chinese, I still had large gaps after learning 2,000 characters and closer to 20,000 words.

Note: we each just used three words not in the first 2,000 and that didn't count verb forms!

http://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y

The previous poster was referring to English. The statistic may not applicable to a lexically unrelated language such as Chinese. Furthermore, the stated vocabulary is intended for the speaker to get by with. A bare minimum for useful expressiveness.

I've taught English to thousands of students who learned it as a foreign language, built and run a school with two partners and I'm the one who was in charge of the curriculum and teaching side. I'm positive that 2,000 words isn't enough to be "passably fluent" in the poster's words. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you something (or has read too much Tim Ferriss).

Yes, it's possible to express a large number of daily life phrases such as "which bus goes to the train station?" or "what's in #3 on the lunch menu?" with a tiny vocabulary but you often won't understand the answers. I've done this before in a few languages.

There are grades of fluency. I learnt Italian in Italy (while working there with English colleagues so speaking English at work during the week), in 9 months to a level I could hold a good conversation one-to-one. I had studied Latin, French and German at school and enjoyed them - the French was a fair help with Italian (Latin too though that was not exactly active).

I realised that in a group situation, with multiple conversations going on at once, it took me another 9 months to be comfortable. If you can't keep up you lose track very quickly. In your mother tongue it is "effortless". One-to-one you can ask if you don't understand - in a group you can't

I was in my early 20s at the time and made a big effort to socialise with the locals. That include many a boring evening when unless someone spoke to me specifically, I sat and smiled and had little clue what the group was talking about. But gradually things seeped in.

I remember my German teacher at school recounting how she learnt it from scratch at university - they were started off by having to learn lots of texts by rote. Seemed a bit retrograde but it worked and they learned rapidly.

Reminds me of:

http://nautil.us/issue/17/big-bangs/how-i-rewired-my-brain-t...

> I remember my German teacher at school recounting how she learnt it from scratch at university - they were started off by having to learn lots of texts by rote. Seemed a bit retrograde but it worked and they learned rapidly.

This is actually the best way to learn. It's obviously not for everyone.

The basic premise is that you will internalize correct grammar and phrasing, assuming that the texts are representative of the accepted way (or at least, at a point in time - when they were written).

Once you know those by rote, speaking can be next by playing "mad libs" with sentences and paragraphs in real-time.

Do we not have actual research as to the most efficient ways of learning foreign languages given particular circumstances (online-only, in-person teacher, vacation access, full-time immersion)?

This seems like such an obvious thing for psychology to experiment on.

Why not an interactive interlinear translation, for which you can for instance click on words of the original text to get their meaning in your language? And there are actually apps and websites that use this kind of methods, such as bliubliu or readlang!

There is one I know of but only if you are interested in new testament greek or hebrew, I've actually picked up some greek using it: https://www.stepbible.org/

Some interlinear books for modern languages can be bought at http://interlinearbooks.com/

How is reading an interlinear translation of the Greek classics supposed to help you engage in a conversation with a real life Greek person in Greece?

My guess is Hamilton was teaching his pupils to be able to read classics, since traveling to speak with a Greek person in Greece would have been difficult back then anyways.

To speak with people, you might look at the learning route advocated by Dr. Pimsleur, who also started a company which publishes language learning in audiobooks only, with the argument that most languages started out without a written form, and when they did develop writing it was inaccessible to a majority of speakers for most of history. Literacy is a recent phenomenon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pimsleur

Nearly half of languages of the world continue to have no writing system: https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages...

Sure, but how many people do those 3000+ languages actually cover? I'd imagine a lot of languages with 1-100 speakers don't have a writing system...

The broader point here is that something most people in the developed world do not realize at first is that a writing system is not an important part of how many (I'd wager most) people use their language. In other words, the spoken language is all that matters or practically exists for most people in the world.

For almost all of history most languages were unwritten. While it's true that today, owing to the efforts of indigenous leaders[1], missionaries[2], and linguists[3], many languages have gained writing systems, they often are of marginal, if any, relevance in the average speaker's daily life.

E.g., Wu Chinese, at 80M speakers, lacks a robust writing system. Many Indo-Aryan languages (i.e. those related to Hindi) in Northern India lack a standard written form. Maay Maay, a language spoken in Somalia with 2M speakers, does not have a writing system.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet

Even today, for me today, being able to read Aristotle, Homer and Euripedes in their language would be slightly more useful than being able speak to Greek locals on some hypothetical holiday.

But learning a language is a big deal, and I don't think that either one is really worth it for anyone who isn't a student. Though if I lived in Greece, that's a different matter.

Pimsleur courses are amazing.

More or less the way that an interlinear translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles will help (say) a Greek monoglot hold conversations in Chicago.

The same way reading Chaucer helps you speak with someone in Yorkshire: it doesn't.

Flippancy aside: you learn languages to have conversations with others; in the case of dead languages it's to have one-sided conversations with long ago people, no different from reading a contemporary novel. Translation is never perfect (whatever that would even mean) so some stuff is clearly worth reading in the original, and when there's a significant corpus of stuff to read the effort to learn the language can be worth it.

The article actually makes two points, neither of which I agree with. One is that interlinear translation is better than, say, paragraph by paragraph translation. The problem is linguistic structure, and the article even says he had to move words around to make interlinear translation work. That can actually "work" in languages with case like Classical Greek and Latin, but would result in a word salad with French and English. And even in a language with case, word order is not irrelevant.

My second problem is the claimed emphasis on grammar. Of course you do need to know some grammar, but in the languages I learned in HS (French, Latin, Greek) the whole point was to be able to read classical texts (some of them salacious to keep the interest of HS kids), not rote learning of grammar and vocabulary for some abstract benefit.

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