Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

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So, it isn't actually.

I did a short foray into learning Morse Code, and I ran into what I found to be the biggest barrier to learning new languages. The bloody lookup table phenomena.

What happens is your mental representation maps the Morse sequence->your primary language character->whatever the message then actually means.

This is a very high overhead mental process, and one specifically advised against by fluent Morse keyers. What you want is to map the Morse pattern->it's representative concept.

Example:

First mental impl would look like ... -> S --- -> O ... -> S Then you mentally reparse that string to get semantic meaning.

Trying to do this for more complex messages blows. Case and point.

..-. --- .-. ....... ... .- .-.. . .-.-.- ....... -... .- -... -.-- ....... -... --- --- - .. . ... .-.-.- ....... -. . ...- . .-. ....... .-- --- .-. -. .-.-.-

Imagine that coming over a line at about 13 to 25 wpm.

You don't have time to decode and reparse. You need realtime streaming and recognition of word units->meaning. No decode phase, just "oh, that's 'blah'"

Same thing applies with other languages. Language is used to nominatively stand in for forms of life. N'est ce pas? In any other language is still indicative of the same form of life/confluence of characteristics, 'is it not?'

It's seems easier when you're younger because you aren't fighting the lookup table phenomena because you're still learning your primary language.

It's why when learning a new programming language, an escalating series of higher complexity Hello World's you've implemented in other languages can be a godsend in getting up to speed.

The Koch method of learning morse code addresses that by never introducing an intermediate visual representation of the dits and dahs.

Instead, you listen to audio sequences and transcribe them directly to the characters of your language. So instead of learning the language visually, you learn to understand the sounds which is far more natural.

There's a great free site that teaches morse code in this fashion if you ever decide to give it another go: https://lcwo.net/

Thanks. I'll have to check it out!

Learning morse code directly from audio is absolutely essential. Once you have learned all the characters by sound, I found it helpful to listen to code at a faster level than you can handle. You will miss characters, but I found it speeds up your ability to copy well. For example, back when I was taking morse code tests for licenses, I would listen to code at 20 wpm to prepare for the 13 wpm test and 30 wpm to prepare for the 20 wpm test. The tests seemed easy. BTW, I cannot read morse code without making the sounds in my head from the visual representation.

That's true, yet you have to go through a lot of Morse -> letter before it becomes automatic enough to advance to the stage where you can go from Morse -> meaning. There's no alternative really, you can't just wish yourself into automatically divining the meanings, you have to put in the hours of incremental training before it all becomes second nature.

I studied German in college, and I have been studying Korean for almost 2 years and I would say you're spot on.

The hardest thing about learning a new language is learning to think in that language, not 1. think in native language 2. transcode to target language. Not only is this quite slow, it leads to very unnatural language. English and Korean have different idioms and ways of structuring sentences.

Since I've been studying Korean for a while now I have certain thoughts I can innately express in Korean and actually have difficulty directly mapping to English.

---

However, one has to start somewhere. I can't really learn a concept in Korean without it being explained in English.. until I'm advanced enough to understand Korean grammar and word explanations in Korean.* One just has to remember that things don't map neatly although textbooks pretend like they do. Over time and exposure, you get a sense for how and when things are really used.

So the real answer is you need to just use the target language as much as you can. The only way to innately grasp a concept is by seeing it and using it.

* It's a bit like bootstrapping a compiler, isn't it?

I vividly remember the moment I first thought in French. It was about a year ago, I was 31 years old and walking along the beach after hanging out with a French couple for a few hours. I don't have a clue what I thought, but I remember idly musing about some subject in my head for a few seconds, suddenly realizing that the musing was in French.

Telegraph and radio operators used to write down the messages, character by character, as soon as they heard each character in Morse, and only once the entire message had been received attempt to read or interpret it. There are artifacts of this even in modern voice radio usage; e.g., "do you copy?" meant originally, did you successfully copy down my message?

You can’t do that above 25 wpm (unless you are a fast typist). You have to transition to hearing entire words.

Telegraph never exceeds 300bpm, which corresponds to 40wpm on average.

Oh my days. That's the saddest (as in - imparting of sadness) morse code message in the world. :'(

I pasted that Morse code into Google fully expecting they'd have an automated translation to text. I was surprised when that failed.

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