Hacker News Reader

Comment by patresh | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your comment. As a sidenote concerning your last point, Gabriel Wyner's book "Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It" explains in detail how to build an SRS system to learn a language and it strongly advises against using translation tasks in your SRS.

Instead of thinking in the target language, your mind will create strong associations with the words in your original language and make it difficult to think in the target language by always having to refer to the original language. A better task design would be receiving images and coming up with the word in the target language.

View on HN

Yeah that works for the first 1000 words perhaps. Then you run out of images to show. Many of the more complicated words simply can't be disambiguated by images.

Learning words by translation is totally fine. The point is not to use this as your ONLY learning method. You use it to SEED words. Once you know like 5000 words, you will be able to read books and also look up words in same-language dictionaries. But still learning more words with translation still should work well as long as you get 90% or so of your language exposure without translation. Learning words is just a tiny part of the task.

Learning words by translation is fine but what the book argues is that it's very inefficient, because you seed them with respect to your original language so you build a habit of going back and forth between the languages when trying to come up with a word instead of staying immersed.

The advantage of images is first of all that visual cues are very powerful for memory, the more senses you associate with a memory the stronger it will be (I wonder if anyone has ever tried to incorporate smells into SRS?). Furthermore, it is not always easy to find a decent image but the mere search for this image will make your brain work with that word in mind and create associations.

Granted, it is not easy to find images for words such as "philosophy" but with a bit of creativity it is possible and if not, it's always possible to explain the target word in the target language to stay immersed.

I tried to define Japanese words from the ground up starting using emojis and then using the word already defined to define more complex words.

https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html

It is doable. There is a book called Lingua Latina per se Illustrata that does it for Latin. I have to admit that it has some limits. At some point you want to go back to using your mother tongue. English is not my first language. I live in the UK everything I read is in English. There are some words I have seen a thousand times and I sort of know what they mean but they become mine only after I look up for their translation.

>At some point you want to go back to using your mother tongue.

It is an interesting point. When you first learn words in your mother tongue, you don't do it by outside reference to another language. Why is it different for you when learning a second language?

In your native language you don't (generally) have a specific goal to learn that word. Unless you feel compelled enough to look at a dictionary or ask someone for a definition (which is basically equivalent to looking at a translation in the language-learning context), you often just live with an incomplete mental model, until it becomes gradually refined from repeatedly hearing/seeing the word in context.

This is required, to some degree, to become fluent (i.e. intuitive) in a new language too, which is why there is an emphasis on immersion/input in most language-learning circles/ideologies. But when you have an explicit goal, you're more likely to be compelled to want the mental shortcut/jumpstart that a translation provides. There's also the fact that, as a language learner, the context itself often isn't understood very well (or at all), which makes the natural process even slower. This is where the idea of "comprehensible input" comes into it, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

When I was younger I bought a learn Mandarin book of which at least half was stickers to put on objects around the house, it was surprisingly effective, because every time I opened the fridge for example, I would see the characters and pinyin and say the word aloud.

These types of HN posts are so valuable to me.

I'm writing my own knowledge base / SRS system and i'd like to start from a mostly fresh dog-food-esque approach. I want to try and record information in such a way that it has the meat of that byte of memory, but pair it with something that could be used to trigger that memory-byte - like your image example.

In the end i'm sure it won't be a revolution, but nevertheless i'm hoping to find ways to bridge knowledge store & retention (ala SRS/etc).

I'm also quite interested in areas of learning. Eg i expect/desire to store far more information than i can retain. So i want a system that can help me move areas of knowledge based on my ability (or time availability) to retain.

Coming up with images for the target language can be a very difficult task, since much of our understanding are verbal only, as opposed to conceptual and images based.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com