Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

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It's not like immersive language classes aren't a thing. Even the normal foreign language classes at my university, past the third or fourth semester at least, only had 1 day of English while handling administravia, and then the entire class from then on was in the target language. During summer semester, all of the classes were taught this way, even the introductory ones.

Part of the difference between children learning something and adults learning something is that we have trouble achieving Beginner's Mind.

Finding techniques that work fine to be remedial or even insulting makes you get into your own way. In the extreme case, how do you fill a cup which is already full?

Less philosophically, each language you master gets its own language center in your brain, just as each finger you can control individually maps to an identifiable region of your motor cortex (and if you can't control your pinky, it's because they've blended together). Translating back and forth is a crutch for most, and a separate skill for others (eg, professionals). That's why when you ask your friend, "what did those guys say in the background?" you get something vague back. Nothing translates directly, idioms doubly or triply so.

What did that guy say? He said he's really mad at that other guy, (using a lot of colorful language), and I can say "he's mad" or we can go into why calling someone a dog/goat/cow/fish in this language is one step down from saying bad things about their mother.

One thing I dislike about language group classes is that you learn with other non-native speakers (and, in general, with the same experiences that you have).

In other words, you learn and re-enforce each others' common mistakes, misconceptions, mistranslated idioms, and ambiguities in the language that native speakers find instantly jarring. This worsens if the teacher is non-native: I wouldn't place much value in such a class.

I definitely think it's important that you teach your native language/that you learn from a native speaker. Learning Japanese from a novice is not something that I want to do.

> One thing I dislike about language group classes is that you learn with other non-native speakers (and, in general, with the same experiences that you have).

> In other words, you learn and re-enforce each others' common mistakes, misconceptions, mistranslated idioms, and ambiguities in the language that native speakers find instantly jarring. This worsens if the teacher is non-native: I wouldn't place much value in such a class.

I absolutely second this as someone who has taken 3/5 semesters of Chinese. Some classmate's pronounciation is so objectively wrong that I have to pay attention for when they're called on just to mute my volume output. Obviously I can't do this in-person.

I've taken one-on-one courses in another language and it's (believable I suppose) how much faster I've progressed.

Another fault is that some classes are structured so that nobody fails or falls behind (whether they're night classes, at a school, or in a corporate environment). The fault with that is that many other subjects simply don't care if 1/3 of the class fails, but language group classes tend to go at the speed of the lowest individuals.

These classes I was referring to were often taught by a native speaker, so there was always at least one person in any class worth emulating. But that was never really my issue so I am not a good judge of how others experience that problem.

Moving backward a few years, my high school teacher (singular) was a bit odd. He sat us in the same alphabetical pattern every year. Behind me sat a girl with impeccable vocabulary but some of the worst pronunciation in the whole class. Meanwhile I had impeccable pronunciation and a respectable vocabulary.

By senior year she had still not improved, and some days it was more than I could take. It was only a few years ago that I realized that while she couldn’t see me make faces, the teacher could. And so he had to stand up front interacting with her while I was in his field of vision, trying and failing not to make pained facial expressions. I don’t know if he found that frustrating, amusing, or something else.

Yes, the 'natural approach' to language learning is definitely popular. But in most classroom settings I would be surprised if students weren't exposed to the translated meanings through homework or the textbook. Class would not get very far once students started learning abstract concepts otherwise. Of course, translation is just the very first step in lexical acquisition - it's still a long journey to acquire a word.

>Less philosophically, each language you master gets its own language center in your brain, just as each finger you can control individually maps to an identifiable region of your motor cortex (and if you can't control your pinky, it's because they've blended together).

That's not really true, though, and it also depends on what aspect of language we're talking about (phonology vs. syntax vs. lexical acquisition, for example). In the case of the lexicon, there's good experimental evidence that bilinguals, when hearing one language, activate lexical competitors from both languages (i.e., they are not fully able to inhibit activation of one language in listening). The mind is far more complex than having different "centers" for different things. It's a complex network of signal activation and inhibition.

Of course, that doesn't relate to my original point, which was simply that language learners should not purposefully limit themselves. The incredible amount of time it's going to take to learn abstract concepts without translation far, far outweighs the possible co-activation of translation equivalents.

> in most classroom settings I would be surprised if students weren't exposed to the translated meanings through homework or the textbook

I don't think this is true. At best the student will have their own dictionary. At least in my experience, all the full time foreign language schools I know of teach solely in the language being learned and the textbook is solely in that language as well. The students are a mix from all over the world. The school would not cater to all of them by providing translations in a bunch of different languages.

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