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Comment by _dain_ | Hacker News Reader

>You learn that lunch is "almuerzo" in Spanish, but is it learning or just memorization/association? To me the lines are blurred, even at first sight of the word.

I think there's a difference. "Almuerzo" -> "al muerzo", I know "al" means "the", from Arabic, I look up the etymology, the "muerzo" is from Latin "morsus", from which we get "morsel" in English. Mnemonic: "the morsel". Then I can guess that the form of the verb is almorzar, which is indeed the case. Even learning a simple word embeds and thickens a web of associations in one's mind. SRS strengthens this, makes it scale better.

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It is interesting from a linguistic point of view, no doubt, and I am an amateur etymologist myself, but let's look at reality with honest eyes: apart from a very small group of people, languages are not learnt, and learnt effectively, starting from the etymology up. I know it is almuerzo, I use it 20 times, and it is "mine".

I think we should try, and I include myself among those who have an approach to learning that is at times too cerebral, to look at how things work more than how interesting would be if they worked in a particular way.

This is language dependent. For learning Chinese, recognizing radicals (like waht represents water, and what represents tree) can go a long way in helping recall of both meaning and pronunciation. Then moving on to learning Korean, where Chinese characters make up ~25% of Korean words, recognizing the Chinese character, then recognizing the typical phonetic alterations to Chinese pronunciations, can go a long way in helping recall of both meaning and pronunciation.

I am still skeptical. One thing is to recognize common roots, for example "to live" is "vivere" in Italian and "vivir" in Spanish, another it is to know that they are both coming from the latin verb vīvĕre. It is sufficient to recognize the commonality, without getting to the etymology of the word, which, in practical term, does not help.

Etymology by itself is not going to be useful. As one more flashcard, another pillar, additional context, they will to deepen your understanding. It is creating more inter-connections between your neurons.

I think we should not confuse the process of hypothesis building with hypothesis testing.

>> As one more flashcard, another pillar, additional context, they will to deepen your understanding. It is creating more inter-connections between your neurons.

This is a hypothesis, identifying a mechanism that leads to an effect. But I don't see any tested hypothesis for either the mechanism or the effect. And we have millions of people who have mastered other languages as children and as adults who have no idea what etymology means.

I mean, it sounds reasonable, in theory. Like knowing the evolution of tactical formations in soccer would like one to become a better player. But it is common sense it has no effect whatsoever on soccer abilities.

There's a guy who did a book like this: http://yong321.freeshell.org/lsw/

preview: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Learning_Spanish_Words_...

It's just a bunch of vocabulary paired with etymology notes and observations/sounds-likes to make the vocabulary memorable.

Oooh, this looks lovely, thank you for showing me this.

EDIT, hm he seems to be missing some obvious cognates, e.g.

>propio, own (adj.); proper (cognate). Proper in modern English no longer has the meaning "own", but this word in Spanish, propio, still retains it. if this knowledge is too uninteresting, use a mnemonic such as "A truly proper lady behaves in her own natural style."

wtf? What about just the English word "property" instead of this silly lady business?

There's something to be said for using strange or even ridiculous mnemonics as a memory aid.

I'd often come up with little stories to teach myself some of the more complex Chinese characters when I was learning quite intensively and found I never struggled to remember those words after doing so.

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