Comment by toddrew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toddrew | Hacker News Reader

I spent nine years as a naval communicator and am fluent in morse. It's been a few years so I would definitely need a bit of practice to get back up to 12 words a minute on a flashing light.

I can speak three languages and morse was similar to learn. From the first day of training they gave us sheet of paper with the alphabet and the morse translation and told us to memorize a couple of letters. Then they sent us outside to spend hours staring at a flashing lightbulb.

When you recognize a letter your writer (someone with a clipboard standing facing you and away from the light) would write it down, and when you didn't recognize the letter you said "MISS".

The first day was spent saying "MISS... MISS... MISS..." It was extremely frustrating, the same way being immersed in a new language can be. It felt useless... as if I would never get it. Every day we'd spend the morning staring at the light, and little by little we started to get more letters.

Once we mastered it (100%) they would turn up the speed and we'd be back to where we started... "MISS... MISS... ECHO... MIKE... MISS... MISSS..." until we perfected that speed and were moved up again.

It took about three months of daily practice to get up to the military's standard.

I catch myself years later spelling out words in morse in my head.

I love anecdotes like this. Were you taught Morse purely visually, with the flashing bulb? Do you find it easier to watch a bulb or to listen to a tone?

It was always visual. It seemed useless at the time, spending hours out in the pouring rain on a ship, sending a message with a flashing light to another ship, but they always reminded us that even with all our technology and cryptography, flashing light is still the most secure method of close ship-to-ship communications because it's directional when using focused light.

That's actually pretty great. I always loved "going back to basics", and flashing a light to talk to another naval ship is as basic as you can get. It works, it's robust in all but the worst conditions, and it's easy. Love it!

Ahhh, the days before a $250 quadcopter existed to provide a plausible attack vector.

I wonder if Navy personnel are flashing base64 (base36?) encoded GPG encrypted Morse code messages to each other?

Ship to ship laser communication fixes that :) Good luck finding the beam.

Dust, mist, and/or Rayleigh scattering means I wouldn't need to be in the beampath to "see" it, but I guess if you've solved the problem of aiming a collimated laser beam from a moving ship to another moving ship, and reliably hitting the "receiver" at the far end, you can probably do it at low enough power levels to make that very hard…

Or do it with infrared.

Doesn't help - the quadcopter's cameras don't _need_ to be only sensitive to the human-visible spectrum.

(having said that, Rayleigh scattering is frequency dependant, if I recall my high school physics correctly, IR will scatter lees than visible light – I doubt thst matter though, in ship-to-ship communication there'd be more than enough mist/water in the air to scatter enough IR for a suitable camera to see the beam)

- Is he the only one looking? - Probably. - We'll have to chance that.

:) still my favorite movie

It was The Hunt for Red October, with Sean Connery.

More than a language, Morse is a script (or whatever is the generalisation of "script" to other transport layers than the written page), isn't it? The fact that you experienced learning Morse similar to learning a new language is rather surprising. For example, I would expect that you can transliterate random Morse into ASCII, perhaps at a lower bitrate, and, if so, the role of understanding the meaning of the content would be far less important than when learning a new language.

Why I compare it to learning a new language is because after a certain speed it becomes almost impossible to read it out letter by letter. When you get good enough you start to see complete words in the light.

When you learn a new language you go through a stage where you're going back word for word to your own language in your head. Eventually you become good enough to start thinking in the new language.

I think* that for those of us that don't have any language learning disability, or "glyph" learning disability -- all symbolic communication is best understood as flow of words/phrases, not symbols -- at least when you're talking about fluency/proficiency/literacy. I believe that's simply how our brains work.

Yes, spoken language is technically built out of phonemes (sounds that we can distinguish, and which carry meaning) -- but there aren't "universal" phonemes (hence most Japanese's problems distinguishing between r/l -- two sounds that are almost identical, and do not carry distinct meaning in Japanese, but do in most(?) European languages).

But the "stops" that allows us to "hear" the phonemes, and even the "stops" between words -- are in fact almost non-existent. This is one reason why we often feel native speakers of a language we've yet to master, speak "too quickly". Our brains are unable to recognize the patterns (words and phrases) from the stream of sounds.

I thnik there's a storng parallel there to how we raed word-picurtes, and not wrods. (Read that line again, slowly).

It makes sense to me that to be "literate" in morse, you'd have to stop looking at the letters, and start looking for the words. Sounds like a great way to learn morse code (and there might be a lesson there about flashcards for foreign languages as well...).

> (hence most Japanese's problems distinguishing between r/l -- two sounds that are almost identical, and do not carry distinct meaning in Japanese, but do in most(?) European languages)

As someone who watched a fair amount of anime with Japanese audio and has some very basic linguistic training, I want to comment on this idea. It's not totally clear what you mean by "two sounds that are almost identical, and do not carry distinct meaning in Japanese", so you get some non-orthogonal untargeted thoughts.

The R and L sounds are in fact closely related. That said, you, as a native speaker of a language distinguishing them, will do so with extreme accuracy.

A possible interpretation of your sentence is that the "sounds are almost identical [...] in Japanese". That's not a particularly coherent idea (and I stress I'm not trying to attribute it to you); a Japanese speaker will hear them as the same sound, but may vary (in terms of what you would hear) from one extreme to the other in what sound they produce when they need that "one".

If you listen to spoken Japanese (it will help to have a transcript of what's being said, since I assume you don't actually know Japanese), you'll notice that sometimes their R/L is more R-like and sometimes it's a definite L. There are all kinds of reasons why this might be the case (most obviously regional accent or phonetic context), but it's also possible that there's just free variation (a la either/either). I have no idea what's the actual reason is. It isn't possible for me, as an English speaker, to process those as the same sound (although prolonged exposure to Japanese might eventually do it; I've become much more comfortable with losing the s/sh distinction as a side effect of exposure to chinese speakers)

Finally, your idea that we read word-pictures, and not words, is quite wrong; the best exposition I'm aware of is at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/WordRecognition....

The same way that you perceive "a" and "A" to be the same grapheme despite seeing different shapes, Japanese speakers consider [r] and [l] to be the same phoneme /R/ despite hearing different sounds.

The same way that you might write A or a or even α to write the letter we pronounce as "aye", a Japanese speaker might choose to pronounce [r] or [l].

A Japanese speaker won't be able to tell that they're saying [r] in an English word that has an /l/. The same way that an English speaker might SWEAR they say writer and rider differently until you record them and they have no clue which one they said when.

> A Japanese speaker won't be able to tell that they're saying [r] in an English word that has an /l/.

There's an interesting phenomenon here. As previously mentioned, my mind has partially assimilated to losing the s/sh distinction. I had a chinese tutor who merged those two sounds, and it stopped bothering me. The same tutor also merged n/l and r/y. I didn't assimilate to those; hearing n where the word I knew used l confused me every single time.

What's relevant is that she didn't merge n/l in her english (which was not fluent). That suggests to me that she might have been able retrospectively to identify which she had just used for a mandarin word like 能 (neng). I agree that that depends on having been trained to recognize the distinction, although I find it slightly odd that she wasn't trained to make it in Mandarin. But, grand summary, I suspect a Japanese speaker could be trained to recognize the distinction even in Japanese.

More generally, I don't think the phenomenon of not distinguishing two different sounds (your Japanese speaker) is the same as the phenomenon of fantasizing that you're distinguishing two identical sounds (your english speaker).

> The same way that you perceive "a" and "A" to be the same grapheme despite seeing different shapes, Japanese speakers consider [r] and [l] to be the same phoneme /R/ despite hearing different sounds.

I know that "a" and "A" are the same letter, but I'm easily capable of distinguishing them on demand. In fact, I'm likely to get upset when one is used where I think the other should be. I don't think that mirrors the r/l situation in Japanese. Similarly, I don't vary freely between A and a (and, owing to personal aesthetics, never write α unless I have to write cursive); I follow a fairly clear set of rules that determines one or the other. I know that situation does not reflect the r/l situation in Japanese, although I don't know that it doesn't reflect the situation of any given speaker.

Given a hypothetical Japanese speaker who's capable of producing r and l allophones, if you asked them to repeat a sentence including "are" realized as "ale", down to mimicking the accent, how likely do you think they would be to mimic that realization of [l]?

Of course it is possible, but it is quite difficult. It is easier for children, and generally gets harder with age.

But it also holds true that it gets easier to learn new languages, if you do it a lot. I've heard a lot of people say that it gets easier after the fifth language. I'm only up to four (Norwegian, English, Japanese and French - with a basic understanding of other European "dialects" - German, Spanish, Italian -- and of course "Scandinavian dialects" of Swedish and Danish) -- and I can imagine that if I learned one more "truly distinctive" language, like Finnish, or Mandarin -- I'd start to know more of the "possible ways" we use sounds -- and it would therefore be easier to choose "the right subset" for a new language.

In addition to mimicking accents, singing can be a very useful way to train pronunciation.

>It isn't possible for me, as an English speaker, to process those as the same sound (although prolonged exposure to Japanese might eventually do it; I've become much more comfortable with losing the s/sh distinction as a side effect of exposure to chinese speakers

I can confirm that it happens: if I've been listening to Japanese for a few hours I find myself struggling to distinguish the first few r/ls I hear in English. Even more bizarrely, I've noticed my speech drifting, vocalising an intermediate sound when I'm saying an English world with an l or r in. Strange how the mind works.

I've spent a year in a host-family in Fukuoka in high-school as an exchange student, so I do in fact speak rather fluent Japanese. And I took most of an introduction course in phonetics (and about a year of Japanese) at university (the Japanese course was very basic though).

You do indeed describe the thing I was getting at: the phonemes (sounds that carry meaning) are different in eg: English and Japanese -- but the sounds are (often) there -- they just sound the same to a person that isn't "used to" distinguish between them. I seem to recall there are some now (almost extinct) dialects in Japan that used to distinguish between "ji"(ざ) and "ji"(じ).

The reduction in phonemes is common in all languages, in Norwegian the current struggle is against kids that pronounce "kj" and "s(k)j" sounds the same ("kjenne"=to feel, "skjenne"=to shout (at)).

Teaching exchange students that come Norway some basic Norwegian is also interesting: Many Asians struggle with r/l and v/b (complicated by the fact that most Norwegians believe r and l are "completely different" sounds; when they are in fact very close, and are articulated very closely - similarly with "b" and "v"). Most English speakers have a hard time pronouncing a long Norwegian "ø" -- even if it sounds approximately like the "oe" in "does" -- and they can distinguish perfectly between "He does", and "the does (female deer)...".

I didn't mean word-images in the sense that we don't look at the whole word, I meant that we read the word "as one" (not letter by letter, sound by sound).

Clearly I didn't do a very good job of getting either of points across ... :-)

Moreover, there are "accents." Some people's morse is very distinctive in terms of how they space the characters of some letters or the inter-letter spacing in some words.

My experience with Morse over flashing light was limited to Merchant Marine training, but before that I was a ham and spent lots of time listening to Morse code (CW) on radio. Patterns emerge and you start hearing common words more easily than their individual letters especially once you get above 15 wpm or so.

Even though after all this time I can barely remember actual letters to dot-dash conversions, I can immediately pick up the pattern of "CQ CQ CQ de XXX" (XXX is sending a request to converse out to anyone listening) and other common idioms.

That gives me a great idea, to write a program that flashes the terminal bell in order to give a similiar educational experience in learning morse.

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