Crazy language learning experiments

General discussion about learning languages
Nogon
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Re: Crazy language learning experiments

Postby Nogon » Mon May 24, 2021 10:34 am

I just remembered that I did a kind of language experiment once, many years ago, back in the Nineties. I was still living in Germany but often visiting a friend in Sweden for vacation. There I met my friend's friend from Hungary and we talked languages.
I got interested in Hungarian, went to the library and borrowed three books: Eugen Storlind's Kortfattad ungersk grammatik (a very short (and bad) overview of the Hungarian grammar), a Hungarian-Swedish dictionary, and a children's book in Hungarian (Erich Kästner - A két Lotti).
I started with reading the grammar to familiarize me with the Hungarian language's phenomenons, and then I took the book and began to "read" it. That is, I took the first word, wrote it down in a notebook, searched for it in the dictionary and noted down its meaning. Then I did the same with the next word, and the next... When encountering a noun or verb or adjective I checked the grammar to find out which inflected form it was. And then I put together my results and tried to find out each sentence's meaning. It was VERY slow going of course - I spent about three days working my way through the first chapter. (And then my vacation and my experiment was over.)
You might not believe it, but for me it was great fun! I saw the text like a kind of riddle which I had to solve. I actually think that it would be possible to acquire reading ability in a language that way. Probably not the most effective way, but possible.
Last edited by Nogon on Mon May 24, 2021 10:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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AnthonyLauder
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Re: Crazy language learning experiments

Postby AnthonyLauder » Mon May 24, 2021 11:59 am

rpg wrote:As for spending 1000 hours (the AUA/Thai example), that's not the part I thought was interesting. It was how those 1000 hours were spent: no speaking, reading, or writing, and no explicit study of grammar or anything like that. I think that's very different from how we generally try to learn languages.


Was this the course in Thailand that was based on silent immersion? I remember reading about that course a few years ago. The school paraded out a few students who after a long and forced silent period were suddenly fluent speakers. It was praised widely as proof that silence immersion is beneficial to students.

A short while later, however, I saw a video where one or two of the star students, who by then had finished the course, revealed that the best speakers (including themselves) had takne secret evening classes elsewhere where they practiced speaking extensively. This, they stated, was the secret to their fluency, not the forced silence. They had waited until the course finished before revealing this, because the head of the school was apparently quite fierce, and had scared them into keeping silent about their lack of keeping silent.
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Re: Crazy language learning experiments

Postby t123 » Mon May 24, 2021 8:35 pm

Anyone remember Keith (Keith's Voice on Extreme Language Learning)?

He was learning Mandarin by watching TV, his old blog was here. Unforuntately he moved to a different domain which no longer exists. He was up to 2350 hours at the time, which is an insane amount of hours of TV watching.

For the curious, here is his first conversation in Mandarin after 2000 hours of listening.
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Re: Crazy language learning experiments

Postby rpg » Tue May 25, 2021 1:14 am

AnthonyLauder wrote:
rpg wrote:As for spending 1000 hours (the AUA/Thai example), that's not the part I thought was interesting. It was how those 1000 hours were spent: no speaking, reading, or writing, and no explicit study of grammar or anything like that. I think that's very different from how we generally try to learn languages.


Was this the course in Thailand that was based on silent immersion? I remember reading about that course a few years ago. The school paraded out a few students who after a long and forced silent period were suddenly fluent speakers. It was praised widely as proof that silence immersion is beneficial to students.

A short while later, however, I saw a video where one or two of the star students, who by then had finished the course, revealed that the best speakers (including themselves) had takne secret evening classes elsewhere where they practiced speaking extensively. This, they stated, was the secret to their fluency, not the forced silence. They had waited until the course finished before revealing this, because the head of the school was apparently quite fierce, and had scared them into keeping silent about their lack of keeping silent.


That's interesting--I'd be interested in watching that video, if you can find it.

To be clear, I'm not endorsing any particular method. I just think it's interesting to read about different things people have tried and how well they have or haven't worked out.
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Re: Crazy language learning experiments

Postby sirgregory » Tue May 25, 2021 4:50 am

Not my personal experience, but I was recently looking into the bio of chess player Judit Polgár and I found the details of her upbringing to be really extraordinary. Her father, László Polgár, firmly believed that with proper education it was possible to reliably raise children to be geniuses and he married a woman who agreed to put his theories to the test. All three of their daughters played chess for 5-6 hours per day from a young age. I'll be honest and say this sounded a bit bonkers to me but it's hard to argue with results: The eldest became a grandmaster. The second was very close to grandmaster level (around 2500 ELO). And the youngest, Judit, at one point peaked at #8 in the world and is universally considered the greatest female player of all-time.

The reason I mention all of this is that Mr. Polgár believed his theories applied to virtually any domain, including foreign languages. He was an enthusiastic Esperantist and he had the girls learn Esperanto as well as English and Russian. He considered several possible specializations before settling on chess.

Why did you and your wife choose just chess as the object of your experiment?

When we began the practical foundation of our genius-educating theory, at first we planned to experiment with mathematics, chess and foreign languages. Influenced by several factors, we decided in the end in favor of chess.


He goes on to say that, among other reasons, they liked that progress in chess could be evaluated clearly and objectively.

Do you consider foreign languages as tools for helping to work in chess?

Yes, they are doubly necessary tools for working. On the one hand, it is necessary to study the (foreign) literature, on the other a chess player is a world traveler, so they need to interact with companions in the sport and others. Thus I attribute a great significance to foreign language instruction. But right now I think that for Zsuzsa fewer languages would be sufficient. The two younger girls first learned English and Russian, and I will encourage them further to learn Esperanto more deeply. (Zsuzsa has learned 7-8 languages, and this has clearly slowed her development in chess.)


By normal standards, the girls still got a huge amount of foreign language instruction. But far less than if they'd spent the 5-6 hours a day studying languages instead of chess.

The above quotes can be found in a short book written by Mr. Polgár called Raise a Genius!
https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/genius.pdf
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Re: Crazy language learning experiments

Postby Querneus » Tue May 25, 2021 12:24 pm

sirgregory wrote:Not my personal experience, but I was recently looking into the bio of chess player Judit Polgár and I found the details of her upbringing to be really extraordinary. Her father, László Polgár, firmly believed that with proper education it was possible to reliably raise children to be geniuses and he married a woman who agreed to put his theories to the test. All three of their daughters played chess for 5-6 hours per day from a young age. I'll be honest and say this sounded a bit bonkers to me but it's hard to argue with results: The eldest became a grandmaster. The second was very close to grandmaster level (around 2500 ELO). And the youngest, Judit, at one point peaked at #8 in the world and is universally considered the greatest female player of all-time.

The reason I mention all of this is that Mr. Polgár believed his theories applied to virtually any domain, including foreign languages. He was an enthusiastic Esperantist and he had the girls learn Esperanto as well as English and Russian. He considered several possible specializations before settling on chess.

[...]

He goes on to say that, among other reasons, they liked that progress in chess could be evaluated clearly and objectively.

I once read a book on performance (the title, sadly, escapes me) where the author, discussing Polgar's daughters, wondered whether certain areas like chess, sports, and musical instruments are precisely ones where proper education methods can make a huge difference in how far you can go, possible in large part due to more objective feedback being available. Meanwhile, activities that have less objective feedback criteria, like how well you can reason about math at a high level, are harder to improve on with feedback. (The book was largely about the importance of feedback to improve performance, and worried about e.g. radiologists not getting much feedback in practice about their observations of patients—with more feedback throughout their career, could their observations improve?)

I'm also reminded of a proverb I've heard a few times (attributed to Jesuits, probably falsely) that goes something like "teach them young and they'll do wonders"...

Personally I'm impressed that all three daughters managed to care about chess, and for so long. My parents tried to get both me and my brother to learn a musical instrument well, but my brother couldn't care any less... And I also stopped caring about some eight years in. Apparently Polgar thought about his daughters abandoning their interest in chess, but tried to reduce this possibility by being largely encouraging and calm, really not forcing them into it, and having a bunch of chess reference books easily available around the house... I can't say my parents were all that different though, and nevertheless I still abandoned music.
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Re: Crazy language learning experiments

Postby Querneus » Wed May 26, 2021 1:23 am

rpg wrote:
einzelne wrote:What do you mean by 'crazy'? 'Crazy' like 'insanely time consuming but effective' or more like 'people do weird stuff on the internet'? Your examples demonstrate both.

I can see there's been some confusion about this so let me clarify. I'm asking about examples of very unusual methodology here. Not about simply bad decision making :D

But bad decision making can also be pretty fun!

I know someone who learned Ancient Greek largely by reading and re-reading Homer as a bilingual text, with just a little push from a textbook for declension and conjugation (she also had experience with Latin)... Not something I'd do, but if you love Homer, well...
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Re: Crazy language learning experiments

Postby einzelne » Wed May 26, 2021 2:05 am

Querneus wrote:But bad decision making can also be pretty fun!

I know someone who learned Ancient Greek largely by reading and re-reading Homer as a bilingual text, with just a little push from a textbook for declension and conjugation (she also had experience with Latin)... Not something I'd do, but if you love Homer, well...


Why would you characterize it as bad decision making? Bilingual texts have been with us for centuries if not millennia. They proved to be very effective and you could easily find interlinear translations for Greek and Latin texts a century ago. It still a mystery for me why classic departments still treat reading Greek as some kind of crossword puzzle.

If I were in charge of the classics department, this is the first thing I would do: updated interlinear translations of all key works with short grammar comments. In fact, a century ago there was a wonderful series — Harrap's Bilingual Series — of annotated texts for reading. See Dante as an example. I can only regret that we don't have such editions today.
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Re: Crazy language learning experiments

Postby leosmith » Wed May 26, 2021 2:28 am

t123 wrote:For the curious, here is his first conversation in Mandarin after 2000 hours of listening.

For a first conversation, this is very good. But 2000 hours - that would definitely qualify as crazy to me. After 2000 hours most people, myself included, have a good base in all the skills, and provided they practice it, would be conversing much better than this.

Before I started to learn Mandarin, the theory that one should have a silent period lasting hundreds of hours was on fire. The proponents claimed that one would never achieve decent pronunciation without doing this (ALG was cited, and later debunked imo). My point is their main argument was about achieving great pronunciation.

The speaker in the link shows good listening skills, but only slightly above average pronunciation for a first conversation for a westerner. I'm not saying that all he was after was pronunciation, but it does indicate that a long silent period does not guarantee good pronunciation. Nothing does, really.

I believe to maximize your pronunciation potential you should learn it in the very beginning, and keep on reinforcing it. If good pronunciation is your goal, then learn phoneme, word and finally sentence level pronunciation before you do anything else.
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