A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Wed Sep 21, 2016 7:32 pm

galaxyrocker wrote:That's an interesting way of looking at language acquisition. How would you factor in interference from L1 into this? Saying that the sculptor tends to use their L1 statue as sort of a basis when they don't know something, and then that needs to be fixed later on?

I think it's just the natural tendency of humans to hold that which is familiar as somehow iconic, your L1 being the archetype of language in your mind through which you mirror everything.

Once your sculpture of the TL becomes refined enough you stop needing to resort to any archetype, as you can find evidence for everything you need in the language itself.
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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Wed Nov 15, 2017 2:57 pm

Offloading some brain-goop here, comments are welcome, it's almost entirely train of thought:

What is language?

In the dualistic view, humans live simultaneously in two separate worlds; the so called "real" world of atoms and molecules interacting, and the semiotic world, how the human brain makes sense of it all. There is a constant negotiation inside each individual about which parts of the real world are included into the intra-cranial representation, and this has to do with their significance to us. Many other animals are capable of conceptual representation as well; all mammals can recognize members of their own species, they have concepts of what is edible and what is not.

The increase in human brain size and thus power allowed more brain power to be dedicated to this semantic mapping system, and I suspect this is where language lives. It seems a logical next step to the primate ability to exhibit mental states (anger, fear) as external ideas (facial expressions), which necessitates a finer control of the muscles and nerves in the face. The articulatory organs of humans are enervated by much the same mechanisms. Languages, then, are idioms (in the original sense) of manipulating the articulators that mutate and pass down in populations.
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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Tue Jan 02, 2018 12:24 pm

Public goals are more shameful to break, so here goes.

I'd like to pass the C1 exam in Swedish this year. This entails a lot of composition, both oral and orthographical.
I'd like to reach a B2-equivalent in Russian, I like to think that I'm quite close, only a few hundred hours more.
With North Saami I'd like to take the intermediate CEFR-test and reach a B1 but we'll see, the resources just are so scarce.
I'm going to dabble with Spanish because occasionally I need to remind myself that not all languages are a hopeless grind.
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Chung
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DABBLED: Bashkir, Chuvash, Crimean Tatar, Inari Saami, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Meadow Mari, Mongolian, Romanian, Tatar, Turkmen, Tuvan, Uzbek
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Chung » Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:23 pm

Henkkles wrote:Public goals are more shameful to break, so here goes.

I'd like to pass the C1 exam in Swedish this year. This entails a lot of composition, both oral and orthographical.
I'd like to reach a B2-equivalent in Russian, I like to think that I'm quite close, only a few hundred hours more.
With North Saami I'd like to take the intermediate CEFR-test and reach a B1 but we'll see, the resources just are so scarce.
I'm going to dabble with Spanish because occasionally I need to remind myself that not all languages are a hopeless grind.


Mitä pohjoissaamen resursseja käytät?
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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:49 pm

Chung wrote:
Henkkles wrote:Public goals are more shameful to break, so here goes.

I'd like to pass the C1 exam in Swedish this year. This entails a lot of composition, both oral and orthographical.
I'd like to reach a B2-equivalent in Russian, I like to think that I'm quite close, only a few hundred hours more.
With North Saami I'd like to take the intermediate CEFR-test and reach a B1 but we'll see, the resources just are so scarce.
I'm going to dabble with Spanish because occasionally I need to remind myself that not all languages are a hopeless grind.


Mitä pohjoissaamen resursseja käytät?

Meidän kurssilla käytetään Cealkke dearvvuođaid-sarjaa vaikka se onki aika huono. Sitte meillä on tietenki opettajan laatimia harjotuksia ja sellasta. Aion syöttää sanaston ANKIin ja yrittää harjotella jonkun verran. Suunnitelma ei oo ihan vielä täysin selvä.
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Chung
Blue Belt
Posts: 529
Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 9:39 pm
Languages: SPEAKS: English*, French
STUDIES: Hungarian, Italian, Ukrainian
OTHER: Czech, German, Polish, Slovak
STUDIED: Azeri, BCMS/SC, Estonian, Finnish, Korean, Latin, Northern Saami, Russian, Slovenian, Turkish
DABBLED: Bashkir, Chuvash, Crimean Tatar, Inari Saami, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Meadow Mari, Mongolian, Romanian, Tatar, Turkmen, Tuvan, Uzbek
x 2309

Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Chung » Wed Jan 03, 2018 4:36 am

Henkkles wrote:
Chung wrote:
Henkkles wrote:Public goals are more shameful to break, so here goes.

I'd like to pass the C1 exam in Swedish this year. This entails a lot of composition, both oral and orthographical.
I'd like to reach a B2-equivalent in Russian, I like to think that I'm quite close, only a few hundred hours more.
With North Saami I'd like to take the intermediate CEFR-test and reach a B1 but we'll see, the resources just are so scarce.
I'm going to dabble with Spanish because occasionally I need to remind myself that not all languages are a hopeless grind.


Mitä pohjoissaamen resursseja käytät?

Meidän kurssilla käytetään Cealkke dearvvuođaid-sarjaa vaikka se onki aika huono. Sitte meillä on tietenki opettajan laatimia harjotuksia ja sellasta. Aion syöttää sanaston ANKIin ja yrittää harjotella jonkun verran. Suunnitelma ei oo ihan vielä täysin selvä.


Harmi, että Cealkke dearvvuođaid-sarja ei ole kovin vaikuttava. Mä käytin Davvin-sarjaa ja olen harkinnut ostaa Cealkke dearvvuođaid-sarjan, mutta nyt...
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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Thu Jan 04, 2018 8:44 am

Chung wrote:
Henkkles wrote:
Chung wrote:
Henkkles wrote:Public goals are more shameful to break, so here goes.

I'd like to pass the C1 exam in Swedish this year. This entails a lot of composition, both oral and orthographical.
I'd like to reach a B2-equivalent in Russian, I like to think that I'm quite close, only a few hundred hours more.
With North Saami I'd like to take the intermediate CEFR-test and reach a B1 but we'll see, the resources just are so scarce.
I'm going to dabble with Spanish because occasionally I need to remind myself that not all languages are a hopeless grind.


Mitä pohjoissaamen resursseja käytät?

Meidän kurssilla käytetään Cealkke dearvvuođaid-sarjaa vaikka se onki aika huono. Sitte meillä on tietenki opettajan laatimia harjotuksia ja sellasta. Aion syöttää sanaston ANKIin ja yrittää harjotella jonkun verran. Suunnitelma ei oo ihan vielä täysin selvä.


Harmi, että Cealkke dearvvuođaid-sarja ei ole kovin vaikuttava. Mä käytin Davvin-sarjaa ja olen harkinnut ostaa Cealkke dearvvuođaid-sarjan, mutta nyt...

Mä teen lauseharjottelua ja transkriptioita kirjojen kappaleista, ja siihen se on aivan hyvä.
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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Tue Jan 16, 2018 8:58 pm

The more I think about it the more obvious it seems to me that language learning (acquisition/building) should begin in a real world environment, interacting with physical objects and spaces. The cognition of language is heavily based on the same neural networks that we use when we interact with the world, and most of human language either relates to the physical world directly or through metaphor; we move appointments, we pick up new information, you get the point. This is of course very much in line with the foundation of TPR (Total Physical Response). I like it a lot as a pedagogy, but there is something I can't really put my finger on that gnaws me about it.

This would (I believe) help a lot in establishing the necessary strong networks on which all subsequent acquisition could lean on.

I'm thinking whether this kind of interaction could be simulated in VR/AR, or if the future of iTalki is people interacting in a simulated environment over the internet.
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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Sat Jul 16, 2022 10:34 am

Medical school really took the wind from my language learning sails...

Anywho, I was practicing a song on guitar yesterday and I realized that I would like to try to learn languages like that. Practicing a couple of minutes of spoken input until I can produce it all "to tempo" from memory. I believe this would be great for the beginner textbook phase at least. This is far from a novel idea, memorization has been used in teaching people Sanskrit for thousands of years I believe.

How I think I would go about doing that:
- sentence train each sentence (corresponding to a bar or a phrase in music sheet)
- start looping the entire file (great if it's not very long, 3 minutes would be good) and try to chorus to tempo
- mark all sentences where you stumble and do extra training on those
- rinse and repeat

If you could design a corpus of texts with all the most important structures in a language you could memorize them and use them as a global "runtime" in your brain for that language. Will have to experiment, maybe I'll dig my copy of Colloquial Welsh and attempt something like that...

To come back to my previous point, I thought VR adoption would have come much farther by now. I still am waiting for a VR language learning environment where you would be prompted to complete things ("put the ball in the box") in target language and would get automatic feedback.
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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Sat Aug 13, 2022 2:46 pm

Don't have much else to say but man, Welsh really is something else.
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