A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

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

Postby Henkkles » Thu Jun 23, 2016 8:43 pm

I wanted to make a language log but as my actual studying is haphazard at best nowadays due to external factors, I figured I'd make a thread where I'd post mini-essays or a paragraph or two of an idea that I had and ping it through you fine folks who decide to join in the discussion.

Without further ado, let's get started.


On Inertia

I've seen lots of people complaining that they can't study effectively because they procrastinate. I can easily empathize with the sentiment, and here's what I came up to address this issue.

I understood this when I was doing my first gig as a language tutor. A high school aged lad, only motivation to learn was to improve grades at school, so quite a difficult job you can imagine. I noticed that the fewer tasks I gave him, the more he would actually do. If I gave him lots of things to do, he'd only have done 25% of them by the time we had our next meeting the following week. However when I sliced the amount of his tasks in half, he actually managed to do 75% of them, increasing the actual studytime I could get him to put in. He was also more keen on doing the things that needed little to no preparation to get started.

In light of the experiences as a tutor and a learner myself, I created a few 'tenets' if you will.

1. Always know exactly what you're going to do before you start studying. Determination leaves no time for procrastination.
2. Have a clear cut plan whose end is not in the far future. This means to make yourself missions that you can accomplish say, within a month. Instead of saying "study the full Glossika course", set yourself a target to complete Fluency 1 within 28 days or so.
3. Do not study only on one occasion. I'd say that the optimal daily studytime is divided into three chunks, the 25/50/25 way. Half an hour in the morning/before noon, half an hour in the afternoon/early evening and half an hour later in the evening, for example.
4. Make your routine light at first and then add stuff later, not the other way around. If you make a four hour gargantuan routine that you try to do every day, most likely you'll just end up dreading to start which leads you to procrasting and eventually dropping the entire thing.

The take-home lesson is:

The inertia to start studying is going to be insurmountable if you have to figure out what you're going to be doing every single time you sit down with the books.
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Wed Jul 06, 2016 6:21 pm

Not All Words Are Created Equal

Roughly speaking there are two types of words: those that belong to open classes and those that do not. I posit that this distinction is important to how they should be learned, but first, let's define the terms.

What does it mean for a word to be "closed class"? It means that it belongs to a class of words that is small and new tokens almost never enter it. Such classes are for example adverbs of time (today, yesterday, tomorrow), adverbs of place (inside, outside, beside), conjunctions (and, or, but), pronouns, you get the picture. Open classes on the contrary always consist of nouns and verbs, sometimes adjectives or adverbs of manner, etc. and new ones are coined almost every day.

The distinction here is that closed classes more often than not contain tokens that are counted in the dozens, whereas native speakers almost invariably recognize open class words in the (tens of) thousands.

I argue that closed class words should always be learned inside a sentence, as they more often inform the syntax, whereas open class words just fill in to the syntax, and thus can be defined more clearly. I remember looking at some flashcard decks when I was starting out with Russian and the first one introduced me to the word "и" - "and". Fair enough, I supposed. Then it gave me the word "a" - and defined it as "and, though, although, however, but". I knew that it could not be this damned complicated, so I looked up a few sentences and got the gist of the use, completely without needing to commit five definitions to memory.
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby reineke » Thu Jul 07, 2016 1:07 am

Henkkles wrote:Not All Words Are Created Equal

Roughly speaking there are two types of words: those that belong to open classes and those that do not. I posit that this distinction is important to how they should be learned, but first, let's define the terms.

What does it mean for a word to be "closed class"? It means that it belongs to a class of words that is small and new tokens almost never enter it. Such classes are for example adverbs of time (today, yesterday, tomorrow), adverbs of place (inside, outside, beside), conjunctions (and, or, but), pronouns, you get the picture.

I argue that closed class words should always be learned inside a sentence,.


"FANBOYS" are popular with teachers. You can make flashcards and "quiz your classmates".
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby aokoye » Thu Jul 07, 2016 2:14 am

Henkkles wrote:What does it mean for a word to be "closed class"? It means that it belongs to a class of words that is small and new tokens almost never enter it. Such classes are for example adverbs of time (today, yesterday, tomorrow), adverbs of place (inside, outside, beside), conjunctions (and, or, but), pronouns, you get the picture. Open classes on the contrary always consist of nouns and verbs, sometimes adjectives or adverbs of manner, etc. and new ones are coined almost every day.


I would argue that adverbs and adjectives are open classes period, not just "sometimes".
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu Jul 07, 2016 3:03 am

aokoye wrote:
Henkkles wrote:What does it mean for a word to be "closed class"? It means that it belongs to a class of words that is small and new tokens almost never enter it. Such classes are for example adverbs of time (today, yesterday, tomorrow), adverbs of place (inside, outside, beside), conjunctions (and, or, but), pronouns, you get the picture. Open classes on the contrary always consist of nouns and verbs, sometimes adjectives or adverbs of manner, etc. and new ones are coined almost every day.


I would argue that adverbs and adjectives are open classes period, not just "sometimes".

On the other hand, in plenty of languages verbs are essentially a closed class, with the need for new ones satisfied by nouns + the equivalent of "to do", while Japanese personal pronouns have been argued to be an open class.
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby galaxyrocker » Thu Jul 07, 2016 3:39 am

Henkkles wrote:
I argue that closed class words should always be learned inside a sentence, as they more often inform the syntax, whereas open class words just fill in to the syntax, and thus can be defined more clearly. I remember looking at some flashcard decks when I was starting out with Russian and the first one introduced me to the word "и" - "and". Fair enough, I supposed. Then it gave me the word "a" - and defined it as "and, though, although, however, but". I knew that it could not be this damned complicated, so I looked up a few sentences and got the gist of the use, completely without needing to commit five definitions to memory.


I'm not sure if I would agree with all closed class words, but I would certainly agree with conjunctions. I personally think I would learn pronouns better through just normal learning, however. But, then again, if the pronouns are vastly different from English, perhaps it would be better to learn in context? But conjunctions definitely need context in my opinion.

vonPeterhof wrote:On the other hand, in plenty of languages verbs are essentially a closed class, with the need for new ones satisfied by nouns + the equivalent of "to do", while Japanese personal pronouns have been argued to be an open class.


It should also be noted that adjectives in Japanese can be considered a closed class as well, though a large one (Where Have all the Adjectives Gone? (Dixon 1977, pg. 48))
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby aokoye » Thu Jul 07, 2016 4:31 am

vonPeterhof wrote:
aokoye wrote:
Henkkles wrote:What does it mean for a word to be "closed class"? It means that it belongs to a class of words that is small and new tokens almost never enter it. Such classes are for example adverbs of time (today, yesterday, tomorrow), adverbs of place (inside, outside, beside), conjunctions (and, or, but), pronouns, you get the picture. Open classes on the contrary always consist of nouns and verbs, sometimes adjectives or adverbs of manner, etc. and new ones are coined almost every day.


I would argue that adverbs and adjectives are open classes period, not just "sometimes".

On the other hand, in plenty of languages verbs are essentially a closed class, with the need for new ones satisfied by nouns + the equivalent of "to do", while Japanese personal pronouns have been argued to be an open class.


Ok, I should have been more specific - I find it almost silly that I wasn't. Adjectives and adverbs in English are an open class. My response likely had more to do with the OP's examples being in English than anything else.

More generally, I don't know that you can easily say that X word class is an open or closed class in most languages without doing a lot of broad based corpus study (which I doubt anyone here has done). I mean I suppose I could look up studies on open and closed classes across languages or perhaps language families though I feel like if there's going to be any open class that is shared by all or most analytical languages it would be nouns.
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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Thu Jul 07, 2016 8:06 am

aokoye wrote:I would argue that adverbs and adjectives are open classes period, not just "sometimes".

Depends on the language.

vonPeterhof wrote:On the other hand, in plenty of languages verbs are essentially a closed class, with the need for new ones satisfied by nouns + the equivalent of "to do", while Japanese personal pronouns have been argued to be an open class.

Is that so? I'm intrigued, could you give me some examples? I thought noun + verb class openness was axiomatic.

Thanks for all the responses people, I see that the focus on open-closed class distinction drew a lot of attention when that wasn't the point so I'll rewrite that soon and throw it at you lot again.
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby aokoye » Thu Jul 07, 2016 8:25 am

Henkkles wrote:
aokoye wrote:I would argue that adverbs and adjectives are open classes period, not just "sometimes".

Depends on the language.


Yep that's why I clarified that they are open classes in English.
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu Jul 07, 2016 7:04 pm

Henkkles wrote:
vonPeterhof wrote:On the other hand, in plenty of languages verbs are essentially a closed class, with the need for new ones satisfied by nouns + the equivalent of "to do", while Japanese personal pronouns have been argued to be an open class.

Is that so? I'm intrigued, could you give me some examples? I thought noun + verb class openness was axiomatic.

Verbs being a closed class is more widespread among languages with complex conjugation, although plenty of conjugating languages do find ways of incorporating new verbs into the system with relative ease. Basque is one example of a language where pretty much the only way to do this is to form compound phrases using existing auxiliary verbs. It's also apparently common among Iranian languages, and I've been told that Chechen also works that way. Japanese is an interesting case in that it has traditionally also relied on auxiliary verbs (which is how verbs of Chinese origin have been incorporated into the language), but is nowadays increasingly showing signs of incorporating new verbs more directly. Perhaps the most well-integrated such verb is サボる (saboru, "to play truant, to slack off", from "sabotage"), although I'm not entirely sure if it's considered okay to use in formal registers. Other such examples tend to be limited to slang - ググる (guguru, "to google"), パニクる (panikuru, "to panic"), だいじょぶ (daijobu, "to be okay", from the Chinese-derived 大丈夫 daijōbu, "okay"), etc. A similar process is happening with adjectives and adverbs as well - エロい (eroi, "erotic"), グロい (guroi, "grotesque"), 違く chigaku ("differently", from 違う, chigau, originally a verb meaning "to differ", but in this slang usage reanalyzed as an irregular adjective; the standard adverbial form derived from the verb is 違って, chigatte), etc.

As for personal pronouns, their openness in Japanese is probably more of a symptom of the general weakness of the boundary between pronouns and nouns in Japanese. The language has a long history of nouns getting repurposed as pronouns: the chart below is far from comprehensive, but it shows some of the most common first person pronouns in various eras of Japanese history, and the four surviving ones can all be traced to nouns (おれ, ore, from 己, onore, "self"; わたくし, watakushi, from 私, "personal affairs"; わたし, watashi, a truncation of the previous one; ぼく, boku, from Chinese 僕, "manservant").
J_1st_person_pronouns.jpg

It's likely that the reason why these transformations have kept happening is the common Japanese practice of referring to oneself or to one's interlocutors using personal names, titles or epithets, even when directly addressing the other person - a practice that often comes across as "talking in the third person" to non-native speakers, but is probably more of a sign of the low relevance of grammatical person to Japanese grammar (e.g. there are no person-specific verb conjugations). Possibly as a result of all this, even the actual historical pronouns aren't all that distinctive from nouns. For example, directly modifying pronouns with adjectives or participles often sounds off in most European languages, but it's perfectly grammatical in Japanese - 弱気な私 (yowaki na watashi, "the timid me"), 笑っている彼 (waratteiru kare, "the laughing he"; unlike the previous example, this one can't be traced to a noun in recorded history and was likely an actual pronoun in the proto-language), etc. For this reason some linguists go as far as arguing that Japanese lacks personal pronouns as a separate part of speech.

Anyway, a somewhat less controversial position is that personal pronouns in Japanese come and go, and the process goes on to this day. The Wikipedia section on open and closed classes mentions 自分 (jibun, "self") turning from a noun/reflexive pronoun into a first person pronoun. What it doesn't mention is that in some regions it's actually turning into a second person pronoun instead. The aforementioned boku can also be used as a second person pronoun, but only against little boys (or grown men who use boku to refer to themselves, if you want to make fun of them for it). And then some forms of fiction just run with it, from characters who affect foreign mannerisms using the English pronouns "me" and "you" in otherwise fully Japanese conversations (kind of like the use of moi in English) to tomboyish teenage girls using the word おじさん (ojisan, "uncle") as a first person pronoun when asserting their authority over younger kids.

Sorry, I may have got a little carried away there...
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