= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Crux comments on Studying Your Native Language - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (7)
As an American teacher of high school English, with a passion for spaced repetition software, I feel like it is my duty to respond to this post. My answer may surprise you.
If your goals are simply to understand more of what you read and to write more effectively, trying to skill up your general English skills strikes me as rather suboptimal.
Sure, a mastery of common word fragments will improve your ability to make at least some sense of unfamiliar words that use them -- I certainly teach these -- but you probably already know the most useful ones. I’m also unconvinced that etymology deepens comprehension much; usually, we want to understand someone, not somewords; this comes from understanding what that person intended to communicate, not from unlocking obscure arcana behind the words they happened to use.
Most of what is known to help reading comprehension is language independent, as is most of what is known to help you write better. I certainly don’t think Paul Graham’s skill as an essayist has much to do with his English; if he knows a second language even marginally well, I’m sure he would write in it nearly as effectively. To wit, he eschews esoteric explication. Writing is a craft, not a lookup table.
The strongest predictor of how well someone will do on a comprehension test of a given passage is how much they already know about the topic of that passage. A knowledge of the domain-specific vocabulary for that topic is either the second strongest predictor, or the same thing, depending on who you ask. General purpose vocabulary is farther down the list, and as an educated native speaker, you, again, are unlikely to find much low-hanging fruit in that area. So rather than take another level in English, I would suggest you consider which domains you want to be able to understand more of, and just start reading more in those domains, looking up words as needed. The language you do it in is almost irrelevant.
Consider: in the 6 credit hours of theory and practice for teachers of English Language Learners my state requires all teachers to take, I was taught that teenagers acquiring English as their second language are best off when they can continue learning domain specific concepts in their native language while waiting for their English to mature enough to transfer this knowledge over. Otherwise, they gain conversational English fluency but miss out on their first, best chance to learn foundational abstract concepts in, say, Science, Math, or Social Studies, leaving them without the ability to talk or even think about these subjects in any language.
With all the above in mind, when it comes to Anki cards and vocabulary, I am convinced that a great example sentence is much more useful than a great denotative definition. Connotations matter, and a visualizable, narratable context goes far both in conveying the extra implications of a word and in providing hooks for one’s memory. Still, you’re unlikely to absorb the deep flavor of the word -- the full intent of one who wields it fluently -- without encountering the word many times in varied contexts.
I say this in part because I acquired a sizable Spanish vocabulary from a time living in Spain decades ago, and there are to this day a number of words common to my internal monologue that are Spanish simply because they capture the flavor of the concept more perfectly than my closest English equivalents. But this is only the case for words that I encountered on enough authentic occasions to build that full connotative sense. Ones I merely studied out of the dictionary never reached that level, no matter how well I mastered them from a recognition and recall standpoint.
As any programmer will tell you, leveling skills in one language will have knock-on effects on your abilities in other languages, whether they are similar or not; the similar ones give you skills that transfer very directly, while the dissimilar ones broaden your conceptual toolset for approaching programs in general. If a problem might be more tractable within the intricacies of language suited to it, by all means, go deep into that language. But if you’re trying to understand say, an algorithm or a data structure, study that.
Perhaps "etymology" was a misleading word choice. I didn't mean to suggest that it would be useful for me to develop a deep historical understanding of how English words evolved. Instead, I was referring to the simpler task of learning to reliably see the parts making up English words. The goal wouldn't be to deepen my comprehension of individual words; the point would be to make it easier to remember large swathes of esoteric vocabulary.
For medical terminology, for instance, I imagine it would be efficient to learn the most commonly used Greek and Latin elements before trying to acquire a large jargon base.
Paul Graham is famous for having an extremely plain-spoken and easily comprehensible way of writing about complex subjects. While I appreciate that kind of style, making a life philosophy out of it seems far too limiting. There are plenty of occasions where having a knack for complex grammar and esoteric terminology is useful.
Spoken English and written English certainly have plenty in common, but they're different tools. To see Paul Graham seeming almost incredulous that people don't write the way they speak was pretty odd. Being able to look up any word you don't know without interrupting the flow of discussion is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to why written language is so divergent from spoken.
Certainly. I would never learn a word out of context, whether in a foreign language or in English.
My Anki deck is over 1 GB, as over 500 of my notes contain a 5-30 second video clip. Often when I encounter a new Japanese word in a show I'm watching, I grab the clip to act as a contextual definition.
Note that my example for how to enter the word "proselyte" into Anki also operated in terms of a contextual definition. It was a quote from Hume that made the meaning clear to me.
Very true, but it's far easier to absorb all of that information if you have the word securely lodged in your mind. Picking up connotations efficiently calls for making sure every new word acquired is remembered as being form A with meaning B within context C, that is until a richer set of associations begins to take hold.
Note that I have two main concerns.
First of all, I would like to delve more deeply into certain sciences which have a large memorization burden for terminology, such as medicine and physiology. Although most important is to understand the material, forgetting the words over and over would be a huge time waster. Just like learning how to type with proper mechanics optimizes writing efficiency, coming up with a good system for memorizing new words seems crucial. My time is limited.
Secondly, I want to level up my writing ability. Seeing as you invoked Paul Graham in an earlier passage as evidence, I suppose we may have deep disagreements here. I believe that knowing thousands of words similar in obscurity to "profligate" would be very useful. My solution for making sure these terms don't make my writing inaccessible and opaque is to use common words which sort of do the job before repeating myself in uncommon words I feel are more fitting.
With that said, I don't really understand your point. Certainly understanding itself is language independent, but using language isn't. I tried to address the tendency to make a distinction between one's native language and one's target foreign language(s) in my original post, but I suppose I didn't go into enough detail.
I'm sure you have no disagreements with my daily study of Japanese, as I'm still only halfway through the journey to sounding like a native speaker. What's so different about English? There are plenty of words and grammatical devices I don't use because I'm not familiar enough with them. You may say that I should simply read more and write more, but why neglect tools like Anki which could make for more disciplined and consistent improvement?
Your post seems appropriate as a response to someone who's at risk of outstripping their conceptual understanding with their language usage. Such people exist in very large numbers. They grab words at random from a thesaurus or weave narratives using words their favorite scientists use without really knowing what they're talking about. But I don't believe I'm one of these people. There are plenty of thoughts I have which I find difficult to represent with English.