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| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4063 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes  Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 25 of 46 04 November 2013 at 4:56pm | IP Logged |
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What follows is a very long and dangerous post, so read at your own risk. :)
First of all, thank you Ezy Ryder for your input and interest. You bring up a very important point that I have been thinking about a lot, namely how would a mnemonic system for languages/words cope with all the syllables in most languages? I have not thought out my answer fully yet but I think I have a hint of how it needs to be done if at all. I will take the time here to bring up my full perspective on the issue and how to solve it, which is based on an important universal principle of philosophy. In my mind it is absolutely crucial to understand how man's conceptual faculty works and what fundamental problem it solves in order to know how to create a good mnemonic system. Fortunately an answer has been given to the why and how of concept formation. So for those who are interested, here follows my long answer: The human consciousness has an important limitation, a limitation that shapes all man's knowledge acquisition. This limitation was coined the "crow epistemology" by philosopher Ayn Rand. I quote from (what in my mind is one of the most important books ever written), Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology : "The story of the following experiment was told in a university classroom by a professor of psychology. I cannot vouch for the validity of the specific numerical conclusions drawn from it, since I could not check it first-hand. But I shall cite it here, because it is the most illuminating way to illustrate a certain fundamental aspect of consciousness of any consciousness, animal or human. The experiment was conducted to ascertain the extent of the ability of birds to deal with numbers. A hidden observer watched the behavior of a flock of crows gathered in a clearing of the woods. When a man came into the clearing and went on into the woods, the crows hid in the tree tops and would not come out until he returned and left the way he had come. When three men went into the woods and only two returned, the crows would not come out: they waited until the third one had left. But when five men went into the woods and only four returned, the crows came out of hiding. Apparently, their power of discrimination did not extend beyond three units and their perceptual-mathematical ability consisted of a sequence such as: one-two-three-many. Whether this particular experiment is accurate or not, the truth of the principle it illustrates can be ascertained introspectively: if we omit all conceptual knowledge, including the ability to count in terms of numbers, and attempt to see how many units (or existents of a given kind) we can discriminate, remember and deal with by purely perceptual means (e.g., visually or auditorially, but without counting), we will discover that the range of man's perceptual ability may be greater, but not much greater, than that of the crow: we may grasp and hold five or six units at most. This fact is the best demonstration of the cognitive role of concepts." -Ayn Rand The quote above sets the context for understanding Rand's answer to concept formation and why we need it. The limitation described above is the core reason for concepts (and as a side note it could be pointed out here that this is also the reason for language as such, i.e. the primary reason is not communication as most think). I quote: "Since consciousness is a specific faculty, it has a specific nature or identity and, therefore, its range is limited: it cannot perceive everything at once; since awareness, on all its levels, requires an active process, it cannot do everything at once. Whether the units with which one deals are percepts or concepts, the range of what man can hold in the focus of his conscious awareness at any given moment, is limited. The essence, therefore, of man's incomparable cognitive power is the ability to reduce a vast amount of information to a minimal number of units which is the task performed by his conceptual faculty. And the principle of unit-economy is one of that faculty's essential guiding principles." - Ayn Rand Unit-economy is how we overcome this limitation. Here is a quick demonstration of unit economy on the most fundamental level: When looking at: ||||||||||||||| it is hard to directly (without counting) see how many lines there are. Now what man's conceptual faculty enables him to do is to count them and then reduce the number of units that he has to hold in mind to a single unit with the number 15 which he can hold in mind and know how many lines he is looking at. The whole process of counting is in essence concerned with focusing on only one unit at a time, the number that you are currently at. On a higher level all concepts serve the same function, namely to free up space in man's conscious awareness. So the same goes for the concept "man" which is used to subsume all concrete instances of man, instead of having to keep each instance in mind. Now there are derivative principles which dictate how the integration should be done to ensure a proper concept. For example trying to integrate 27 year old blonds, stars, the color purple and grass into one concept, cripples the integrating capacity, because there is no necessity to make the concept and there is no common element/attribute that makes the concept formation valid (i.e. making up a proper unit subsuming all these instances). So there is a valid way to create concepts and it has to do with being able to discern a common nature among instances (and all of this is actually valid to knowing how to make a good mnemonic system, believe it or not!). Now the principle of unit-economy is at the base of all knowledge acquisition. For example it dictates what clarity is in design and in code (if you are a programmer as I am). It gives you guidelines to ensure clarity and that you make proper integrations. But how does it apply to creating a mnemonic system for vocabulary retention, especially for languages with many syllables? It tells us that however we chose to structure our system, to be efficient it has to ensure unit-economy. It would be totally meaningless to create a mnemonic system that translates each letter of the written form of a word into a separate unit/entity. A word of 10 letters would have you hold 10 units in mind plus the unit for the meaning of the word which must be integrated into a mental image. And then you will have the problem of knowing in what order all those units should come. So lets take a look at what I mentioned about how I remembered the word "Embêtant" (annoying) in French. I divided the word into three units: "Em" for Emily "be" for ask in Swedish "tant" for lady in Swedish Then I integrated all these three units into a mental image together with the meaning of the word, so in total the image subsumed 4 separate units. This turned out to be fully manageable for me and worked great for remembering the word "Embetant". Had I tried to make one unit/entity out of every letter in the word, it would not have been manageable to hold in mind. So I think 3-5 units for a word is perfectly manageable to hold in mind. Now having a good automatized mnemonic system here, instead of having to create a mnemonic for myself would have saved time and perhaps even created stronger connections in my mind. So I think a good mnemonic system for vocabulary should not extend beyond at maximum 5 units at any given time. So how could it be devised? I am not sure yet... but one thought experiment (remember this is only an interesting thought!) I have had for a mnemonic system for the written form is to perhaps define an entity/unit as being 4 letters of a word. And then assign each letter a specific role. So for example if we take the word "Embetant", it would mean that we get the following units: "Embe" "tant" Now what I was thinking was that the first letter could be play the role of a noun, the second a place, the third a adjective, and the forth a verb. I am however not at all sure about the specific roles here nor the order. So what the system would need would be a list of 4x all the letters of the alphabet with a corresponding concept that the specific letter in the specific role stands for. One could try to use the letter as being the same as the first one in concept that one uses to remember the letter. So for example the E in the role of noun could stand for Egg. When a word is shorter than four letters, you could perhaps use some defaults as place, adjective, and verb. As for knowing the exact order of the entities in longer word, there are a lot of alternative ways one could go about. But since there would not be more than 4 separate entities (i.e. 16 letter long words) this should not pose any significant problem. One example here is to place out the different entities along a familiar route another would be to give them a different color. So there are a lot of possibilities. Now it is absolutely crucial here to note that it would be really hard or impossible to have all the letters serve as nouns, since it would cripple our integrating capacity (remember from above that integrations should not be made beyond necessity). But if however every four letters is a clearly separate entity (one noun with specific attributes/properties) the integration follows instantaneously. So reading "Embe" could translate into: Egg, Market, Big, Eat. So you instantly read Embe as a big egg eating at the market. Then you need something for "tant" and to integrate them into an image together with the meaning of the word. Of course this requires that you first automatize about a 100 (4x the alphabet) items of what the letters correspond to in their different roles. Once you do that the mnemonic creation should be quite instantaneous. And for the recall, it poses no problem, since you can decode the image correctly because you know the role order of the words. So if you see a big egg, you know that big is an adjective and thus always the third letter. And if you are not concerned with recalling actively a word, you will be reminded of the image if you read it passively, so as you begin to read "Em" of "Embetant" it will begin creating an image of an Egg at the market in your mind and guess what this will remind you of? Okay, this should be enough for now. It is indeed interesting. Now I want to end this post by returning back to the reason why I am talking about a mnemonic system for vocabulary, a reason which is easy to forget in all this terminology. The whole problem when learning a new language is that you encounter unfamiliar letter or sound combinations. As long as these combinations stay meaningless to you, it will take a very long time for you to learn a specific word. The meaning of a given concept possess no problem since we most of the time already have an established understanding of the concept in our mind. The only problem for retention left is that of making seemingly random letter or sound combinations meaningful, before they can be integrated into one unit with the meaning of the word you are learning. Having a mnemonic system of making every seemingly random letter or sound combination could be truly revolutionary for language learning in my mind. After all knowledge is acquired by making meaningful connections. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4063 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 26 of 46 19 November 2013 at 12:19pm | IP Logged |
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I have not put too much effort into developing a universal mnemonic system but I did experiment a bit. I came
to induce so far that whatever mnemonic system you are using, the story that you end up using to help you remember a word, MUST MAKE SENSE. You will not remember a story where all the elements aren't integrated into a proper whole and make sense as a whole. Now this can be hard when you get the elements of the story generated from a system. I did indeed notice that since verbs are very important it seems better not to generate them from a mnemonic system. I did not think of this before my experiments with a mnemonic system I devised. It actually seemed easier to generate nouns and come up with the verbs yourself, this makes it a bit easier to devise a story that makes sense i.e is reasonable. It is truly amazing to discover yet again how important and fundamental reason is to us humans. I did not investigate further but I think this discovery here is getting at the core problem of devising an universal mnemonic system for words. I think it can be of great help to those that care to develop their own mnemonic system. I will not bother in the nearest future. Edited by JC_Identity on 19 November 2013 at 12:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4063 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 27 of 46 19 November 2013 at 1:16pm | IP Logged |
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My whole language learning approach is based on me treating the target language as a tool and learning it
more as a by-product of consuming interesting content with that language. I like to keep it as natural as possible so whatever I would consume in English for example would be a great thing to consume in the target language. This ensures the most important thing, namely that I find the process interesting. However a couple of days ago I noticed that I had began to "unintentionally" force myself to read some content beyond what I would normally do. This was a warning that I had began to treat French more as an end than as a mean. I have been reading a lot of fiction in French but lately I had read more for the French than for the pleasure. So I took an honest introspection and ask myself whether I found the content interesting enough apart from the fact that it was written in French and helped me with the French. The honest answer is that I do not read a lot of fiction normally (apart from the French pursuit). I like comic books however but have never been big on ordinary fiction books. So I asked myself what kind of content I normally like to consume and realized that I should start incorporating French in my consumption of TV-series (something emk mentioned that he was doing). Now I normally watch American tv-series and I am not yet comfortable with listening to dubbed French, but what I do is to use French subtitles. This has been truly amazing. Time flies by and I think this might be one of the most efficient ways to learn a language. It feels like true LR in a way. You have a very rich context also. I also very rarely look up words this way. The type of content that you get is also completely conversational which will be helpful if you plan to speak the language anytime soon. I am truly amazed! I think a lot more people would learn foreign languages, and English especially, if native TV programs had English subtitles. The problem is that we usually get the reverse, English programs with native subtitles. Of course this has to do with the fact that the majority of good TV content is in English. But there is enough room for this. Having English video/audio with native subtitles is an impossible way for a complete beginner to learn a foreign language because it is so hard to discern the individual words from the spoken form at first. It is much easier to start off by reading the foreign language and as you get comfortable doing so, you could transition to the spoken form much more easily. What a waste the current way is, truly! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4291 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 28 of 46 19 November 2013 at 1:32pm | IP Logged |
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Yes, that is quite important. That's probably because as opposed to short term memories, long term
memory remembers meanings, so having a few items of the story in your auditory or visual memory won't be enough. And that's what I'm having a problem with. I'm not patient enough, and I keep making stories without logically relating all the elements (sometimes I start making stories before I have all the elements, i.e., pronunciation, tone, radicals and meaning), because I just want to get over with it quickly. Which is kind of like the paradox of the active user. I'm rushing in the beginning (encoding) just to make the later stages take longer (recall, and probably also re-encoding). PS.: Perhaps instead of making a universal mnemonic system, it would be more effective to develop a set of rules for coming with one's own system depending on the language. Not everything is as memorable to one, so why waste the images easier to memorize for aspects which may not exist in a particular language. For example, in English there tends to be a distinction mainly in voicing, in Chinese it might be in aspiration, and in Na'vi it might be between unvoiced and ejective consonants. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4063 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 29 of 46 22 November 2013 at 7:42am | IP Logged |
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Yesterday I was about to begin to program an application that would help me watch videos with target language subtitles and make
translations of the subtitles easier. But of course before I started the programming, I looked around on the Internet and stumbled upon an application that is absolutely perfect in regards to solving the problem that I pictured. The application is called LAMP, Language Media Player. Even the small details that I had imagined were integrated into this app. I think the app is the best way to learn a language through video. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND IT TO ALL LANGUAGE LEARNERS!. What the application does is, it lets you either load a video file into it or select one from YouTube. It then enables you to load into it two subtitle files (one in the target language and one in a language you understand for the specific video). Once you have done this you can start watching the video with the two subtitles displayed and you can rewind instantly between all the subtitle lines with the keyboard arrows. And if there is a word or a whole sentence that you do not understand in the subtitle, it lets you search Bing or Google Translate for a quick translation. It also has some other lesser details that are truly well though out. Again I am convinced without a doubt that this is the best application out there for learning languages through the use of video. Check it out, it is free. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4063 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 30 of 46 03 December 2013 at 4:28pm | IP Logged |
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You only need a direction, no expectations!
This is an important and fundamental psychological insight that is crucial to all areas of life, language learning included. So I thought I post it here. It is easy to get distracted and lose motivation when you have long term goals. This loss of motivation can oftentimes come from being too result/outcome-oriented. It can be hard to detect it at first, especially if you do not know about it. The unfortunate fact is also that the most ambitious of us are more prone to get trapped. The more successful you are the higher you tend to reach for and you get blinded by the goals and results. You forget what motivated you in the first place and your performance tends to suffer even more as you get results-focused. This is sometimes referred to the second-season syndrome in sports, because a lot of sportspeople tend to get blinded by their successes and fail in season two. So what is the difference between season one and season two? And why does not only the performance but also the enjoyment of an activity sometimes tend to decline the better we become? Because of expectations, implicit or explicit! The more successful you are the easier it is to get tempted to put expectations and musts on yourself. But the more you do this, the more your performance and enjoyment tend to suffer. What you in fact are doing is to narrow down the scope of accepted outcomes, until you cannot imagine even the smallest miss-step or failure. In this state you are unable or unwilling to act, and when and if you do your mind is not focused on the activity itself but on the outcome. There is also a deeper perspective on all this. Every act involves the collaboration of the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind sets the direction and the subconscious executes on it. This is evident in the activity of driving a car, once you learned the necessary skill. You need to know where you are going and everything else is usually automatic. But what happens when you narrow the scope of expected outcomes? What will happen if you cannot imagine yet accept of being late 5 minutes, or making a wrong turn, or being passed by a crappy car or yet: a woman driving the crappy car? The more these expectations tend to creep in, the more the performance and the enjoyment of the activity will decline. Why? What these type of expectations are doing is crippling the subconscious to execute properly. The more you tend not to accept all possible outcomes the more they will tend to creep into your conscious mind which means that the likelihood of you confusing your subconscious will go up. The subconscious will forget about the first order of direction and get involved with expectation- related issues. You will start to feel anxious and the decline begins from there. The proper role of the conscious mind is to set the direction then to get out of the way by trusting the subconscious to execute. To trust also here means that you accept the fact that outcomes which are unwanted COULD happen, even though they aren't likely. You just have to be honest and acknowledge the fact that you do not know how things are going to turn out and what ever happens, you will be fine with it. This is where the necessary liberation is released for the subconscious to work properly and even to perform miracles occasionally. Expectations which means having a too narrow scope of accepted outcomes is what is killing us, not only our enjoyment and performance, since it addresses the cause of all types of stress. So in every act, know want you want to do (the direction), but also introspect for any expectations and you better honestly accept that this can turn out unexpectedly if you are to enjoy the process and perform well. Now what can be some expectations in regard to language learning? - Learning a specific amount of words, expecting to remember every single word that you look up, expecting to learn a language in a given time, studying for a given amount of time every day, studying with only the end-goal of knowing the language in mind etc. These are only some expectations that were on top of my mind, there are an endless number of them out there which could interfere with your enjoyment and actual performance of learning a language. What we need are not these expectation, we just need to know what we want i.e. in what direction to go, and then get out of our way, and actually enjoy the process, everything else will come naturally. Edited by JC_Identity on 03 December 2013 at 4:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4789 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 31 of 46 04 December 2013 at 2:15am | IP Logged |
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Well put, JC.
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| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4063 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 32 of 46 10 December 2013 at 2:32am | IP Logged |
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After having used LAMP, the language learning software for videos that I mentioned some posts ago I can say that it fits my language learning
approach perfectly. I like watching videos more than I like to read fiction. So I have been doing so, for a while now, and I am amazed at how fast I have improved my reading comprehension of French this way. I of course first and foremost have a lot of fun. I like LAMP so much that I think this software is the best language learning software when it comes video consumption. I also think that LAMP might be the best way to start out to learn a new foreign language, provided that you know how to pronounce the written form of L2 and that you as me like watching movies or TV-series. However I have also come to realize another thing, it is hard to find L2 videos and subtitles which match, this seems especially true for common DVDs that you can buy. The subtitles seem all too often not to be a transcript of the audio. This makes it hard to enjoy the activity (because it is difficult to find videos that you like, and that are setup with both the audio and subtitle in L2). It also makes LAMP less good for improving the listening comprehension. To me the best tool for listening comprehension is my own app, which allows me to load in a book along with the translation and the corresponding audio book. I am right now making a desktop version of my iPad app which I will be using for reading some interesting books and I will of course exploit the fact that it will enable me to improve my listening comprehension. So use LAMP but use also something like LR, both are great when you have found that interesting content. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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