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From: Tobias Brox on 15 Dec 2005 09:43 [Lee Sau Dan] > Tobias> Then you're cheating; children learn pronunciations > Tobias> without dictionaries. :-) > I learnt English by going to school and using dictionaries. Yes, I also went to school and we also had dictionaries. However, when the youngest children learn their first language(s), they learn it only by practice, not by dictionaries. I believe this is an ability that is irreversibly lost as one grows elder. -- This signature has been virus scanned, and is probably safe to read Tobias Brox, 69?42'N, 18?57'E
From: Peter T. Breuer on 15 Dec 2005 09:57 In comp.os.linux.misc Tobias Brox <tobias(a)stud.cs.uit.no> wrote: > [Lee Sau Dan] >> Tobias> Then you're cheating; children learn pronunciations >> Tobias> without dictionaries. :-) >> I learnt English by going to school and using dictionaries. > Yes, I also went to school and we also had dictionaries. However, > when the youngest children learn their first language(s), they learn > it only by practice, not by dictionaries. I believe this is an ability > that is irreversibly lost as one grows elder. Well, all languages are learned by practice. In my case the problem is that I don't internalise a foreign language as well - english resonates throughout my head while other languages have a very estranged kind of semantic resonance, in comparison. The result is that it is more difficult to _live within_ the language, and as a result intuiting the sense of new constructs is more of an intellectual than autonomic activity. As a point of interest, I cannot speak two latin-based languages at once, though I know more than one. It appears to me that the same neural net is involved, and that I have to retrain it from one similar anguage to the other, thus making it impossible to speak two of the same kind at once. If I try to speak in french, the words may come out in spanish, and vice versa, until I have rehabituated the net to the correct cnnectivities. The same kind of thing happens with english accents - I have to retrain my sense of what is welsh english, and what is irish, and what is scottish, before being able to speak in those accents, and I cannot do two at once. It takes a shift of gears. On the other hand I have no trouble in translating up to three ways simultaneously when the languages involved do not include two latin-based ones. I infer that I have at least three neural nets available for the lingustic task. Peter
From: blmblm on 15 Dec 2005 10:19 In article <87vexq1lv9.fsf(a)informatik.uni-freiburg.de>, Lee Sau Dan <danlee(a)informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote: >>>>>> "blmblm" == blmblm <blmblm(a)myrealbox.com> writes: > > blmblm> I suspect you also have noticed that people who learn a > blmblm> language as an adult sometimes make mistakes no native > blmblm> speaker would make. > >Such as? Or similar mistakes, when made by native children, are >simply forgotten or ignored? Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but you sound a bit defensive here, so -- I don't mean this as a put-down of non-native speakers. It's just that in my experience there's a class of "mistakes" -- call them "unidiomatic usage" -- that are commonly made by people who learn a language as adults, but rarely if ever made by people who learn the same language as children. There's another class of "mistakes" consisting of spelling, usage, etc. that are frowned on by the proverbial mean-spirited English teacher with the red pen, and some native speakers make plenty of those. The examples I've noticed: People whose native language is Russian or Chinese often are shaky about articles. At least one person I know whose native language is Chinese has trouble with singular/plural, and he claims it's because Chinese doesn't really make that distinction. (You'll be able to confirm whether I'm remembering this right.) I think he also has trouble with verb tenses, which you mention later. I don't have a lot of experience listening to adults and children talking, so I can't be sure, but I think this is stuff that children sort of pick up by osmosis. There are mistakes that they make that *are* corrected -- if the adults around them even recognize them as mistakes, which not all do -- but I think some of the learning proceeds without explicit correction. > blmblm> In English, what I've noticed is that people whose first > blmblm> language doesn't have articles ("a", "an", "the") really > blmblm> have no idea how to use them > >Then, I should have no idea of how to use them, either. My mother >tongue has no articles. My mother tongue even doesn't distinguish >singular from plural. And it doesn't modify verbs depending on >whether an action takes place at present, or took place in the past. Okay, I made a mistake not saying "most people" or "many people" -- clearly you're an exception. But I think "many or most" is true. > blmblm> -- they've learned some rules and struggle to apply the > blmblm> rules, but it's all a conscious process that native > blmblm> speakers don't have to go through. > >Don't very young kids speaking English natively also leave out >articles in their "baby-talk"? I don't know. Maybe. I'm not talking about future native speakers of a language, though (i.e., children still learning). > blmblm> Native speakers "just know" when to use these little > blmblm> words. > >They have to learn it. Sure. But they don't learn it by studying rules. I'm fairly sure about this: I think I also use articles properly, but I certainly don't have in my head a list of explicit rules about when to use them -- the right usage just "sounds right" to me. I think this is how childhood language acquisition works -- whatever usage you hear a lot as a child comes to "sound right". So there's some kind of mental model in the back of the brain (built by some process that's outside the person's conscious awareness or maybe control), but it's not a set of explicit rules. When I hear people talk about rules for when to use articles, they seem like contrived attempts to turn this mental model into a checklist. > blmblm> I had this feeling when I was studying Spanish, about the > blmblm> subjunctive -- native speakers "just knew" when to use it, > >English has also a subjunctive. You just aren't aware of it. If only >the English speakers would call the subjective "subjective", rather >than something like "unreal past tense". Would they? Could they? Careful. I am indeed aware that English has a subjunctive mood (I think the grammar people call it mood rather than a tense). But it's not used very much -- not nearly as much as Spanish uses its subjunctive, if I remember right. And there were plenty of other things I couldn't get my head around in trying to learn Spanish. For example, the names of the verb tenses seemed to mostly be like those of English verb tenses, but when to use them was not exactly the same. People who learn Spanish as children seem to pick up the mental model for when to use which tense, by that mysterious-to-me language acquisition process. Adults .... Maybe there's some way of teaching languages to adults that mimics how children learn and works better. But the way I was taught was more based on rules, and .... Well, this was all a long time ago, and I probably didn't invest nearly enough effort in it to succeed, and I might do better now, after having discussions like this one. But I have heard many people describe similar difficulties, so I don't really think the explanation is that I'm unusually dim. Maybe lazy. I think there's a parallel here between this argument and the perennial argument about CLI versus GUI -- something about people who've acquired a skill being apt to assume that anyone should be able to acquire the same skill, and if they don't, they're either stupid or lazy. Not saying you're necessarily in that camp. But it strikes me as wrong-headed. -- | B. L. Massingill | ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
From: Dances With Crows on 15 Dec 2005 10:30 [Gotta love topic drift, eh?] ["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.misc.] On Thu, 15 Dec 2005 15:57:42 +0100, Peter T. Breuer staggered into the Black Sun and said: > In comp.os.linux.misc Tobias Brox <tobias(a)stud.cs.uit.no> wrote: >> when the youngest children learn their first language(s), they learn >> it only by practice, not by dictionaries. I believe this is an >> ability that is irreversibly lost as one grows elder. Probably true. Google "critical period" and possibly Pinker's _The Language Instinct_, though ISTR that the academics have savaged that book for one reason or another and the controversy/fallout have led to a tempest in a teapot. > english resonates throughout my head while other languages have a very > estranged kind of semantic resonance, in comparison. The result is > that it is more difficult to _live within_ the language, [[and as a > result intuiting the sense of new constructs is more of an > intellectual than autonomic activity.]] Hm. For the part in [[ ]], did you mean "learning new words, idioms, and grammatical things is something I have to think about, not something that just happens"? This seems to be the case for people who are past puberty IIRC. [snip] > On the other hand I have no trouble in translating up to three ways > simultaneously when the languages involved do not include two > latin-based ones. I infer that I have at least three neural nets > available for the lingustic task. It may not be just you. ISTR some studies of children in multilingual households that found that kids could pick up languages very quickly and well if 1, 2, or 3 languages were routinely spoken around them. If 4 or more languages were used, kids learned less well and got confused. I don't have a cite for this, but there might be one in my old Linguistics 101 textbook. -- Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong http://www.brainbench.com / "He is a rhythmic movement of the -----------------------------/ penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL
From: Tobias Brox on 15 Dec 2005 19:55
[Peter T. Breuer] >> Yes, I also went to school and we also had dictionaries. However, >> when the youngest children learn their first language(s), they learn >> it only by practice, not by dictionaries. I believe this is an ability >> that is irreversibly lost as one grows elder. > Well, all languages are learned by practice. When an adult is to learn a language, it's needed with both lots and lots of practice, but he also needs "bridges" to an already known language - like teachers and dictionaries. I believe that if an adult C knowing only language A, thrown into a society where everybody knows the totally different language B and nobody knows language A - and if there are no dictionaries nor books available, then C will have serious troubles learning language B, even if two persons are hired as full-time teachers for C. I suppose that after four years C will know B even nearly as good as a 4-year child. Unfortunately, this is only belief not science. Such an experiment would not be possible today, I'm afraid. -- This signature has been virus scanned, and is probably safe to read Tobias Brox, 69?42'N, 18?57'E |