(no subject)

[telophase]

How I learned a language in 22 hours.

Okay, he didn't become fluent: what happened is that he used classic memory techniques to memorize a large list of the most commonly-used words in a particular African language, and he did it in short sessions spread out over several months, totalling 22 hours. But it was enough to enable a sort of basic communication.

Comments

[ellen_fremedon]

The thing that struck me, reading that, is how much time he could have saved if he'd memorized fewer words and more rules. He had to suss out the grammatical relationships between all the words derived from the root for 'work' himself, whereas if he'd learned the paradigm first, he could have anticipated the derived forms without needing to hear them. And he went to all that trouble devising a mental image to remember 'motele,' which looks like it's got to be borrowed from 'motor' into a language with no l/r distinction-- learning a few basic phonological rules and knowing which languages Lingala borrowed the most from would probably be enough to understand a huge swath of the vocabulary, since Lingala is a trade language and most of its vocabulary is probably borrowings and Wanderwörter.

tl;dr-- learning != memorization. Language learning really, really != memorization.

[telophase]

Headline =/= content of article. What he had was pretty much a vocabulary list, and two and a half months in which to learn it. He also explains (late in the article, admittedly) that this was just a base:

As I memorised words in Lingala, I started to notice that there were relationships between them. The verb to work is kosala. The noun for work is mosala. A tool is esaleli. A workshop is an esalelo. At first, this was all white noise to me. But as I packed my memory with more and more words, these connections started to make sense and I began to notice the same grammatical formulas elsewhere – and could even pick them up in conversation. This sort of pattern recognition happens organically over time when a child learns a language, but giving myself all the data points to work with at once certainly made the job easier, and faster.

He's also using the concept of learning vocabulary to talk about the process of getting things into your short-term memory and then into your long-term memory, and how scientists have found that the usual methods of studying don't work as well as short bursts of studying repeated at differing intervals. As someone with ADHD and the resulting abysmal study skills, I can see how this would be immensely useful to me: yes, memorizing vocabulary lists, formulas, facts, etc. Making the connections between them is something I'm decently good at (that's how I skated through all of school and grad school with acceptable but not stellar grades: grasping the connections, but not the minutiae) and can worry about later.

[ellen_fremedon]

No, I know-- I did read the article. It still struck me as a poor use of his time: not the short bursts of effort, but the complete emphasis on vocabulary over grammar and phonology.

*shrug*

Different language-learning techniques work better for different people. If all I had to learn a language from was a glossary, I would have to start by breaking the word list down into a morphology problem set and abstracting everything I could about the structure before I even tried to memorize the words; if I went the other way, the vocab would just be a distraction. This is why my Latin is still so much better than my German, even though I've used it much less-- I was taught Latin by an approach that didn't even attempt to teach vocab until we hit the second-year curriculum, because we could always look it up.

[telophase]

If I tried to break a vocabulary list down into a morphology problem first, I'd get hyper-focused on that for a couple of days, then burn out and never get around to learning the words. Perhaps learning Latin like you did might work wonders for me, but I'd have to be taught: I couldn't do that on my own, because I'd get bored and stop doing it. It would require someone outside myself laying down requirements (and at that, I'd only do as much as I could to get a passing grade, all at the last minute, all the while intending to sit down and study it more ... tomorrow).