(no subject)
Nov. 1st, 2004 09:37 amI'm wondering how much of the same neural circuitry is involved in learning spoken languages and computer languages. I can see lots of parallels here, but as I've never managed to successfully learn to speak another language[1], I'm not entirely sure.
I can speak PHP already to an extent - I'm basically fluent in it, but I have the equivalent of a really thick accent and a decent vocabulary that requires looking a lot of things up to figure if there's a short term that does what I want this really long paragraph to do. I'm learning ASP now, and it's far easier than it would have been two years ago because I now know the basic logic behind the coding, but as I code now I'm thinking in PHP and having to translate to ASP, which involves a lot of looking things up in books. Admittedly a lot of my PHP coding involves looking things up in books, but I'm looking up more complicated things and I'm looking up bits and pieces of things that I'm knitting together in my brain to form complex functions, while in ASP I'm looking up incredibly basic grammar and vocabulary. To worry that metaphor a bit more, PHP and ASP would be Romance languages - somewhat similar to my own and similar enough to each other that they share much of the same logic and knowing one helps you understand a bit of the other. In which case, would would be the comptur-language equivalent of Japanese? Or does the metaphor completely break down?
In an ideal world I expect that learning computer languages would help my brain retain spoken languages, but I doubt that's the case, more's the pity.
[1] I chalk this up to the fact that the way you learn to speak another language is to actually speak to other people in it, and I have problems with thinking of things to say when speaking to people in my own language, it's doubly hard to sit there and think of what to say, translate it into French or Italian or whatever, and then say it.
I can speak PHP already to an extent - I'm basically fluent in it, but I have the equivalent of a really thick accent and a decent vocabulary that requires looking a lot of things up to figure if there's a short term that does what I want this really long paragraph to do. I'm learning ASP now, and it's far easier than it would have been two years ago because I now know the basic logic behind the coding, but as I code now I'm thinking in PHP and having to translate to ASP, which involves a lot of looking things up in books. Admittedly a lot of my PHP coding involves looking things up in books, but I'm looking up more complicated things and I'm looking up bits and pieces of things that I'm knitting together in my brain to form complex functions, while in ASP I'm looking up incredibly basic grammar and vocabulary. To worry that metaphor a bit more, PHP and ASP would be Romance languages - somewhat similar to my own and similar enough to each other that they share much of the same logic and knowing one helps you understand a bit of the other. In which case, would would be the comptur-language equivalent of Japanese? Or does the metaphor completely break down?
In an ideal world I expect that learning computer languages would help my brain retain spoken languages, but I doubt that's the case, more's the pity.
[1] I chalk this up to the fact that the way you learn to speak another language is to actually speak to other people in it, and I have problems with thinking of things to say when speaking to people in my own language, it's doubly hard to sit there and think of what to say, translate it into French or Italian or whatever, and then say it.