10 ms·

I attempted to use only intuitive explanations in my programming class once, and a student rebelled and asked for some more definite rules. She wasn't asking fo

by acbart 11y ago

I attempted to use only intuitive explanations in my programming class once, and a student rebelled and asked for some more definite rules. She wasn't asking for a dictionary, just SOME structure to help her out. The conclusion I reached is that you need a mix - ground students in rules while supplying them with high-level concepts. You shouldn't rely on only one approach, but give them multiple entry points into the idea. Moderation, as in all things.

ehartsuyker 11y ago
This is everything I hate about language learning through pure immersion (Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, most language schools). For example, I struggled for an absurdly long time with genders in German when I started because I assumed it was like French (male, female, plural). Turns out there's 4 genders, and often the female article is the same as a the plural. Once English sentence could have solved that.
- stevoski 11y ago
  There are three genders in German. And four cases. Multiply them together, throw in plurals, add in uses of the indefinite article and the definitive article, and, well, it is far too much for a single sentence to explain. But in principle I agree with you. We need a bit of book learning to go with the "just start speaking" approach.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    Hence the 3-dimensional chart for determining adjective ending -- it depends on gender, case, and the word preceding it (i.e., definite article, indefinite, or nothing). Although I found a chart on this page that "reduces" it to a four-branch flow chart: http://www.nthuleen.com/teach/grammar/adjektivendungenexpl.html http://www.nthuleen.com/teach/grammar/adjektivendungenexpl.h...
- mikeash 11y ago
  I think that learning the rules is an absolute necessity, even if your goal is to develop your intuition well enough that you don't need them. (Edit: I think this implies a little more than I meant to say. Being exposed to the rules is a necessity, but you don't necessarily have to go out and memorize them from beginning to end or anything.) They're important scaffolding. Even native speakers of a language need to be taught the formal rules if they're to speak well. I'm going to make a lame attempt to coin a term and call this the Arch Fallacy, which is when you look at your goal and assume anything not present in it is unnecessary to achieve it. A completed arch contains no supports within it, but you'll have a tough time building one without any.
  - Stratoscope 11y ago
    "contains no supports" (was "contains to supports") Funny thing is on first reading, I didn't notice that at all and read it the way you meant. I only saw the typo on a second reading. Interesting autocorrect the brain does. In any case I like your Arch Fallacy! I think I will use it.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      Thanks for finding the typo. Glad you like the idea.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > In any case I like your Arch Fallacy! I think I will use it. I'll use it too, it's great and I don't recall any term for that particular error in thinking. I've already started spreading it (the name, not the error) among friends, hoping it will catch on.
  - frenchy 11y ago
    > Even native speakers of a language need to be taught the formal rules if they're to speak well. Native speakers are taught some rules, but many are rarely taught unless a student has learning difficulties. The adjective ordering that OP mentions is a solid example. Others include aspiration of stops; voicing assimilation in words like "bets" and "beds"; the difference between "putting up" and "putting out"; why it's (sometimes) okay to say "Hey fucker" to your best friend, but not to your teacher; and the deletion of nominative arguments in subjunctive phrases. Second language learners often (maybe always) find more rules useful, for several reasons. However, those who learn the language in highly rule-focused manner often have difficulty actually communicating in the same way that Computer Science professors are sometimes quite knowledgeable about CS theory, but unable to produce good code. Rules are good at telling you what not to do, but bad at helping you be creative.
- tmd 11y ago
  After having lived 4+ years in Germany and struggling to learn German, I would say that the only way you can learn truly by pure immersion is from your parents. In any other case you need at least some theoretical basis because no one else is willing to spend hours trying to communicate with someone who's basically babbling. I'm using Duolingo now and after I'm finished with it I want to get some formal classes to (hopefully) get to a B1 level. I wouldn't call Duolingo immersion learning though -- they explicitly provide grammatical rules (unless you're using the mobile app which lacks some features) and it's very difficult and frustrating to try to do it with your intuition alone. I also liked the explanation of cases and adjective endings from this site: http://yourdailygerman.com/learn-german-online-course/ http://yourdailygerman.com/learn-german-online-course/
- jdeisenberg 11y ago
  In the language tutorials I wrote, I decided to write a whole section for people who didn't want to learn grammar. (http://langintro.com/kintro/grammar/hategram.htm http://langintro.com/kintro/grammar/hategram.htm) My example was Russian adjectives, where a 3 by 5 chart reduces to a 5-entry table plus two spelling rules.
sbilstein 11y ago
I've been teaching a beginner's guitar class at the office with another coworker. Teaching to adults is interesting because as a kid I was satisfied without necessarily knowing the underlying foundational concepts of music (something that held back my development for a while) but adult students are quick to ask questions and dive deeper. "What do you mean play a minor chord?" is easy to explain away to a child and get the to accept an intuitive definition (to be explained more thoroughly later) but totally throws off adults who are used to having acquired deep knowledge in some other field. As with music, math, programming, one does need a deep foundation to be good but also one needs to develop a feel by repeated effort so that your mind begins to recognize patterns.
- OscarCunningham 11y ago
  As a kid I refused to learn music because no-one could give me a good explanation of the difference between the black piano keys and the white keys. The explanations were always circular: white notes are special because they are in C-Major; C-Major is special because it contains all the white notes. (The correct answer is that people's hands aren't wide enough to deal with all twelve notes on the same level, and that particular subset of the notes contains a lot of consonant intervals and barely any dissonant ones.)
  - hueving 11y ago
    >As a kid I refused to learn music because no-one could give me a good explanation of the difference between the black piano keys and the white keys. Doesn't that seem really stupid to you now or do you still support that stance? Refusing to learn the entire field of music because of one irrelevant detail is pretty appalling.
    - nkrisc 11y ago
      Kids aren't known for being rational.
    - Kluny 11y ago
      It makes you distrust the people teaching you - if they're going to answer your legitimate question with circular logic, it shows that they're missing some info and not willing to admit it. So they're either lying or wrong about this thing, and who know what else they're lying or wrong about? Similar logic puts some people off of Christianity - x is in the Bible, and we know the Bible is true because the Bible says it is true, therefore x is also true. Hmm. Someone who tries to sell you that logic is also either lying or wrong, now you can't trust either that person or the Bible.
kalid 11y ago
(Kalid from betterexplained here) Thanks for the comment, totally agree with moderation. My goal is to ask "Is the structure I'm providing helpful right now?". There's an implicit assumption that "more structure is better" (especially in technical subjects that can be structured) because it seems official and defensible. It reminds me of many Wikipedia articles -- they grow in length (why not?) and become more precise (why not?) and you're left with a description inscrutable to a beginner. Calculus, for example, gets my goat because we spend weeks on limits, continuity, L'Hospital's Rule, etc. so students can "properly" understand derivatives. (Never mind that Newton and Leibniz never used them and seemed to do ok.) Showing a circle non-rigorously transform into a triangle to measure its area (Archimedes) gets closer to the meaning of Calculus than a page of epsilons, deltas and tangent lines. One you have the idea, you put in the rigorous skeleton by showing how the formal rules describe the same result. Appreciate the comment!
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I also agree that you need a mix for optimal learning. I noticed myself that when trying to really grok something, most of the work happens after I both know the formal description and the intuitive idea behind it - it's figuring out how exactly the two fit together that leads to actual understanding.
  - kalid 11y ago
    Exactly. Terry Tao calls this having a "post-rigorous" understanding (https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there’s-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there’s-more-to...). We can't think the formal rules are sufficient. (And in the case of adjectives, it seems explicit knowledge of the formal rules aren't even necessary for fluency.)
- adrianN 11y ago
  You probably like this http://cr.yp.to/papers/calculus.pdf http://cr.yp.to/papers/calculus.pdf It develops calculus in just 12 pages without being hand-wavy.
zodiac 11y ago
My best math classes have been where the professor took the intuitive approach but prefaced it with a rigorous definitions so I always had a safety net to fall back on.

by acbart 11y ago

ehartsuyker 11y ago

This is everything I hate about language learning through pure immersion (Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, most language schools). For example, I struggled for an absurdly long time with genders in German when I started because I assumed it was like French (male, female, plural). Turns out there's 4 genders, and often the female article is the same as a the plural. Once English sentence could have solved that.

stevoski 11y ago
There are three genders in German. And four cases. Multiply them together, throw in plurals, add in uses of the indefinite article and the definitive article, and, well, it is far too much for a single sentence to explain. But in principle I agree with you. We need a bit of book learning to go with the "just start speaking" approach.
- SilasX 11y ago
  Hence the 3-dimensional chart for determining adjective ending -- it depends on gender, case, and the word preceding it (i.e., definite article, indefinite, or nothing). Although I found a chart on this page that "reduces" it to a four-branch flow chart: http://www.nthuleen.com/teach/grammar/adjektivendungenexpl.html http://www.nthuleen.com/teach/grammar/adjektivendungenexpl.h...
mikeash 11y ago
I think that learning the rules is an absolute necessity, even if your goal is to develop your intuition well enough that you don't need them. (Edit: I think this implies a little more than I meant to say. Being exposed to the rules is a necessity, but you don't necessarily have to go out and memorize them from beginning to end or anything.) They're important scaffolding. Even native speakers of a language need to be taught the formal rules if they're to speak well. I'm going to make a lame attempt to coin a term and call this the Arch Fallacy, which is when you look at your goal and assume anything not present in it is unnecessary to achieve it. A completed arch contains no supports within it, but you'll have a tough time building one without any.
- Stratoscope 11y ago
  "contains no supports" (was "contains to supports") Funny thing is on first reading, I didn't notice that at all and read it the way you meant. I only saw the typo on a second reading. Interesting autocorrect the brain does. In any case I like your Arch Fallacy! I think I will use it.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Thanks for finding the typo. Glad you like the idea.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > In any case I like your Arch Fallacy! I think I will use it. I'll use it too, it's great and I don't recall any term for that particular error in thinking. I've already started spreading it (the name, not the error) among friends, hoping it will catch on.
- frenchy 11y ago
  > Even native speakers of a language need to be taught the formal rules if they're to speak well. Native speakers are taught some rules, but many are rarely taught unless a student has learning difficulties. The adjective ordering that OP mentions is a solid example. Others include aspiration of stops; voicing assimilation in words like "bets" and "beds"; the difference between "putting up" and "putting out"; why it's (sometimes) okay to say "Hey fucker" to your best friend, but not to your teacher; and the deletion of nominative arguments in subjunctive phrases. Second language learners often (maybe always) find more rules useful, for several reasons. However, those who learn the language in highly rule-focused manner often have difficulty actually communicating in the same way that Computer Science professors are sometimes quite knowledgeable about CS theory, but unable to produce good code. Rules are good at telling you what not to do, but bad at helping you be creative.
tmd 11y ago
After having lived 4+ years in Germany and struggling to learn German, I would say that the only way you can learn truly by pure immersion is from your parents. In any other case you need at least some theoretical basis because no one else is willing to spend hours trying to communicate with someone who's basically babbling. I'm using Duolingo now and after I'm finished with it I want to get some formal classes to (hopefully) get to a B1 level. I wouldn't call Duolingo immersion learning though -- they explicitly provide grammatical rules (unless you're using the mobile app which lacks some features) and it's very difficult and frustrating to try to do it with your intuition alone. I also liked the explanation of cases and adjective endings from this site: http://yourdailygerman.com/learn-german-online-course/ http://yourdailygerman.com/learn-german-online-course/
jdeisenberg 11y ago
In the language tutorials I wrote, I decided to write a whole section for people who didn't want to learn grammar. (http://langintro.com/kintro/grammar/hategram.htm http://langintro.com/kintro/grammar/hategram.htm) My example was Russian adjectives, where a 3 by 5 chart reduces to a 5-entry table plus two spelling rules.

sbilstein 11y ago

I've been teaching a beginner's guitar class at the office with another coworker. Teaching to adults is interesting because as a kid I was satisfied without necessarily knowing the underlying foundational concepts of music (something that held back my development for a while) but adult students are quick to ask questions and dive deeper. "What do you mean play a minor chord?" is easy to explain away to a child and get the to accept an intuitive definition (to be explained more thoroughly later) but totally throws off adults who are used to having acquired deep knowledge in some other field. As with music, math, programming, one does need a deep foundation to be good but also one needs to develop a feel by repeated effort so that your mind begins to recognize patterns.

OscarCunningham 11y ago
As a kid I refused to learn music because no-one could give me a good explanation of the difference between the black piano keys and the white keys. The explanations were always circular: white notes are special because they are in C-Major; C-Major is special because it contains all the white notes. (The correct answer is that people's hands aren't wide enough to deal with all twelve notes on the same level, and that particular subset of the notes contains a lot of consonant intervals and barely any dissonant ones.)
- hueving 11y ago
  >As a kid I refused to learn music because no-one could give me a good explanation of the difference between the black piano keys and the white keys. Doesn't that seem really stupid to you now or do you still support that stance? Refusing to learn the entire field of music because of one irrelevant detail is pretty appalling.
  - nkrisc 11y ago
    Kids aren't known for being rational.
  - Kluny 11y ago
    It makes you distrust the people teaching you - if they're going to answer your legitimate question with circular logic, it shows that they're missing some info and not willing to admit it. So they're either lying or wrong about this thing, and who know what else they're lying or wrong about? Similar logic puts some people off of Christianity - x is in the Bible, and we know the Bible is true because the Bible says it is true, therefore x is also true. Hmm. Someone who tries to sell you that logic is also either lying or wrong, now you can't trust either that person or the Bible.

kalid 11y ago

(Kalid from betterexplained here) Thanks for the comment, totally agree with moderation. My goal is to ask "Is the structure I'm providing helpful right now?". There's an implicit assumption that "more structure is better" (especially in technical subjects that can be structured) because it seems official and defensible. It reminds me of many Wikipedia articles -- they grow in length (why not?) and become more precise (why not?) and you're left with a description inscrutable to a beginner. Calculus, for example, gets my goat because we spend weeks on limits, continuity, L'Hospital's Rule, etc. so students can "properly" understand derivatives. (Never mind that Newton and Leibniz never used them and seemed to do ok.) Showing a circle non-rigorously transform into a triangle to measure its area (Archimedes) gets closer to the meaning of Calculus than a page of epsilons, deltas and tangent lines. One you have the idea, you put in the rigorous skeleton by showing how the formal rules describe the same result. Appreciate the comment!

TeMPOraL 11y ago
I also agree that you need a mix for optimal learning. I noticed myself that when trying to really grok something, most of the work happens after I both know the formal description and the intuitive idea behind it - it's figuring out how exactly the two fit together that leads to actual understanding.
- kalid 11y ago
  Exactly. Terry Tao calls this having a "post-rigorous" understanding (https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there’s-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there’s-more-to...). We can't think the formal rules are sufficient. (And in the case of adjectives, it seems explicit knowledge of the formal rules aren't even necessary for fluency.)
adrianN 11y ago
You probably like this http://cr.yp.to/papers/calculus.pdf http://cr.yp.to/papers/calculus.pdf It develops calculus in just 12 pages without being hand-wavy.

zodiac 11y ago

My best math classes have been where the professor took the intuitive approach but prefaced it with a rigorous definitions so I always had a safety net to fall back on.