6 ms·

The New Old Way of Learning Languages (2008)

58 points by oskarth 10y ago

ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
How is reading an interlinear translation of the Greek classics supposed to help you engage in a conversation with a real life Greek person in Greece?
- chillacy 10y ago
  My guess is Hamilton was teaching his pupils to be able to read classics, since traveling to speak with a Greek person in Greece would have been difficult back then anyways. To speak with people, you might look at the learning route advocated by Dr. Pimsleur, who also started a company which publishes language learning in audiobooks only, with the argument that most languages started out without a written form, and when they did develop writing it was inaccessible to a majority of speakers for most of history. Literacy is a recent phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pimsleur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pimsleur
  - lgessler 10y ago
    Nearly half of languages of the world continue to have no writing system: https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten-0 https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages...
    - oh_sigh 10y ago
      Sure, but how many people do those 3000+ languages actually cover? I'd imagine a lot of languages with 1-100 speakers don't have a writing system...
      - lgessler 10y ago
        The broader point here is that something most people in the developed world do not realize at first is that a writing system is not an important part of how many (I'd wager most) people use their language. In other words, the spoken language is all that matters or practically exists for most people in the world. For almost all of history most languages were unwritten. While it's true that today, owing to the efforts of indigenous leaders[1], missionaries[2], and linguists[3], many languages have gained writing systems, they often are of marginal, if any, relevance in the average speaker's daily life. E.g., Wu Chinese, at 80M speakers, lacks a robust writing system. Many Indo-Aryan languages (i.e. those related to Hindi) in Northern India lack a standard written form. Maay Maay, a language spoken in Somalia with 2M speakers, does not have a writing system. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    Even today, for me today, being able to read Aristotle, Homer and Euripedes in their language would be slightly more useful than being able speak to Greek locals on some hypothetical holiday. But learning a language is a big deal, and I don't think that either one is really worth it for anyone who isn't a student. Though if I lived in Greece, that's a different matter.
  - visarga 10y ago
    Pimsleur courses are amazing.
- cafard 10y ago
  More or less the way that an interlinear translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles will help (say) a Greek monoglot hold conversations in Chicago.
- gumby 10y ago
  The same way reading Chaucer helps you speak with someone in Yorkshire: it doesn't. Flippancy aside: you learn languages to have conversations with others; in the case of dead languages it's to have one-sided conversations with long ago people, no different from reading a contemporary novel. Translation is never perfect (whatever that would even mean) so some stuff is clearly worth reading in the original, and when there's a significant corpus of stuff to read the effort to learn the language can be worth it. The article actually makes two points, neither of which I agree with. One is that interlinear translation is better than, say, paragraph by paragraph translation. The problem is linguistic structure, and the article even says he had to move words around to make interlinear translation work. That can actually "work" in languages with case like Classical Greek and Latin, but would result in a word salad with French and English. And even in a language with case, word order is not irrelevant. My second problem is the claimed emphasis on grammar. Of course you do need to know some grammar, but in the languages I learned in HS (French, Latin, Greek) the whole point was to be able to read classical texts (some of them salacious to keep the interest of HS kids), not rote learning of grammar and vocabulary for some abstract benefit.
Koshkin 10y ago
I understand the (good) reason why, say, a Greek or an Armenian would want to learn one of the "world" languages. There are also other specific reasons, like learning to speak the language of the next-door tribe... But how would an average English-speaking person (not a scholar, a spy, or, perhaps, a diplomat, a migrant, etc.) benefit today from learning any other language? Isn't this just a waste of brain cells (and time)? What would we have lost if - which is no doubt what is going to happen in the (possibly somewhat distant) future - there was only one spoken language?
- chillacy 10y ago
  Same reason everyone should travel: it's the best way to know more about yourself. It's like the story: two young fish meet an older fish, who asks them “How's the water?” The younger fish look at each other and say, “What the hell is water?" There's pretty decent evidence that languages have a big impact on how we think (weak spair-worf hypothesis). It's but one easy way to introspect. Anyways, I don't know if it should be required, but it's probably more useful than calculus or english literature, both of which most people also don't use.
  - freeflight 10y ago
    >It's but one easy way to introspect. So much this! Not all languages are "equal" in their ways how they can express/define certain concepts, thus knowing more than one language helps you define better what's going on. A thing I personally really enjoy is reading Wikipedia articles in different languages for a more "complete" picture of the topic because that works a little bit like triangulation: What one language might leave out another language might explain in more detail also highlighting different cultural influences and giving me the feeling of having a rather universal understanding of certain concepts, which doesn't hinge that much on merely memorizing terminology as terminology keeps on changing while the underlying principles don't.
    - rukuu001 10y ago
      What you're describing has actually been the most rewarding thing for me - learning a new language is a window on a different way to think about things.
WalterBright 10y ago
I read long ago that the TV vocabulary is about 2,000 words, high school vocabulary is 10,000 words, college is 30,000 words, and there were a million words in the English language. What this meant to me is that in order to be passably fluent in a foreign language only about 2,000 words need to be learned.
- Koshkin 10y ago
  > 2,000 words That's about right. It is easy to learn 2,000 words. Problem is, it takes enormously long time to learn how to break the live stream of sounds - which is what the human speech is - down into individual words, so one could, then, apply the knowledge of the vocabulary and possibly understand what is being said.
  - RangerScience 10y ago
    Seems like you could learn ~1k words and then just massive exposure, let your brain do the hard work. 1k words to give a decent chance of every other word to be one you can recognize, letting your brain better begin to determine those word breaks...?
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    It is easy to learn 2,000 words. I don't think it's easy.
  - wallflower 10y ago
    > Problem is, it takes enormously long time to learn how to break the live stream of sounds Check out https://www.mimicmethod.com https://www.mimicmethod.com for a pronunciation-first approach to language learning.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  2,000 words isn't even close to enough. When learning Chinese, I still had large gaps after learning 2,000 characters and closer to 20,000 words. Note: we each just used three words not in the first 2,000 and that didn't count verb forms! http://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y http://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y
adrianratnapala 10y ago
Hamilton also revised the word order of the original text to conform to the word order of modern languages, overcoming perhaps the greatest difficulty for modern students of classics. Well now that's just silly. It gives you have a book written in English, with some incorrect, or at best stilted, Greek written above it. OK can you with vocab -- if you don't fall into just reading the English. Surely it is better to have word-by-word English transliterations as cribs for an untampered Greek sentence.
- jhbadger 10y ago
  The idea is that you would graduate to full unaltered Greek after mastering the easier more natural word ordering, much as the point of learning to ride a bicycle with training wheels is to graduate to leaving them off.
  - vorg 10y ago
    You'd need two editions of the translation, the training one and the unaltered, which seems like wasted effort when having one translation with Yoda-style English would be adequate for both groups of readers. It's easy enough for a native English speaker to read a jumbled sentence when it has enough punctuation. Your sentence above, for example, could be "The easier ordering of words, more naturale; master them so after, graduate, the idea is, you would to Greek, unaltered and full -- (just as) learn-ride a bicycle with wheels-training, then graduate to no-wheels, is the point" if that's the word order of the original language. It would also cause the reader to think in the word order of the translated language, to discern its thematic structure as well as its semantic structure.
programLyrique 10y ago
Why not an interactive interlinear translation, for which you can for instance click on words of the original text to get their meaning in your language? And there are actually apps and websites that use this kind of methods, such as bliubliu or readlang!
- a_brawling_boo 10y ago
  There is one I know of but only if you are interested in new testament greek or hebrew, I've actually picked up some greek using it: https://www.stepbible.org/ https://www.stepbible.org/
pnathan 10y ago
Huh. Didn't know this had died out; guess I'd never thought about it when I was learning German back in college. But, then.... > What is withheld is the information on the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences the students are reading. This is not how I learned German at Idaho State University in the 2002-2003 timeframe. Anyway, a Hebrew / Green interlinear is a very standard Bible study tool. You can find a online example at Blue Letter Bible online. They have middling worth, in my opinion. You can get an idea of what the sentence is, but you lose substantial information, possibly even the key nuance of the sentence. It would be interesting to see what an interlinear would look like for a generally factual newspaper article, as opposed to the more symbolic religious texts. If someone is interested, I can probably translate a German newspaper paragraph into a stab at an interlinear reading (email me the request, as I have a lot on my plate and won't really be able to update it on HN).
- ajarmst 10y ago
  It's still standard for dead languages (cf. Wheelock's Latin, any Biblical Hebrew text, Koine Greek, Classical Greek, Aramaic, etc.). Modern languages have tended to shift into a focus on conversational use rather than scholarly reading. There're fairly obvious reasons for this.
bsder 10y ago
Do we not have actual research as to the most efficient ways of learning foreign languages given particular circumstances (online-only, in-person teacher, vacation access, full-time immersion)? This seems like such an obvious thing for psychology to experiment on.
wolfgke 10y ago
Some interlinear books for modern languages can be bought at http://interlinearbooks.com/ http://interlinearbooks.com/

58 points by oskarth 10y ago

How is reading an interlinear translation of the Greek classics supposed to help you engage in a conversation with a real life Greek person in Greece?

chillacy 10y ago
My guess is Hamilton was teaching his pupils to be able to read classics, since traveling to speak with a Greek person in Greece would have been difficult back then anyways. To speak with people, you might look at the learning route advocated by Dr. Pimsleur, who also started a company which publishes language learning in audiobooks only, with the argument that most languages started out without a written form, and when they did develop writing it was inaccessible to a majority of speakers for most of history. Literacy is a recent phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pimsleur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pimsleur
- lgessler 10y ago
  Nearly half of languages of the world continue to have no writing system: https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-world-are-unwritten-0 https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages...
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    Sure, but how many people do those 3000+ languages actually cover? I'd imagine a lot of languages with 1-100 speakers don't have a writing system...
    - lgessler 10y ago
      The broader point here is that something most people in the developed world do not realize at first is that a writing system is not an important part of how many (I'd wager most) people use their language. In other words, the spoken language is all that matters or practically exists for most people in the world. For almost all of history most languages were unwritten. While it's true that today, owing to the efforts of indigenous leaders[1], missionaries[2], and linguists[3], many languages have gained writing systems, they often are of marginal, if any, relevance in the average speaker's daily life. E.g., Wu Chinese, at 80M speakers, lacks a robust writing system. Many Indo-Aryan languages (i.e. those related to Hindi) in Northern India lack a standard written form. Maay Maay, a language spoken in Somalia with 2M speakers, does not have a writing system. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  Even today, for me today, being able to read Aristotle, Homer and Euripedes in their language would be slightly more useful than being able speak to Greek locals on some hypothetical holiday. But learning a language is a big deal, and I don't think that either one is really worth it for anyone who isn't a student. Though if I lived in Greece, that's a different matter.
- visarga 10y ago
  Pimsleur courses are amazing.
cafard 10y ago
More or less the way that an interlinear translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles will help (say) a Greek monoglot hold conversations in Chicago.
gumby 10y ago
The same way reading Chaucer helps you speak with someone in Yorkshire: it doesn't. Flippancy aside: you learn languages to have conversations with others; in the case of dead languages it's to have one-sided conversations with long ago people, no different from reading a contemporary novel. Translation is never perfect (whatever that would even mean) so some stuff is clearly worth reading in the original, and when there's a significant corpus of stuff to read the effort to learn the language can be worth it. The article actually makes two points, neither of which I agree with. One is that interlinear translation is better than, say, paragraph by paragraph translation. The problem is linguistic structure, and the article even says he had to move words around to make interlinear translation work. That can actually "work" in languages with case like Classical Greek and Latin, but would result in a word salad with French and English. And even in a language with case, word order is not irrelevant. My second problem is the claimed emphasis on grammar. Of course you do need to know some grammar, but in the languages I learned in HS (French, Latin, Greek) the whole point was to be able to read classical texts (some of them salacious to keep the interest of HS kids), not rote learning of grammar and vocabulary for some abstract benefit.

Koshkin 10y ago

I understand the (good) reason why, say, a Greek or an Armenian would want to learn one of the "world" languages. There are also other specific reasons, like learning to speak the language of the next-door tribe... But how would an average English-speaking person (not a scholar, a spy, or, perhaps, a diplomat, a migrant, etc.) benefit today from learning any other language? Isn't this just a waste of brain cells (and time)? What would we have lost if - which is no doubt what is going to happen in the (possibly somewhat distant) future - there was only one spoken language?

chillacy 10y ago
Same reason everyone should travel: it's the best way to know more about yourself. It's like the story: two young fish meet an older fish, who asks them “How's the water?” The younger fish look at each other and say, “What the hell is water?" There's pretty decent evidence that languages have a big impact on how we think (weak spair-worf hypothesis). It's but one easy way to introspect. Anyways, I don't know if it should be required, but it's probably more useful than calculus or english literature, both of which most people also don't use.
- freeflight 10y ago
  >It's but one easy way to introspect. So much this! Not all languages are "equal" in their ways how they can express/define certain concepts, thus knowing more than one language helps you define better what's going on. A thing I personally really enjoy is reading Wikipedia articles in different languages for a more "complete" picture of the topic because that works a little bit like triangulation: What one language might leave out another language might explain in more detail also highlighting different cultural influences and giving me the feeling of having a rather universal understanding of certain concepts, which doesn't hinge that much on merely memorizing terminology as terminology keeps on changing while the underlying principles don't.
  - rukuu001 10y ago
    What you're describing has actually been the most rewarding thing for me - learning a new language is a window on a different way to think about things.

WalterBright 10y ago

I read long ago that the TV vocabulary is about 2,000 words, high school vocabulary is 10,000 words, college is 30,000 words, and there were a million words in the English language. What this meant to me is that in order to be passably fluent in a foreign language only about 2,000 words need to be learned.

Koshkin 10y ago
> 2,000 words That's about right. It is easy to learn 2,000 words. Problem is, it takes enormously long time to learn how to break the live stream of sounds - which is what the human speech is - down into individual words, so one could, then, apply the knowledge of the vocabulary and possibly understand what is being said.
- RangerScience 10y ago
  Seems like you could learn ~1k words and then just massive exposure, let your brain do the hard work. 1k words to give a decent chance of every other word to be one you can recognize, letting your brain better begin to determine those word breaks...?
- ktRolster 10y ago
  It is easy to learn 2,000 words. I don't think it's easy.
- wallflower 10y ago
  > Problem is, it takes enormously long time to learn how to break the live stream of sounds Check out https://www.mimicmethod.com https://www.mimicmethod.com for a pronunciation-first approach to language learning.
xiaoma 10y ago
2,000 words isn't even close to enough. When learning Chinese, I still had large gaps after learning 2,000 characters and closer to 20,000 words. Note: we each just used three words not in the first 2,000 and that didn't count verb forms! http://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y http://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y

adrianratnapala 10y ago

Hamilton also revised the word order of the original text to conform to the word order of modern languages, overcoming perhaps the greatest difficulty for modern students of classics. Well now that's just silly. It gives you have a book written in English, with some incorrect, or at best stilted, Greek written above it. OK can you with vocab -- if you don't fall into just reading the English. Surely it is better to have word-by-word English transliterations as cribs for an untampered Greek sentence.

jhbadger 10y ago
The idea is that you would graduate to full unaltered Greek after mastering the easier more natural word ordering, much as the point of learning to ride a bicycle with training wheels is to graduate to leaving them off.
- vorg 10y ago
  You'd need two editions of the translation, the training one and the unaltered, which seems like wasted effort when having one translation with Yoda-style English would be adequate for both groups of readers. It's easy enough for a native English speaker to read a jumbled sentence when it has enough punctuation. Your sentence above, for example, could be "The easier ordering of words, more naturale; master them so after, graduate, the idea is, you would to Greek, unaltered and full -- (just as) learn-ride a bicycle with wheels-training, then graduate to no-wheels, is the point" if that's the word order of the original language. It would also cause the reader to think in the word order of the translated language, to discern its thematic structure as well as its semantic structure.

programLyrique 10y ago

Why not an interactive interlinear translation, for which you can for instance click on words of the original text to get their meaning in your language? And there are actually apps and websites that use this kind of methods, such as bliubliu or readlang!

a_brawling_boo 10y ago
There is one I know of but only if you are interested in new testament greek or hebrew, I've actually picked up some greek using it: https://www.stepbible.org/ https://www.stepbible.org/

pnathan 10y ago

Huh. Didn't know this had died out; guess I'd never thought about it when I was learning German back in college. But, then.... > What is withheld is the information on the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences the students are reading. This is not how I learned German at Idaho State University in the 2002-2003 timeframe. Anyway, a Hebrew / Green interlinear is a very standard Bible study tool. You can find a online example at Blue Letter Bible online. They have middling worth, in my opinion. You can get an idea of what the sentence is, but you lose substantial information, possibly even the key nuance of the sentence. It would be interesting to see what an interlinear would look like for a generally factual newspaper article, as opposed to the more symbolic religious texts. If someone is interested, I can probably translate a German newspaper paragraph into a stab at an interlinear reading (email me the request, as I have a lot on my plate and won't really be able to update it on HN).

ajarmst 10y ago
It's still standard for dead languages (cf. Wheelock's Latin, any Biblical Hebrew text, Koine Greek, Classical Greek, Aramaic, etc.). Modern languages have tended to shift into a focus on conversational use rather than scholarly reading. There're fairly obvious reasons for this.

bsder 10y ago

Do we not have actual research as to the most efficient ways of learning foreign languages given particular circumstances (online-only, in-person teacher, vacation access, full-time immersion)? This seems like such an obvious thing for psychology to experiment on.

wolfgke 10y ago

Some interlinear books for modern languages can be bought at http://interlinearbooks.com/ http://interlinearbooks.com/