5 ms·

A different word order, any different word order, changes language learning from "learn a bunch of substitutions for my native language" to "learn a completely

A different word order, any different word order, changes language learning from "learn a bunch of substitutions for my native language" to "learn a completely new system". There's a huge mental overhead for the latter.

adrianN 6y ago
The effort of learning a different grammar is dwarfed by the effort of memorizing a sufficiently large dictionary to understand everyday speech. To read at an elementary school level you need 5-20k words.
- munchbunny 6y ago
  I thought that too, but as a bilingual person who studied Latin for several years... either I'm linguistically handicapped, or the grammar was legitimately tough to wrap your head around. Or both. Some of it was that I really did struggle with the grammar. Some of it was that sometimes we really were reading syntactically complex writing.
- rangibaby 6y ago
  If you're a master of the grammar, I think it's possible to start figuring things out from context once you've learned a critical mass of words
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Yes, but "critical mass" is much larger than you'd commonly think. It's the low frequency words that contain most information in a sentence.
    - airstrike 6y ago
      > It's the low frequency words that contain most information in a sentence. This is an incredibly insightful point.
    - solarmist 6y ago
      Thank you. That's a very succinct way of putting it. I wonder if there's a term or concept for this in linguistics.
- imtringued 6y ago
  That's not true. People usually learn around a thousand words per year. Someone in their 20s is expected to have a 20k vocabulary but much of that is academic or professional vocabulary. i.e. the overlap between a mechanical and a software engineer might only be 15k words.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    Is that number for active or passive vocabulary? For active, it seems reasonable, but GP is talking about reading comprehension, i.e. passive vocabulary.
bernulli 6y ago
There's a lot more to learning a different language than learning substitutions. For starters, there is hardly any bijective mapping between words. Translating 'run' to German could mean any of 'rennen, renne, rennst, rennt, renn, laufen, laeuft' and I am sure I am missing quite a bit. And that only scratches the surface, let's not get started about Grammar or idioms, etc. The word order really only adds negligible overhead.
- solarmist 6y ago
  You get closer to something bijective when you only consider lemmas, but then you'll probably have around 1/3 that are bijective, 1/3 that 1->2 or 3 and 1/3 that are 2 or 3->1.
thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
So learn it. You'll get to practice it with every sentence you ever use. Conversely, you'll only use 'ballon' when you take about un ballon. I hope that's frequently enough for you to remember the word & its gender. At least it looks like the word 'ball', something you don't get with Vietnamese's 'bóng' or Chinese's '球[1]' And you'll still get funny looks if you say you're getting ready to go to the New Year's ballon, because substitutions fail with homonyms in both directions. And you'll have to learn and relearn about ten thousand of these substitutions. [1]maybe?
numpad0 6y ago
More like building a completely different persona for each family of languages. “Learn a bunch of substitutions” approach only goes so far, your language specific part of identity must be separated at where thought processes for languages diverge and necessary new parts must be built. Philosophers deny linguistic determinism(a notion that language sets the ceiling for thoughts) but that’s just talking Turing Completeness.

adrianN 6y ago

The effort of learning a different grammar is dwarfed by the effort of memorizing a sufficiently large dictionary to understand everyday speech. To read at an elementary school level you need 5-20k words.

munchbunny 6y ago
I thought that too, but as a bilingual person who studied Latin for several years... either I'm linguistically handicapped, or the grammar was legitimately tough to wrap your head around. Or both. Some of it was that I really did struggle with the grammar. Some of it was that sometimes we really were reading syntactically complex writing.
rangibaby 6y ago
If you're a master of the grammar, I think it's possible to start figuring things out from context once you've learned a critical mass of words
- adrianN 6y ago
  Yes, but "critical mass" is much larger than you'd commonly think. It's the low frequency words that contain most information in a sentence.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    > It's the low frequency words that contain most information in a sentence. This is an incredibly insightful point.
  - solarmist 6y ago
    Thank you. That's a very succinct way of putting it. I wonder if there's a term or concept for this in linguistics.
imtringued 6y ago
That's not true. People usually learn around a thousand words per year. Someone in their 20s is expected to have a 20k vocabulary but much of that is academic or professional vocabulary. i.e. the overlap between a mechanical and a software engineer might only be 15k words.
- majewsky 6y ago
  Is that number for active or passive vocabulary? For active, it seems reasonable, but GP is talking about reading comprehension, i.e. passive vocabulary.

bernulli 6y ago

There's a lot more to learning a different language than learning substitutions. For starters, there is hardly any bijective mapping between words. Translating 'run' to German could mean any of 'rennen, renne, rennst, rennt, renn, laufen, laeuft' and I am sure I am missing quite a bit. And that only scratches the surface, let's not get started about Grammar or idioms, etc. The word order really only adds negligible overhead.

solarmist 6y ago
You get closer to something bijective when you only consider lemmas, but then you'll probably have around 1/3 that are bijective, 1/3 that 1->2 or 3 and 1/3 that are 2 or 3->1.

thrwyoilarticle 6y ago

So learn it. You'll get to practice it with every sentence you ever use. Conversely, you'll only use 'ballon' when you take about un ballon. I hope that's frequently enough for you to remember the word & its gender. At least it looks like the word 'ball', something you don't get with Vietnamese's 'bóng' or Chinese's '球[1]' And you'll still get funny looks if you say you're getting ready to go to the New Year's ballon, because substitutions fail with homonyms in both directions. And you'll have to learn and relearn about ten thousand of these substitutions. [1]maybe?

numpad0 6y ago

More like building a completely different persona for each family of languages. “Learn a bunch of substitutions” approach only goes so far, your language specific part of identity must be separated at where thought processes for languages diverge and necessary new parts must be built. Philosophers deny linguistic determinism(a notion that language sets the ceiling for thoughts) but that’s just talking Turing Completeness.