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Hi I am the OP. I just discovered that my submission has made it to the front page. A quick word on the rationale for not using translation. All of the class

Hi I am the OP. I just discovered that my submission has made it to the front page. A quick word on the rationale for not using translation. All of the classic apps (Anki, Duolingo, Memrise, ...) are to some extent translation based. Translating has three scalability issues. First, if you want to be inclusive and your product to be used by everyone you have to translate the whole product in a long list of languages. I imagine there is a ton of people who do not speak English and would love to learn Japanese ! I don't really know how to express the second limitation better than by saying 'translation is not additive' or it does not 'scale up'. What I mean by that is that if you translate at the word level (such as with Memrise), you learn words but somehow you do no learn the language (to be fair is the point of the app and that works fairly well). However a language expresses itself through sentences and translating a sentence is not the same as translating each one of its word. So you are sort of stuck at the word level and can't scale up to the sentence level by combining the low level components that words are. Third, translating sentences does not scale well due to the complexity of natural languages. If like Duolingo you base your app on translating sentences you face all the poblem faced by Duolingo. How do you translate 猿はバナナを食べる ? There are a lot of potential translations. Here are some I can think of right now : The monkey eats the banana. The monkeys eat the banana The monkey will eat the bananas. The monkeys are going to eat the bananas.

tsimionescu 6y ago
I think that one problem that eventually happens with this approach, which is a problem I had with Duolingo as well, is that very soon after learning a few words you need to start learning basic grammar. In these approaches that don't explain the grammar at all, you need to spend effort pattern matching to pick up the right grammatical rules to construct your own sentences, and you are never sure that you're doing the right thing. For example, in 猿はバナナを食べる, how should I understand what は and を mean? When should I use them? I can more or less easily understand that 猿 means monkey, バナナ means banana, and 食べる is related to eating. But to understand that は indicates the topic and を indicates that the word before is having an action done to them, I would have to see a LOT of examples. I think a little grammatical explanation goes a very long way in terms of the number of examples you have to show.
- Swizec 6y ago
  > In these approaches that don't explain the grammar at all, you need to spend effort pattern matching to pick up the right grammatical rules to construct your own sentences, and you are never sure that you're doing the right thing. To be fair, you learn your first language by inference and don't start learning the rules until you're some 10 years into fluency. Even as late as high school we were taught grammatical rules with "As a native speaker, do what sounds right, then find the correct rule and say you applied it. Immigrants, sorry you'll find this exam question impossibly difficult. Good luck"
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    We may not teach a codified grammar rule set until later, but we are definitely learning grammer as we learn language for the first time. My 2 year old will say things like, "I like she". After which we will correct her, "I like her". She has never heard anyone say "I like she" but she is re-ordering and inventing her own sentences using unspoken rules. (She may have generated that sentence from hearing "where is she?") She will eventually recognize that some things don't sound right, but she is also applying those things that sound right to newly invented sentences using those rules. So in effect, we do seem to be learning rules when first learning to talk, we just are extracting those rules internally and applying them rather than working from a codified set of rules.
    - cyphar 6y ago
      There is a fair amount of evidence that corrections (negative evidence) do not actually improve the grammar of children who are still developing their language skills[1], for two reasons: adults are bad at correcting mistakes consistently, and children do not internalise corrections because language acquisition is not a conscious process. In addition, even in early development children actually do appear to have pretty strong understanding of their native language's syntax[2] even if they cannot produce adult-level English. There are certain classes of mistakes they do not make (indicating they have internalised many more rules than may be apparent), and they can understand sentences which have grammar that they do not produce themselves (meaning that the level of output is not a good indication of their language development). [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Un06tDOn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Un06tDOn0 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmghbKNiI1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmghbKNiI1k
616c 6y ago
This is basically the Uplan method, no? The Israelis pioneered this long ago, or so I have been told, by relatives who were taught Hebrew in the 70s when studying there. Hebrew as spoken today (aka Modern Hebrew) was a new language that won by vote (to IIRC Russian, Yiddish, German and others) when the country had to decide on a national language, and they needed a way to teach people uniformly. https://www.ulpanor.com/ https://www.ulpanor.com/ That being said, as they learned via Ulpan as adults in their 20's and spent only 1-2 years there, none of them speak beyond a few words of Hebrew once I was in their lives decades later up until now. Twas quickly forgotten. I went through conventional language education in Arabic from early teens (it was my desired hobby because of my obviously vibrant social life, hehe) to college and speak it so-so until this day, but I have many friends and family of my own who speak Arabic. So more than anything: increased exposure is key and few people will correct humor you with your method if it takes longer as an adult, and it definitely will! haha
chrisvasselli 6y ago
I think you're hitting on something real here, that translation doesn't "scale up". You can't rely entirely on learning translations to learn a language, and in some ways it can really hold you back if you think of things as having a 1-1 mapping with English. Especially when dealing with languages without a common ancestor with English, like Japanese, where a lot of concepts just don't line up. For example, in Japanese there's not a direct equivalent to the word "to give". There are different words depending on the relationship between the people, and at a basic level, you always have to "give upwards" or "give downwards", with different words for each. I could see this kind of method of teaching being really useful for learning those kinds of concepts. I think learning the Japanese words directly, without getting hung up on what their English translations are, could avoid some pitfalls. I'm less sure about how useful it is for the real basic basics. But it's a cool concept none the less.
nullsense 6y ago
You forgot "Monkeys eat bananas"
unabst 6y ago
You're still translating the mouse image into "mouse" in your mother tongue, then staring at the Japanese word. But I do agree translation does about as much harm as good. It's a shortcut that helps you shorten the learning curve by importing what you already know about language and the things you often say generically from another language. Learning a language is really really hard, so for many, without this shortcut, you'd barely get anywhere. That's the only good it does though, because it will set you back from becoming fluent and will continue to prevent you from thinking in that new langauge. The best way to learn a language is through mimicry, immersion, and repetition as you're surrouned by people who only speak that language, who are also friendly, forgiving, and willing to talk to you. Like, children surrounded by their parents, then friends, then friends and teachers.
- lmm 6y ago
  > The best way to learn a language is through mimicry, immersion, and repetition as you're surrouned by people who only speak that language, who are also friendly, forgiving, and willing to talk to you. Like, children surrounded by their parents, then friends, then friends and teachers. Those people must also be willing to correct you when you make a mistake, which is socially much harder as an adult.
naniwaduni 6y ago
Or worse—僕はうなぎだ!
- timw4mail 6y ago
  You're an eel?!
zumu 6y ago
I learned Japanese without translation, but I learned it in a classroom in Japan. From that experience, I don't know how you expect to start with reading and not listening first. You really need to hear something over and over and watch people pronounce the words to learn it properly yourself.
- tkgally 6y ago
  I also learned Japanese in a classroom in Japan. At the elementary level, some of the teachers used English to explain grammar and vocabulary, but from the intermediate level the classes were conducted entirely in Japanese. While some teachers and learners believe strongly in monolingual immersion as a matter of principle, at the school I attended in Tokyo there was a more practical reason for choosing that approach: most of the students were from other East Asian countries and did not understand English. Outside of class, though, I memorized vocabulary mostly using English translations from dictionaries rather than definitions in Japanese until I reached quite an advanced level. That was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it was easier for me to remember Japanese words when I associated them with a particular English word; on the other, the translation I memorized sometimes actually referred to something different from the Japanese word. It took a lot of exposure to real-life Japanese to unlearn some of those mistranslations. Some years ago, I wrote a paper about the use of Japanese-Japanese dictionaries by people learning the language: https://researchmap.jp/multidatabases/multidatabase_contents/detail/232973/865afc786acbcdb8f938fa60541dbc20?frame_id=621150 https://researchmap.jp/multidatabases/multidatabase_contents...

tsimionescu 6y ago

I think that one problem that eventually happens with this approach, which is a problem I had with Duolingo as well, is that very soon after learning a few words you need to start learning basic grammar. In these approaches that don't explain the grammar at all, you need to spend effort pattern matching to pick up the right grammatical rules to construct your own sentences, and you are never sure that you're doing the right thing. For example, in 猿はバナナを食べる, how should I understand what は and を mean? When should I use them? I can more or less easily understand that 猿 means monkey, バナナ means banana, and 食べる is related to eating. But to understand that は indicates the topic and を indicates that the word before is having an action done to them, I would have to see a LOT of examples. I think a little grammatical explanation goes a very long way in terms of the number of examples you have to show.

Swizec 6y ago
> In these approaches that don't explain the grammar at all, you need to spend effort pattern matching to pick up the right grammatical rules to construct your own sentences, and you are never sure that you're doing the right thing. To be fair, you learn your first language by inference and don't start learning the rules until you're some 10 years into fluency. Even as late as high school we were taught grammatical rules with "As a native speaker, do what sounds right, then find the correct rule and say you applied it. Immigrants, sorry you'll find this exam question impossibly difficult. Good luck"
- jjeaff 6y ago
  We may not teach a codified grammar rule set until later, but we are definitely learning grammer as we learn language for the first time. My 2 year old will say things like, "I like she". After which we will correct her, "I like her". She has never heard anyone say "I like she" but she is re-ordering and inventing her own sentences using unspoken rules. (She may have generated that sentence from hearing "where is she?") She will eventually recognize that some things don't sound right, but she is also applying those things that sound right to newly invented sentences using those rules. So in effect, we do seem to be learning rules when first learning to talk, we just are extracting those rules internally and applying them rather than working from a codified set of rules.
  - cyphar 6y ago
    There is a fair amount of evidence that corrections (negative evidence) do not actually improve the grammar of children who are still developing their language skills[1], for two reasons: adults are bad at correcting mistakes consistently, and children do not internalise corrections because language acquisition is not a conscious process. In addition, even in early development children actually do appear to have pretty strong understanding of their native language's syntax[2] even if they cannot produce adult-level English. There are certain classes of mistakes they do not make (indicating they have internalised many more rules than may be apparent), and they can understand sentences which have grammar that they do not produce themselves (meaning that the level of output is not a good indication of their language development). [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Un06tDOn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Un06tDOn0 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmghbKNiI1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmghbKNiI1k

616c 6y ago

This is basically the Uplan method, no? The Israelis pioneered this long ago, or so I have been told, by relatives who were taught Hebrew in the 70s when studying there. Hebrew as spoken today (aka Modern Hebrew) was a new language that won by vote (to IIRC Russian, Yiddish, German and others) when the country had to decide on a national language, and they needed a way to teach people uniformly. https://www.ulpanor.com/ https://www.ulpanor.com/ That being said, as they learned via Ulpan as adults in their 20's and spent only 1-2 years there, none of them speak beyond a few words of Hebrew once I was in their lives decades later up until now. Twas quickly forgotten. I went through conventional language education in Arabic from early teens (it was my desired hobby because of my obviously vibrant social life, hehe) to college and speak it so-so until this day, but I have many friends and family of my own who speak Arabic. So more than anything: increased exposure is key and few people will correct humor you with your method if it takes longer as an adult, and it definitely will! haha

chrisvasselli 6y ago

I think you're hitting on something real here, that translation doesn't "scale up". You can't rely entirely on learning translations to learn a language, and in some ways it can really hold you back if you think of things as having a 1-1 mapping with English. Especially when dealing with languages without a common ancestor with English, like Japanese, where a lot of concepts just don't line up. For example, in Japanese there's not a direct equivalent to the word "to give". There are different words depending on the relationship between the people, and at a basic level, you always have to "give upwards" or "give downwards", with different words for each. I could see this kind of method of teaching being really useful for learning those kinds of concepts. I think learning the Japanese words directly, without getting hung up on what their English translations are, could avoid some pitfalls. I'm less sure about how useful it is for the real basic basics. But it's a cool concept none the less.

nullsense 6y ago

You forgot "Monkeys eat bananas"

unabst 6y ago

You're still translating the mouse image into "mouse" in your mother tongue, then staring at the Japanese word. But I do agree translation does about as much harm as good. It's a shortcut that helps you shorten the learning curve by importing what you already know about language and the things you often say generically from another language. Learning a language is really really hard, so for many, without this shortcut, you'd barely get anywhere. That's the only good it does though, because it will set you back from becoming fluent and will continue to prevent you from thinking in that new langauge. The best way to learn a language is through mimicry, immersion, and repetition as you're surrouned by people who only speak that language, who are also friendly, forgiving, and willing to talk to you. Like, children surrounded by their parents, then friends, then friends and teachers.

lmm 6y ago
> The best way to learn a language is through mimicry, immersion, and repetition as you're surrouned by people who only speak that language, who are also friendly, forgiving, and willing to talk to you. Like, children surrounded by their parents, then friends, then friends and teachers. Those people must also be willing to correct you when you make a mistake, which is socially much harder as an adult.

naniwaduni 6y ago

Or worse—僕はうなぎだ!

timw4mail 6y ago
You're an eel?!

zumu 6y ago

I learned Japanese without translation, but I learned it in a classroom in Japan. From that experience, I don't know how you expect to start with reading and not listening first. You really need to hear something over and over and watch people pronounce the words to learn it properly yourself.

tkgally 6y ago
I also learned Japanese in a classroom in Japan. At the elementary level, some of the teachers used English to explain grammar and vocabulary, but from the intermediate level the classes were conducted entirely in Japanese. While some teachers and learners believe strongly in monolingual immersion as a matter of principle, at the school I attended in Tokyo there was a more practical reason for choosing that approach: most of the students were from other East Asian countries and did not understand English. Outside of class, though, I memorized vocabulary mostly using English translations from dictionaries rather than definitions in Japanese until I reached quite an advanced level. That was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it was easier for me to remember Japanese words when I associated them with a particular English word; on the other, the translation I memorized sometimes actually referred to something different from the Japanese word. It took a lot of exposure to real-life Japanese to unlearn some of those mistranslations. Some years ago, I wrote a paper about the use of Japanese-Japanese dictionaries by people learning the language: https://researchmap.jp/multidatabases/multidatabase_contents/detail/232973/865afc786acbcdb8f938fa60541dbc20?frame_id=621150 https://researchmap.jp/multidatabases/multidatabase_contents...