4 ms·

I'm not sure what qualifies his argument as an arm-chair argument relative to yours. Grammar is a shortcut to a basic understanding, the primary complaint of u

I'm not sure what qualifies his argument as an arm-chair argument relative to yours. Grammar is a shortcut to a basic understanding, the primary complaint of users of Duolingo is the lack of grammar lessons, and having to infer rules solely through examples. I don't know of anyone who is arguing for a single approach to language learning either. Pretty much everyone who has ever worked through a textbook recommends supplementing with real content, examples, media, conversations and so on. It doesn't invalidate the use of a textbook focused on grammar. As for language models they're pretty much entirely irrelevant to human learning.

wokwokwok 4y ago
Language models show that language is predictive, not rule based. Every bit of research in the last 30 years shows this. If you want to ignore that and use rule based approaches, that’s fine, but you’re a) wrong and b) it doesn’t work. /shrug Of course people want rules, they think it’s a shortcut to learning. …but there is no shortcut to learning. You have to do the hard work.
- yorwba 4y ago
  > Language models show that language is predictive, not rule based. Training language models by making them predict missing words in a text is a trick to optimize their ability to extract information from text. That doesn't mean that making humans do the exact same task is the optimal way to learn a language. And it definitely doesn't mean there are no rules. Millenia of linguistic research have succeeded in identifying a lot of rules in every language. You don't have to learn them explicitly, but it speeds things up a bit. If you think there are no shortcuts to learning, you're either blind to the shortcuts you used, or you missed out on a lot. Like dictionaries. They just tell you what a word means in a language you can understand! That saves a lot of time compared to having to figure out everything from context. The Wiktionary entry for the particle に https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%AB#Particle https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%AB#Particle lists eight different uses and has a note on the different nuance of ヘ. Do you think this entry is completely useless? If someone looks up に, what information should they get?

wokwokwok 4y ago

Language models show that language is predictive, not rule based. Every bit of research in the last 30 years shows this. If you want to ignore that and use rule based approaches, that’s fine, but you’re a) wrong and b) it doesn’t work. /shrug Of course people want rules, they think it’s a shortcut to learning. …but there is no shortcut to learning. You have to do the hard work.

yorwba 4y ago
> Language models show that language is predictive, not rule based. Training language models by making them predict missing words in a text is a trick to optimize their ability to extract information from text. That doesn't mean that making humans do the exact same task is the optimal way to learn a language. And it definitely doesn't mean there are no rules. Millenia of linguistic research have succeeded in identifying a lot of rules in every language. You don't have to learn them explicitly, but it speeds things up a bit. If you think there are no shortcuts to learning, you're either blind to the shortcuts you used, or you missed out on a lot. Like dictionaries. They just tell you what a word means in a language you can understand! That saves a lot of time compared to having to figure out everything from context. The Wiktionary entry for the particle に https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%AB#Particle https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%AB#Particle lists eight different uses and has a note on the different nuance of ヘ. Do you think this entry is completely useless? If someone looks up に, what information should they get?