4 ms·

Much as this sounds amazing, languages are pretty uniform once you know the basics much as once you get the basics of programming, your knowledge is portable ac

by bwarp 15y ago

Much as this sounds amazing, languages are pretty uniform once you know the basics much as once you get the basics of programming, your knowledge is portable across other languages. The majority of a language is working out how the basic structures apply and learning local variations and nuances. I'd be more impressed if he had some eastern languages which don't follow the usual structures. The languages he has learned are all similarly structured. Hebrew is possibly an exception. The BBC are also notoriously impressed with anything that people can do if it's a slow news day.

heretohelp 15y ago
I learned Hebrew when I was much younger, I'm no longer even remotely functional in it but I can tell you that it has a lot of patterns that can be carried over from other western languages. The primary novelty in it would be the K-T-B [1] vocab patterns and the occasional quaint idiom. [1] K-T-B referring to how nouns/verbs with the consonants K, T, and B in them tend to refer to libraries, books, or reading. This is true in both Hebrew and Arabic. IIRC, Aramaic shares the same families of concepts but isn't as directly portable like Arabic and Hebrew. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-T-B http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-T-B
- bwarp 15y ago
  Thanks for this - very interesting!
  - heretohelp 15y ago
    If you think that's cool, imagine how easy vocabulary is in Hebrew or Arabic once you know the patterns. The verb/noun/adverb patterns tend to be pretty consistent, so if you know the noun for "book", you can just apply the verb pattern to get "read". This can be carried over to most such concept-families that follow this pattern. Note: not as applicable to newer words or words taken from the West. Hebrew has a lot of obvious English ports. I find middle-eastern languages pretty fascinating in general. It's my dream to spend time with ancient Levantine-Arabic speaking tribes and learn the tongue from them. The idioms in traditionally Arabic-speaking cultures are fascinating. There's a reason the intellectuals of yore, such as Thomas Jefferson, considered Arabic to be one the most artful and elegant languages in terms of expression and structure. A lot of people like to talk about musical talent ports over very well for programming ability. I'd like to think my obsession with languages has done similar things for my coding.
darklajid 15y ago
I disagree, but from a gut feeling. Frankly, I've never been good at languages. English is the one single language I learned and feel comfortable with, everything else failed (most notably I tried several times to learn Italian, now I'm in Israel and start to doubt if I'll ever have a conversation in Hebrew). Maybe you are right about emerging patterns, and in fact that is exactly what the guy claims in the BBC video at the end: It becomes easier the more languages you learn. But still, I'm honestly impressed by speaking a large amount of languages fluently (i.e. no stuttering, freely, without a hard accent - and without starting to mix languages due to context switches). "All similarly structured": I guess I have to take your word for it. Coming from Germany I haven't found a language that feels like a good match so far (disclaimer applies again of course: I suck at languages). To me, Russian and Dutch/Afrikaans kind of don't mix. And the final, most impressive feat for me is: Handling the conflicts, not the similarities. A chair - does it have a gender in the language at hand? Which one? What are the consequences? Are you talking to a male or female person? Does this change your sentence? What are the languages ~basic~ irregularities (think numbering, for example). Some of these examples are things that I'd imagine being hard learning German. Some are issues that I have with learning Hebrew. I'm impressed.
heyitsnick 15y ago
It is impressive; he won the prize for for most prolific young polyglot in the country. There are very few in the world at this age who can speak 10+ languages. Are you speaking from authority as a polyglot yourself? Because I haven't heard this opinion before. The uniformity does ease the burden slightly of learning a language but it's a small role in achieving fluency. I think you could go from zero to having full command of the Spanish grammar in a couple of weeks. I did it self taught in a month or two with a Michel Thomas CDs in a single grammar thin book. If you have the mind for it, learning language structure of a Romance or Germanic language is not too much of a challenge. What then takes _years_ is vocabulary acquisition, comprehension, pronunciation, idiomatic usage, and the fast application of the grammar you've learned. For me, what took a long time was training my brain to think fast enough that I could decode the target language fast enough to hold fluent conversation and, later, get my brain fast enough thinking in the target language. This is hardly "learning local variations and nuances", it is what takes up 90%+ of reaching a "fluency" and it's something every language learner must go through, whether they already speak 1 or 8 languages. I am starting learning German, and i'm going through the same process as with Spanish. It's really not hard to laern the principals of the language, the sentence structure and verbal agreement, gender etc. But _using it at a natural speed_ so you can conversion in German - that's a mammoth job and takes months or years. Perhaps your programming anology holds, but reaching a "fluency" means you can go hours or days of coding without ever reaching for a reference document. Sure took me a long time to get there.
- bwarp 15y ago
  It does take years. The brain is very pliable and easy to teach the younger you are so it depends on when you start. I'm not much of a polyglot myself: English, French, Swiss-German, Afrikaans (mainly the insults!) but my sister can speak 8 languages fluently (she's a professional translator) and the basis of my comment is on her observations of language.

by bwarp 15y ago

heretohelp 15y ago

I learned Hebrew when I was much younger, I'm no longer even remotely functional in it but I can tell you that it has a lot of patterns that can be carried over from other western languages. The primary novelty in it would be the K-T-B [1] vocab patterns and the occasional quaint idiom. [1] K-T-B referring to how nouns/verbs with the consonants K, T, and B in them tend to refer to libraries, books, or reading. This is true in both Hebrew and Arabic. IIRC, Aramaic shares the same families of concepts but isn't as directly portable like Arabic and Hebrew. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-T-B http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-T-B

bwarp 15y ago
Thanks for this - very interesting!
- heretohelp 15y ago
  If you think that's cool, imagine how easy vocabulary is in Hebrew or Arabic once you know the patterns. The verb/noun/adverb patterns tend to be pretty consistent, so if you know the noun for "book", you can just apply the verb pattern to get "read". This can be carried over to most such concept-families that follow this pattern. Note: not as applicable to newer words or words taken from the West. Hebrew has a lot of obvious English ports. I find middle-eastern languages pretty fascinating in general. It's my dream to spend time with ancient Levantine-Arabic speaking tribes and learn the tongue from them. The idioms in traditionally Arabic-speaking cultures are fascinating. There's a reason the intellectuals of yore, such as Thomas Jefferson, considered Arabic to be one the most artful and elegant languages in terms of expression and structure. A lot of people like to talk about musical talent ports over very well for programming ability. I'd like to think my obsession with languages has done similar things for my coding.

darklajid 15y ago

I disagree, but from a gut feeling. Frankly, I've never been good at languages. English is the one single language I learned and feel comfortable with, everything else failed (most notably I tried several times to learn Italian, now I'm in Israel and start to doubt if I'll ever have a conversation in Hebrew). Maybe you are right about emerging patterns, and in fact that is exactly what the guy claims in the BBC video at the end: It becomes easier the more languages you learn. But still, I'm honestly impressed by speaking a large amount of languages fluently (i.e. no stuttering, freely, without a hard accent - and without starting to mix languages due to context switches). "All similarly structured": I guess I have to take your word for it. Coming from Germany I haven't found a language that feels like a good match so far (disclaimer applies again of course: I suck at languages). To me, Russian and Dutch/Afrikaans kind of don't mix. And the final, most impressive feat for me is: Handling the conflicts, not the similarities. A chair - does it have a gender in the language at hand? Which one? What are the consequences? Are you talking to a male or female person? Does this change your sentence? What are the languages ~basic~ irregularities (think numbering, for example). Some of these examples are things that I'd imagine being hard learning German. Some are issues that I have with learning Hebrew. I'm impressed.

heyitsnick 15y ago

It is impressive; he won the prize for for most prolific young polyglot in the country. There are very few in the world at this age who can speak 10+ languages. Are you speaking from authority as a polyglot yourself? Because I haven't heard this opinion before. The uniformity does ease the burden slightly of learning a language but it's a small role in achieving fluency. I think you could go from zero to having full command of the Spanish grammar in a couple of weeks. I did it self taught in a month or two with a Michel Thomas CDs in a single grammar thin book. If you have the mind for it, learning language structure of a Romance or Germanic language is not too much of a challenge. What then takes _years_ is vocabulary acquisition, comprehension, pronunciation, idiomatic usage, and the fast application of the grammar you've learned. For me, what took a long time was training my brain to think fast enough that I could decode the target language fast enough to hold fluent conversation and, later, get my brain fast enough thinking in the target language. This is hardly "learning local variations and nuances", it is what takes up 90%+ of reaching a "fluency" and it's something every language learner must go through, whether they already speak 1 or 8 languages. I am starting learning German, and i'm going through the same process as with Spanish. It's really not hard to laern the principals of the language, the sentence structure and verbal agreement, gender etc. But _using it at a natural speed_ so you can conversion in German - that's a mammoth job and takes months or years. Perhaps your programming anology holds, but reaching a "fluency" means you can go hours or days of coding without ever reaching for a reference document. Sure took me a long time to get there.

bwarp 15y ago
It does take years. The brain is very pliable and easy to teach the younger you are so it depends on when you start. I'm not much of a polyglot myself: English, French, Swiss-German, Afrikaans (mainly the insults!) but my sister can speak 8 languages fluently (she's a professional translator) and the basis of my comment is on her observations of language.