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>> There's just so much the brain can absorb in a short time. Daniel Tammet learned Icelandic in one week. I would be interested to see what backs your claim t

>> There's just so much the brain can absorb in a short time. Daniel Tammet learned Icelandic in one week. I would be interested to see what backs your claim that the brain can only absorb so much in a short time. I think both you and the GP are projecting YOUR limitations onto everyone else. The brain can and does absorb a massive amount of information each and every day. Training the conscious mind to direct that natural ability of the brain is something that is orthogonal to the brains capabilities. Being an Opera Singer (dedicated and focused) probably helps with that task.

grepherder 14y ago
>> Daniel Tammet learned Icelandic in one week. Your point? Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. And some people have eidetic memory. There is little relevance unless we find a method to recreate these traits in "normal" people, there is by no means any evidence that every human has latent super powers. As a normal person having nevertheless high language aptitude, I reached C1 or very close to C1 in about 6-7 months. I say close to C1 despite reaching C1 level in a test, because I don't think it's fair to claim you have every capability for C1 as described by CEFR just because you passed a 4-hour test, in certain ways you just cheat by learning for the test. Anyway, even that was with a very generous amount of immersion, about a minimum of 8 hours a day including long hours of grammar practice. Still, despite praises from native speakers, at that time I wouldn't assert that I was fluent in speech or writing. Now to claim you can be "fluent" in 5 months just by studying 30-60 minutes a day is a bit outrageous. I can't tell you how much our brain can really "absorb" and "retain" in one day, but there are very real limits in language acquisition after a certain age. I won't say it's impossible, but to realize your claims, we definitely need a magic pill or surgical operation / cybernetics.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- chastened 14y ago
  Please accept my apology for disagreeing with you. I have only recently become aware of the rules here and I now understand that disagreement is frowned upon and can lead to being banned.
ekianjo 14y ago
I guess you have never read anything about the brain works. The brain is not an organ to memorize, but an organ to forget. It's a filter for information. You won't remember in 30 minutes a series of 10 numbers you are asked to remember by heart, unless you are exposed to it many, many times. Memory works by repetition. That should be a good observation enough to say the brain is not very good at remembering things, since you need to feed it again and again the same information for it to remember it for a while. Daniel Tammet is not an ordinary person. You are projecting HIS extraordinary capabilities onto everyone else, and you can see that 99.999999 % of the population is NOT anything like Tammet. So your point does not stand.
- chastened 14y ago
  You are right, it's not my place to comment here. Please accept my apology for disagreeing with you.
v0cab 14y ago
Did Daniel Tammet really learn Icelandic in a week? He studied for a particular interview about his experience learning Icelandic. I don't know how well he spoke in that interview, or if he could cope in situations which weren't interviews about what he thinks of Iceland/Icelandic and his studying method.
v0cab 14y ago
Did Daniel Tammet really learn Icelandic in a week? He studied for a particular interview about his experience learning Icelandic. I don't know how well he spoke in that interview, or if he could cope in situations which weren't interviews about what he thinks of Iceland/Icelandic and his studying method.
cowardnews 14y ago
I had a long reply to your question, but my account has been banned again. Here is my last post to this site. -- It depends what you mean by 'learn Icelandic'. At the end of a week he spoke at probably a grade school level, but with less vocabulary than a grade school child. I saw the documentary of his progress, and he did indeed speak with other Icelanders outside of the interview setting, and he could communicate with them. Again, from the subtitles, it seemed he was speaking at a grade school level. There are other people who have achieved similar levels in very short periods of time who are not Savants or Aspies. Dan Lee Dimke learned Mandarin Chinese to about the same level in 11 days. Powell Janulus began learning languages at the age of 18, started with Pakistani, then went on to learn 40 other languages and was a certified translator in 28 of them at the age of 38. HE wasn't autistic or even particularly intelligent in the academic sense. He developed his own phonetic alphabet based on the mouth movements needed to make a sound, and wrote his target language in his own alphabet. I used to know many more, but haven't visited the subject for some time now, so their names presently escape me.

grepherder 14y ago

>> Daniel Tammet learned Icelandic in one week. Your point? Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. And some people have eidetic memory. There is little relevance unless we find a method to recreate these traits in "normal" people, there is by no means any evidence that every human has latent super powers. As a normal person having nevertheless high language aptitude, I reached C1 or very close to C1 in about 6-7 months. I say close to C1 despite reaching C1 level in a test, because I don't think it's fair to claim you have every capability for C1 as described by CEFR just because you passed a 4-hour test, in certain ways you just cheat by learning for the test. Anyway, even that was with a very generous amount of immersion, about a minimum of 8 hours a day including long hours of grammar practice. Still, despite praises from native speakers, at that time I wouldn't assert that I was fluent in speech or writing. Now to claim you can be "fluent" in 5 months just by studying 30-60 minutes a day is a bit outrageous. I can't tell you how much our brain can really "absorb" and "retain" in one day, but there are very real limits in language acquisition after a certain age. I won't say it's impossible, but to realize your claims, we definitely need a magic pill or surgical operation / cybernetics.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
chastened 14y ago
Please accept my apology for disagreeing with you. I have only recently become aware of the rules here and I now understand that disagreement is frowned upon and can lead to being banned.

ekianjo 14y ago

I guess you have never read anything about the brain works. The brain is not an organ to memorize, but an organ to forget. It's a filter for information. You won't remember in 30 minutes a series of 10 numbers you are asked to remember by heart, unless you are exposed to it many, many times. Memory works by repetition. That should be a good observation enough to say the brain is not very good at remembering things, since you need to feed it again and again the same information for it to remember it for a while. Daniel Tammet is not an ordinary person. You are projecting HIS extraordinary capabilities onto everyone else, and you can see that 99.999999 % of the population is NOT anything like Tammet. So your point does not stand.

chastened 14y ago
You are right, it's not my place to comment here. Please accept my apology for disagreeing with you.

v0cab 14y ago

Did Daniel Tammet really learn Icelandic in a week? He studied for a particular interview about his experience learning Icelandic. I don't know how well he spoke in that interview, or if he could cope in situations which weren't interviews about what he thinks of Iceland/Icelandic and his studying method.

v0cab 14y ago

cowardnews 14y ago

I had a long reply to your question, but my account has been banned again. Here is my last post to this site. -- It depends what you mean by 'learn Icelandic'. At the end of a week he spoke at probably a grade school level, but with less vocabulary than a grade school child. I saw the documentary of his progress, and he did indeed speak with other Icelanders outside of the interview setting, and he could communicate with them. Again, from the subtitles, it seemed he was speaking at a grade school level. There are other people who have achieved similar levels in very short periods of time who are not Savants or Aspies. Dan Lee Dimke learned Mandarin Chinese to about the same level in 11 days. Powell Janulus began learning languages at the age of 18, started with Pakistani, then went on to learn 40 other languages and was a certified translator in 28 of them at the age of 38. HE wasn't autistic or even particularly intelligent in the academic sense. He developed his own phonetic alphabet based on the mouth movements needed to make a sound, and wrote his target language in his own alphabet. I used to know many more, but haven't visited the subject for some time now, so their names presently escape me.