3 ms·

I would suggest to drop "Amateur" from the title in the sense that languages are useful both professionally and privately - you never know in what language your

by jll29 2y ago

I would suggest to drop "Amateur" from the title in the sense that languages are useful both professionally and privately - you never know in what language your next deal will be signed, your next networking acqaintance bumps into you to make you the next job offer etc. Besides, as a professional (computational) linguist, I have met many trained/professional linguists that know only one language - typically English - well - I think that is professionally totally unacceptable when your mission is to study language (in abstract, intentionally without article here => linguistics); the way a language structures the world for you in the way its vocab influences the way you think in concepts (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, AKA linguistic relativity => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity ) is something that you should at least occasionally step out of, so that you don't take it for granted, and for that, you need to master a second language.

troad 2y ago
> Besides, as a professional (computational) linguist, I have met many trained/professional linguists that know only one language - typically English - well - I think that is professionally totally unacceptable when your mission is to study language (in abstract, intentionally without article here => linguistics); the way a language structures the world for you in the way its vocab influences the way you think in concepts (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, AKA linguistic relativity => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity ) is something that you should at least occasionally step out of, so that you don't take it for granted, and for that, you need to master a second language. As a trained (and formerly professional) linguist, I vehemently disagree. (1) Linguistics, as you seem to allude to, is the study of language as a phenomenon, not the study of languages. It includes fields like the study of acoustics (the intersection of the physics of sound and the biology of the ear / vocal cords), and neurolinguistics (the neuroscience of language) that have nothing to do with sociolinguistics or second language acquisition. [0] (2) The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its strong formulation is pseudoscience, and is rejected as such by the academic mainstream of linguistics. Journalists love it because it flatters them in their role as word-smiths, so there is sadly no end to the ink being spilled over it. (3) Most crucially, any linguist worth their salt can work in multiple languages without necessarily speaking them. I can understand the sandhi phenomenon in Vedic Sanskrit without speaking Sanskrit, because that's sort of the job of a linguist? People can talk about 'sun and moon letters' in Arabic, and I can go - cool, assimilation of coronal consonants. I don't need to weep over Arabic poetry before realising this, this is just the basic tradecraft of a linguist. Same as I can understand lambda functions as a concept, without needing to know how they're implemented in <insert programming language here>. In my experience, linguists enjoy other languages and often speak them, as I do, but it's rather ignorant to assert it's "professionally totally unacceptable" for, say, a neurolinguist to be monolingual. It suggests an exceedingly narrow view of the field. [0] Here's a fun example of neurolinguistics. Consider the sentence 'I drinks a tall.' Approx 100-200 ms after reading this, an electrical signal (simplifying for clarity) fired off in your left frontal lobe, near the section of your brain called Broca's area. That signal, the Early Left Anterior Negativity (ELAN), is associated with syntactic violations (in this case, the use of 'tall' without an accompanying noun). Approx. 300-500 ms after reading this sentence, a second impulse, the Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) fired off in the same area of your brain. This impulse is associated with morphological violations (in this case, the use of 'I drinks' rather than the expected 'I drink'). If I said 'He drinks a tall', you'd just get the ELAN, but no LAN. If I said 'I drinks a tall glass of water.', you'd get the LAN but no ELAN. Fascinatingly, you haven't actually parsed the meaning of the sentence at the time either of these fired - that comes later, at around 600 ms (the P600 signal, in a different part of the brain). This kind of work is very much the domain of linguistics, and clearly not contingent on learning lots and lots of languages. (Enjoyable though that may be!)
ajuc 2y ago
> the way a language structures the world for you in the way its vocab influences the way you think in concepts You can even see it in this article :) "Learn only 4 tenses. Past for one time events, past continuous, present, future. These are enough to go by and explain yourself." Some lanuages don't even have 4 tenses. Polish has 3. And Past Continuous isn't a thing, we have aspects instead. BTW I don't intend to criticize the author, they're far more of a polyglot than I am (I only speak 4 languages, and only 2 well). It's just funny how we take some things for granted.
- SamBam 2y ago
  I think that the author's intent can be meaningful understood without the implication that they don't know about other languages. I think a reasonable interpretation of the statement is "learn how to use verbs such that you can talk about doing something now, doing something in the future, having done something and continuing to do it, and having some something and since stopped doing it." In every language humans are capable of expressing those distinct concepts. But boy, that was an awful lot wordier than the way the author put it.
- enkid 2y ago
  Some languages are tenseless.
- betaby 2y ago
  > Polish has 3. Native speakers of slavic languages tend to believe that there are three tenses. Try asking that someone who learned it as a second language and you'll realize that native french/english speakers think that slavic languages have 6+ tenses to them. Aspekt dokonany i niedokonany basically doubles number of tenses.
  - XajniN 2y ago
    Serbo-Croatian has 4 past tenses, plus the aspect that applies to two of them.
    - ajuc 2y ago
mycologos 2y ago
> I would suggest to drop "Amateur" from the title in the sense that languages are useful both professionally and privately - you never know in what language your next deal will be signed, your next networking acqaintance bumps into you to make you the next job offer etc I agree that knowing more languages can only help, but it's an awfully large time investment for that hypothetical benefit. Unless you're moving to a place or in love with a person that speaks it, learning a language seems pretty far down the list of time-efficient ways to improve your "professional and private" life. That's not to say people shouldn't pursue it, as hobbies go it seems like an edifying one, but unless you think it's fun, it doesn't seem very worth it.

by jll29 2y ago

troad 2y ago

> Besides, as a professional (computational) linguist, I have met many trained/professional linguists that know only one language - typically English - well - I think that is professionally totally unacceptable when your mission is to study language (in abstract, intentionally without article here => linguistics); the way a language structures the world for you in the way its vocab influences the way you think in concepts (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, AKA linguistic relativity => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity ) is something that you should at least occasionally step out of, so that you don't take it for granted, and for that, you need to master a second language. As a trained (and formerly professional) linguist, I vehemently disagree. (1) Linguistics, as you seem to allude to, is the study of language as a phenomenon, not the study of languages. It includes fields like the study of acoustics (the intersection of the physics of sound and the biology of the ear / vocal cords), and neurolinguistics (the neuroscience of language) that have nothing to do with sociolinguistics or second language acquisition. [0] (2) The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its strong formulation is pseudoscience, and is rejected as such by the academic mainstream of linguistics. Journalists love it because it flatters them in their role as word-smiths, so there is sadly no end to the ink being spilled over it. (3) Most crucially, any linguist worth their salt can work in multiple languages without necessarily speaking them. I can understand the sandhi phenomenon in Vedic Sanskrit without speaking Sanskrit, because that's sort of the job of a linguist? People can talk about 'sun and moon letters' in Arabic, and I can go - cool, assimilation of coronal consonants. I don't need to weep over Arabic poetry before realising this, this is just the basic tradecraft of a linguist. Same as I can understand lambda functions as a concept, without needing to know how they're implemented in <insert programming language here>. In my experience, linguists enjoy other languages and often speak them, as I do, but it's rather ignorant to assert it's "professionally totally unacceptable" for, say, a neurolinguist to be monolingual. It suggests an exceedingly narrow view of the field. [0] Here's a fun example of neurolinguistics. Consider the sentence 'I drinks a tall.' Approx 100-200 ms after reading this, an electrical signal (simplifying for clarity) fired off in your left frontal lobe, near the section of your brain called Broca's area. That signal, the Early Left Anterior Negativity (ELAN), is associated with syntactic violations (in this case, the use of 'tall' without an accompanying noun). Approx. 300-500 ms after reading this sentence, a second impulse, the Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) fired off in the same area of your brain. This impulse is associated with morphological violations (in this case, the use of 'I drinks' rather than the expected 'I drink'). If I said 'He drinks a tall', you'd just get the ELAN, but no LAN. If I said 'I drinks a tall glass of water.', you'd get the LAN but no ELAN. Fascinatingly, you haven't actually parsed the meaning of the sentence at the time either of these fired - that comes later, at around 600 ms (the P600 signal, in a different part of the brain). This kind of work is very much the domain of linguistics, and clearly not contingent on learning lots and lots of languages. (Enjoyable though that may be!)

ajuc 2y ago

> the way a language structures the world for you in the way its vocab influences the way you think in concepts You can even see it in this article :) "Learn only 4 tenses. Past for one time events, past continuous, present, future. These are enough to go by and explain yourself." Some lanuages don't even have 4 tenses. Polish has 3. And Past Continuous isn't a thing, we have aspects instead. BTW I don't intend to criticize the author, they're far more of a polyglot than I am (I only speak 4 languages, and only 2 well). It's just funny how we take some things for granted.

SamBam 2y ago
I think that the author's intent can be meaningful understood without the implication that they don't know about other languages. I think a reasonable interpretation of the statement is "learn how to use verbs such that you can talk about doing something now, doing something in the future, having done something and continuing to do it, and having some something and since stopped doing it." In every language humans are capable of expressing those distinct concepts. But boy, that was an awful lot wordier than the way the author put it.
enkid 2y ago
Some languages are tenseless.
betaby 2y ago
> Polish has 3. Native speakers of slavic languages tend to believe that there are three tenses. Try asking that someone who learned it as a second language and you'll realize that native french/english speakers think that slavic languages have 6+ tenses to them. Aspekt dokonany i niedokonany basically doubles number of tenses.
- XajniN 2y ago
  Serbo-Croatian has 4 past tenses, plus the aspect that applies to two of them.
  - ajuc 2y ago

mycologos 2y ago

> I would suggest to drop "Amateur" from the title in the sense that languages are useful both professionally and privately - you never know in what language your next deal will be signed, your next networking acqaintance bumps into you to make you the next job offer etc I agree that knowing more languages can only help, but it's an awfully large time investment for that hypothetical benefit. Unless you're moving to a place or in love with a person that speaks it, learning a language seems pretty far down the list of time-efficient ways to improve your "professional and private" life. That's not to say people shouldn't pursue it, as hobbies go it seems like an edifying one, but unless you think it's fun, it doesn't seem very worth it.