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> It’s the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone. Those are not opposite activities. Drillin

• nickburns 2y ago
  > A young child has basically nothing but figuring out what's going around him Right—not simply memorizing what's happening around them. Those are fundamentally different activies. That is the gist of the parent comment's point. They've also acknowledged expressly that rote memorization techniques are "valuable" and "have a place."
• kqr 2y ago
  > That's a bad argument: the life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult. Also it takes a surprisingly long time for children to learn language. I used to think it sorta-kinda happened over a year or two, but having children myself revealed how wrong I was. I have written up a fairly hefty dictionary of words they mispronounce or even just invent on their own because they don't know the one in their native tongue. My oldest rarely contributes individual words to this dictionary anymore, but he still improvises expressions and idioms.
  • nickburns 2y ago
    > I have written up a fairly hefty dictionary of words they mispronounce or even just invent on their own because they don't know the one in their native tongue. Ah, beautiful little displays of an attempt to understand, not merely memorize.
    • doubled112 2y ago
      Sometimes those made up words were way more fun than the correct ones. I could usually see why my little ones combined them that way.
      • WalterBright 2y ago
        I remember one where the kid was asked, "do you want some half-and-half?" "No, I want whole and whole!"
    • coldtea 2y ago
      Understanding coming from years of exposure leading to memorizing the whole low hanging words of a language and their meaning. They don't merely understand the words as a concept, they also remember the word sounds attached to the associated concept (and later have to remember the spelling of those words as well). All the while commiting to memory all kinds of facts about the world, starting from their name and the ABC. Grammar might come closer to exposure-grasping a generalized concept -- then again nobody said understanding concepts is not hugely important, or is done by memorization alone: just that memorization goes hand in hand, and is hugely important in being effective in being able to use and think with not just the concepts but also the relevant facts related to them).
  • bunderbunder 2y ago
    An anecdote I once heard provided in support of this point in a lecture: there are aspects of Spanish grammar that native speakers typically don't grasp until their teenage years. I suspect that, if one were to sit down and count hours of practice so that we could do a better apples-to-apples comparison, we'd find that children learn languages at a glacial pace compared to adults. And the rest is pure selection bias.
    • kqr 2y ago
      The one thing children can learn that adults generally cannot is native pronounciation. If that is included in language proficiency, then adults take an infinite amount of time to learn!
      • bunderbunder 2y ago
        True, but I really dislike the amount of focus people put on that. With the right techniques, it's not particularly difficult for an adult to develop decently good pronunciation that allows them to be comfortably understood. And placing the bar for having learned a language to a high level of proficiency at "able to hide evidence of where they were born from native speakers" smacks of internalized xenophobia. I also read in a second language acquisition textbook a while back (so, decent chance of being out of date, also decent chance of my memory of what I read being less-than-perfect) that the strongest predictor of how native-like an accent someone develops isn't actually the age at which they started learning the language, it's the lag between when they started learning it and when they started socially integrating into a community of native speakers. And it happens to be the case that, for all sorts of practical reasons, there's a strong correlation between this lag period and age. Which isn't to say that there's nothing to the critical period hypothesis - there is - but when we're talking about children it's difficult-to-impossible to root out selection bias effectively enough to permit even a convincing stab at partial identification of causal effects. Which creates a risky situation for the purposes of drawing firm conclusions, because our prejudices love to helpfully answer the questions that science won't. In grad school I had a social science textbook that dubbed these kind of questions "Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions" in the first chapter, and in subsequent chapters simply described them as "FUQ'd".
• Izkata 2y ago
  > Also good luck learning to read Chinese or Japanese without rote learning a few hundred characters. Even native speakers learn them by repetition. I've tried this for years with Japanese kanji and never really got very far. Just didn't work well, they largely were just a big blob of lines. Then I found an Android app (Kanji Study) that mixes this in with informational screens that break down kanji into radicals and puts them alongside a bunch of multi-kanji words and uses them in sentences so we can see them in context, and it's actually been working.
  • hosh 2y ago
    Learning to read Chinese is done by learning to write Chinese. The strict (but structured) stroke order while writing becomes part of muscle memory, and in turn, becomes a kind of kinesthetic mnemonic device while reading.
    • Izkata 2y ago
      The app I mentioned has that too, but stepping back and giving context helps me more. For example, 語 being composed of 言, 五, and 口 reduces it down to 3 things instead of 14 strokes. This is an easy one since the parts are distinct, but plenty aren't nearly as obvious, like the left side of 教
• watwut 2y ago
  Vocabulary flashcards are not all that efficient way to start being able to read/listen/speak. They teach you translation rather then meaning directly, you don't get context or the "context" is super repetitive sentence and so on. And plus, general recommendation is to learn words elsewhere and just put them into anki to not forget. Some people like it, but it is not the only or the most recommended way to learn speak and write.
• bunderbunder 2y ago
  > Drilling vocabulary flashcard is the most efficient way to start being able to read/listen/speak This isn't actually a settled matter. I did a literature dive a while back and found that drilling vocabulary flashcards shows the highest benefit on artificial recall tasks (like multiple choice tests), and over relatively short time scales (days to weeks). Studies that looked at longer time scales (months to years) and more organic tasks generally showed mixed results. Which I generally interpret as a sign that the literature in question is highly susceptible to the file drawer effect. And that in turn suggests that the magnitude of flashcarding's value for this kind of thing has a lot to do with your goals. In a nutshell, are you more interested on the science on how to develop communicative proficiency over the long run, or are you more interested on the science on how to get a good grade in class? I'm studying Chinese right now, and I do use flashcards, but it's not because I believe it's the best way, per se. It's because it's a convenient option for reviewing characters and words that don't appear often in the reading material I have. When they do appear often in my reading material, I find (anecdotally) that it takes a lot fewer organic repetitions to get the character or word to stick in my head than it does with flashcard repetitions. It's also worth mentioning there's no particular reason to assume Chinese and Japanese schools are any less likely than schools elsewhere in the world to cling to inefficient pedagogical techniques out of a sense of tradition. So one can't necessarily assume that the way they are doing it is the way they ought to be doing it.
• zharknado 2y ago
  > and it's not even clear from research that output (speaking and writing) is useful at all for learning. Only if your goals don’t include being able to speak or write. > You can’t be serious advocating “just go read stuff” True, not “just.” And Chinese is particularly tricky because the ideograms convey little to no phonetic information. Even so, almost any activity I can imagine seems superior to traditional flashcards. Photo flashcards (vs. translation), listening along to highlighted text or closed captions, deciphering street signs or memes, even the written drills you mentioned. (Or better, “write 5 phrases that all start with character X”). Our brains crave meaning, and flashcards offer very little of it. > even native speakers learn them by repetition No argument there, most everything is learned by repetition, but I’m interested in context. Native speakers already know the verbal form of most words they’re learning to write, even in Chinese. I’d argue the meaning is stronger. > life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult True. The scale of their learning tasks are much bigger than ours. They have to learn that they exist, that their family exists, that they can vocalize, that language is a thing, that they want and need things, and that they can get them by communicating. > An adult has much less time for that I think this is a good entry point to the core of the issue for me—-small children don’t “set aside time to learn,” they just learn. You and I do this also, though it’s less novel and flexible and therefore maybe less salient. I think we place too much value on structured or synthetic learning as “real” learning when in fact it’s often extremely inefficient compared to our natural learning tendencies. There’s a spectrum of structure, starting with what we choose to pay attention to, to an open-ended “study time,” to guided classroom activities, to timed math drills. Flashcards are at the extreme reductivist end of that spectrum. I suspect we like them because they’re easy to understand, uniform, predictable, and convenient to create and use. Creating more effective learning opportunities and supports is substantially harder, but generally worthwhile IMO.