3 ms·
Native speakers have an inventory on the order of 30,000 ~ 40,000 words, and it takes them 30 years for their vocab to reach its peak. I had an Anki deck I buil
by latentsea 2y ago
Native speakers have an inventory on the order of 30,000 ~ 40,000 words, and it takes them 30 years for their vocab to reach its peak. I had an Anki deck I built up over a 2 year period containing 17.5k vocab for Japanese and I would still frequently encounter words I didn't know.
If you don't actually know the meanings of the words, they may as well be random. What do you have to remember them by if you have no meaning to attach to them?
It's not even an insane feat. It's inhuman.
- Towaway69 2y agoInhuman might be going too far since it would imply Nigel Richards isn’t human. <End pedantic rant> Also if one takes character patterns (which words are) and attach other characteristics, such as number of occurrences of individual characters or use ascii numbering to convert to numbers, then these character patterns (aka words) might be simpler to memorise. Meaning is only necessary if you intend to speak the language.
- latentsea 2y agoWell he sure ain't a regular human. If you're applying mnemonics to remember things then the act of doing so also takes time and energy. The issue here is the volume of information in the stated time span.
- Towaway69 2y agoIt’s certainly an amazing feat and it demonstrates what humans can actually do if they set their minds to it. Just a pity that there are so many regular humans.
- latentsea 2y agoI don't think it really demonstrates what humans can do if they can put their mind to it. I think it demonstrates what a 1 in 8 billion type edge case looks like.
- brookst 2y agoYeah, likely an outlier for hardware acceleration, just like some people are insanely good at reconizing faces they saw once 20 years ago. That’s not cognitive load, that’s specialized parts of the brain performing far better than most people.
- Towaway69 2y agoA world where human intelligence made such rapid process as CPUs. Stuff of science fiction.
- Towaway69 2y agoImagine if that’s the norm though. I doubt very much we would be wondering how to get to Mars. Also Nigel Richards probably doesn’t spend much time watching Netflix or shopping on Amazon. Probably very much focussed on scrambling. A world where one in eight billion binge watches Netflix would truly be an interesting world!
- latentsea 2y agoApparently he doesn't own a computer. Imagine a world where none of us owned computers!