4 ms·

My language learning problem is slightly different and quite under-served because my motivation is not the most common one. I want to learn so that I can read/

by srean 1y ago

My language learning problem is slightly different and quite under-served because my motivation is not the most common one. I want to learn so that I can read/understand publications in mathematics in a foreign language, mostly Swedish, French, German. (*) For this exercise, the typical apps do not help much. (*) I would have liked to add Latin and Greek too but that's mostly a pipe dream. Reading old mathematicians and scholars I have realized something that runs quite counter to the common perception we have, especially in my country. That common perception is school kids, especially in mid and high school are overwhelmingly burdened by sheer volume of subject matter to learn at a very young age. But then I look at educated teenagers from 17th - 18th centuries, who went on to become mathematicians or scholars, they were so immensely well read at a very young age. I understand this is a biased sample, but many of these people, Newton, for example, were ordinary folks (socio-economically speaking) Hamilton (I concede that one cannot compare Hamilton with a typical modern teenager) was already quite fluent in thirteen languages in his pre-teens. Apart from the usual suspects, he knew Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi. This might sound atypical but this was not unheard of. One of the poets in my language was fluent in Hebrew, Greek, Italian, French, Latin, Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, English.

DyslexicAtheist 1y ago
what makes Latin difficult in your context? My focus isn't Math and fwiw found many very good, free, entry-level[1] self-study[2] books (Hans Orberg and others), and even Latin podcasts. There is even a fun Latin track on some of the popular language learning apps. [1] https://archive.org/details/conspectus-grammaticus-familia-romana https://archive.org/details/conspectus-grammaticus-familia-r... [2] https://latinitium.com/best-books-for-learning-latin/ https://latinitium.com/best-books-for-learning-latin/
- srean 1y ago
  Thanks for the links. As for difficulty, well, even English is not my first language. So Latin would be quite a stretch for me. What makes things more difficult (this is not specific to Latin) is that Maths, Physics has its own language. Domain specific words, such as curvature, torsion, divergence, curl, force, power, action, moment, momentum do not translate in a way that is linguistically obvious.
jwrallie 1y ago
That's quite different than what most folks are looking for when learning a new language, but I guess some techniques can apply just fine. You would have to take the lead find and prepare your own study material. Something like collecting phrases from these books, loading them into SRS, collecting youtube videos of natives discussing the material you are into, extracting the sound and listening several hours of it for immersion... That is basically the way I learn but focusing on different material. With LLMs, it is much easier to create your own study material nowadays, as you can ask to translate, break down and explain things as you go.
agentcoops 1y ago
I understand both your historical question and the more concrete practical one. Separating reading comprehension as a skill from all the other discrete functions of a language is very straight-forward [1] and, in fact, there are some good analog resources for this. For French: Dandberg and Tatham, French for Reading For German: Jannach, German for Reading Knowledge I've used both and swear they're magic, especially if you're trying to learn to read in a scientific domain that you're already a specialist in (versus literature). Once you've sort of "learned the game" it isn't very hard to do a similar process for other languages on your own. Then, my main recommendation is to take a text you're deeply familiar with in your native language or English that exists in X other language and just go ahead and start reading it with a dictionary. It starts slow, but progress is very very fast if you stick with it, especially compared to learning to speak or even just listen to a language. For life reasons, I've found myself having to learn Danish, so I'll let you know if I figure out any good resources for Scandinavian languages. [1] The only downside I've encountered is trying to later learn to speak a language I had been reading for a while where overcoming the sort of "fictitious phonetics" that existed in my head proved problematic.
- vidarh 1y ago
  My last year of German, I brought it up a grade by reading Faust in parallel in German and a century old Danish translation... I'm Norwegian, and the old Danish translation was a decent mid-point between Norwegian and German to let me get through the German without having to resort to the dictionary very often. I think, for Danish, if your German is decent, look to older, more formal Danish books you can also find in German, or maybe try to find work in both Danish and Low German / Plattdeutsch and see if it forms a good midpoint for you. Dutch might possibly also form a decent parallel - the combination of my Norwegian, German and English means I can slog my way through more formal Dutch reasonably well without ever having tried to learn it.
  - agentcoops 1y ago
    Thanks for the tips! It's really interesting going back to that point of indistinction in these languages where even the proximity to old English is so strong. I've been hoping to try and read some of the old sagas in the process, but that's probably a bit too far back -- I'll have to see if there are some good century old translations thereof, as you suggest. The phonetics, on the other hand, are presenting some challenges...
bawis 1y ago
Interesting, you are learning languages for math publications but you didn't include Russian ? unless of course you are native (or you are from ex soviet)
- srean 1y ago
  That's a great point because a lot of the maths literature I am interested in is actually in Russian (optimization, probability). Thankfully there is the "Translations of Mathematical Monographs" book series https://bookstore.ams.org/mmono https://bookstore.ams.org/mmono I had just resigned myself to the fact that I will probably never be able learn Russian. At an optimistic best, perhaps French and Swedish only, if at all.
vunderba 1y ago
Good luck! This kind of reminds me of how Bobby Fischer at a relatively young age learned Russian for the explicit purpose of being able to keep up with the best Chess manuals and periodicals - a great deal of which were coming out of the Soviet Union.
credit_guy 1y ago
I find your problem to be much easier than the problem faced by a typical language learner. Mathematics literature uses quite a small subset of a language, and in many languages math authors use a lot of equations, which are quite language agnostic. One way to tackle this problem is to just get started with an LLM. You ask ChatGPT for example, to translate for you, and then you try to figure out what word correspond to what word and keep going. After a while you will need the LLM help less and less. Who am I to tell you this? I only read math in my native language, and in French and English. But once I wanted to do some calculations using Gauss's Theorema Egregium, so, out of curiosity, I picked up both the English translation of Gauss's original publication, and the original Latin text. I was able to understand sufficient Latin to figure out what Gauss was saying and to find out that the English translation has a bug.
- srean 1y ago
  Great to know. Many here suggested LLMs. I have not tried them before for this problem. I assumed they wouldn't work well with old languages that do not dominate the web.

by srean 1y ago

DyslexicAtheist 1y ago

what makes Latin difficult in your context? My focus isn't Math and fwiw found many very good, free, entry-level[1] self-study[2] books (Hans Orberg and others), and even Latin podcasts. There is even a fun Latin track on some of the popular language learning apps. [1] https://archive.org/details/conspectus-grammaticus-familia-romana https://archive.org/details/conspectus-grammaticus-familia-r... [2] https://latinitium.com/best-books-for-learning-latin/ https://latinitium.com/best-books-for-learning-latin/

srean 1y ago
Thanks for the links. As for difficulty, well, even English is not my first language. So Latin would be quite a stretch for me. What makes things more difficult (this is not specific to Latin) is that Maths, Physics has its own language. Domain specific words, such as curvature, torsion, divergence, curl, force, power, action, moment, momentum do not translate in a way that is linguistically obvious.

jwrallie 1y ago

That's quite different than what most folks are looking for when learning a new language, but I guess some techniques can apply just fine. You would have to take the lead find and prepare your own study material. Something like collecting phrases from these books, loading them into SRS, collecting youtube videos of natives discussing the material you are into, extracting the sound and listening several hours of it for immersion... That is basically the way I learn but focusing on different material. With LLMs, it is much easier to create your own study material nowadays, as you can ask to translate, break down and explain things as you go.

agentcoops 1y ago

I understand both your historical question and the more concrete practical one. Separating reading comprehension as a skill from all the other discrete functions of a language is very straight-forward [1] and, in fact, there are some good analog resources for this. For French: Dandberg and Tatham, French for Reading For German: Jannach, German for Reading Knowledge I've used both and swear they're magic, especially if you're trying to learn to read in a scientific domain that you're already a specialist in (versus literature). Once you've sort of "learned the game" it isn't very hard to do a similar process for other languages on your own. Then, my main recommendation is to take a text you're deeply familiar with in your native language or English that exists in X other language and just go ahead and start reading it with a dictionary. It starts slow, but progress is very very fast if you stick with it, especially compared to learning to speak or even just listen to a language. For life reasons, I've found myself having to learn Danish, so I'll let you know if I figure out any good resources for Scandinavian languages. [1] The only downside I've encountered is trying to later learn to speak a language I had been reading for a while where overcoming the sort of "fictitious phonetics" that existed in my head proved problematic.

vidarh 1y ago
My last year of German, I brought it up a grade by reading Faust in parallel in German and a century old Danish translation... I'm Norwegian, and the old Danish translation was a decent mid-point between Norwegian and German to let me get through the German without having to resort to the dictionary very often. I think, for Danish, if your German is decent, look to older, more formal Danish books you can also find in German, or maybe try to find work in both Danish and Low German / Plattdeutsch and see if it forms a good midpoint for you. Dutch might possibly also form a decent parallel - the combination of my Norwegian, German and English means I can slog my way through more formal Dutch reasonably well without ever having tried to learn it.
- agentcoops 1y ago
  Thanks for the tips! It's really interesting going back to that point of indistinction in these languages where even the proximity to old English is so strong. I've been hoping to try and read some of the old sagas in the process, but that's probably a bit too far back -- I'll have to see if there are some good century old translations thereof, as you suggest. The phonetics, on the other hand, are presenting some challenges...

bawis 1y ago

Interesting, you are learning languages for math publications but you didn't include Russian ? unless of course you are native (or you are from ex soviet)

srean 1y ago
That's a great point because a lot of the maths literature I am interested in is actually in Russian (optimization, probability). Thankfully there is the "Translations of Mathematical Monographs" book series https://bookstore.ams.org/mmono https://bookstore.ams.org/mmono I had just resigned myself to the fact that I will probably never be able learn Russian. At an optimistic best, perhaps French and Swedish only, if at all.

vunderba 1y ago

Good luck! This kind of reminds me of how Bobby Fischer at a relatively young age learned Russian for the explicit purpose of being able to keep up with the best Chess manuals and periodicals - a great deal of which were coming out of the Soviet Union.

credit_guy 1y ago

I find your problem to be much easier than the problem faced by a typical language learner. Mathematics literature uses quite a small subset of a language, and in many languages math authors use a lot of equations, which are quite language agnostic. One way to tackle this problem is to just get started with an LLM. You ask ChatGPT for example, to translate for you, and then you try to figure out what word correspond to what word and keep going. After a while you will need the LLM help less and less. Who am I to tell you this? I only read math in my native language, and in French and English. But once I wanted to do some calculations using Gauss's Theorema Egregium, so, out of curiosity, I picked up both the English translation of Gauss's original publication, and the original Latin text. I was able to understand sufficient Latin to figure out what Gauss was saying and to find out that the English translation has a bug.

srean 1y ago
Great to know. Many here suggested LLMs. I have not tried them before for this problem. I assumed they wouldn't work well with old languages that do not dominate the web.