Pinker’s The Language Instinct

I’ve been listening to Pinker’s The Language Instinct on the way to and from work. I can only handle about 30min at a time, but I’m very happy with what I’ve been getting out of it. My head has been filled with ideas about language and the brain.

Pinker’s writing is fantastic. He has a rare gift for distilling a complex field into laymen’s terms. That’s not to say that he dumbs down the material in any way. Quite to the contrary, I find that Pinker’s arguments and explanations are expressed with a depth and clarity that does more for bringing a person new to the field up to speed than piles of research journal ever could.

I’m particularly impressed with how Pinker evokes genetics and physics to help him with his arguments. I’ve several times needed to stop the recording so I can think through a tangent idea spawned by his book. For example, this evening I was listening to his explanation of how the “language organ” must be very similarly wired between individuals because otherwise the genetic crossover between individuals with different “plans” for the organ would be catastrophic. This leads me to think of punctuated equilibrium and how the “geometry” of the population can have an effect on evolution… Literally each chapter of his book has spawned at least one original research idea for me.

I look forward to reading his books on other topics as well. He seems to have written quite a bit about morality… This is an area I neither know nor honestly really care about very much, but Pinker so impresses me that perhaps I’ll give some of his other work a try, if only to see what could have interested him in it.

So, if you’re interested in the workings of language in the mind, Pinker’s The Language Instinct is a great place to start.

The Lomb Method

In a previous post I made some recommendations from among the established commercial language learning methods such as Berlitz, Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, and a few course books. Over the past year I have branched out to experiment with the methods of various on-line linguaphile gurus, the likes of Piotr Wozniak, Tim Ferris, Mike Campbell, Prof Arguelles, and Katzumoto — all of whom are worth checking out. But just today I stumbled across the method of polyglot and simultaneous interpreter Kató Lomb, as explained in her book “This is How I Learn Languages”. I found Lomb’s book absolutely captivating. She makes a number of excellent points. Although her book is by no means a one-stop-shop for polyglottery, it is definitely worth a read for those aspiring to learn one or a few L2s.

I will give a few highlights of her book here.

Lomb’s method revolves around extensive reading. Yet, she seems to encourage extensive reading even when one is well under the 98% lexical comprehension threshold recommended by Arguelles. She advices:

Ignore what you can’t immediately understand. If a word is important, it will occur several times and explain itself anyway. Base your progress on the known, not the unknown. The more you read, the more phrases you will write in the margins. The relationship that develops between you and the knowledge you obtain will be much deeper than if you had consulted the dictionary automatically. The sense of achievement provides you with an emotional-affective charge: You have sprung open a lock; you have solved a little puzzle.

Later on, she explains how you can get through a book even when you have reached a “linguistic deadlock”, caused no doubt by jumping into a text far above one’s level. She evokes the wonderful “push-pull” concept:

We must admit that in a foreign language in which we have a deficient vocabulary, reading can be boring. After five, 10, or 20 minutes, we may get the feeling of coming to a linguistic deadlock if we’re not motivated to continue. We need something more to help us get through it.

That something is the pull of a truly interesting text.

She later quotes a fellow Hungarian by the name of Dezső Kosztolányi who used a similar method to hers. He waxes poetic when reminiscing on his experience learning Portuguese from scratch by reading a single novel:

An exciting game, a coquettish hide-and-seek, a magnificent flirt with the spirit of humanity. Never do we read so fluently and with such keen eyes as in a hardly known, new language. We grow young by it, we become children, babbling babies and we seem to start a new life. This is the elixir of my life.

Her love for books is certainly endearing:

A book can be pocketed and discarded, scrawled and torn into pages, lost and bought again. It can be dragged out from a suitcase, opened in front of you when having a snack, revived at the moment of waking, and skimmed through once again before falling asleep. It needs no notice by phone if you can’t attend the appointment fixed in the timetable. It won’t get mad if awakened from its slumber during your sleepless nights. Its message can be swallowed whole or chewed into tiny pieces. Its content lures you for intellectual adventures and it satisfies your spirit of adventure. You can get bored of it—but it won’t ever get bored of you.

Books are eternal companions. When you grow out of one you simply discard it for another.

A book is the simplest and most easily accessible—even if not necessarily the most efficient—means of creating a personal linguistic microclimate.

Other than her emphasis on reading, she also suggests autologue, or, having conversations with oneself. I can say that I often apply this technique while walking outdoors. It is highly effective at finding holes in one’s vocabulary in a foreign language. My problem lately has been that I need to decide at the beginning of a walk what language my autologue will be in, as I have numerous salivating L2s begging me to walk them. (The autologue principle can be applied effectively to other subjects as well, particularly philosophy. It is entertaining to record oneself speaking aloud during an autologue and then listen to it later while at a keyboard. Some of my favorite ideas I’ve formulated in this way.)

I don’t entirely agree with Lomb when she stresses the importance of traditional teacher-pupil relationship for L2 learning. I believe that smart application of technology can remove much of the need for language teachers. One particularly important feature of language teachers is that they can slow down their speech to give students a chance to catch all the phonemes and time for the words to ring in their minds. As Lomb puts it:

To return to my method of language study, what I expect from my Azilian teacher is what I cannot get from either books or the radio. Firstly, I ask the teacher to speak at a slower than average speed so that I can catch as many words as possible from the context.

This effect can be easily obtained with the “change tempo” feature of HiFi audio software, which is now easily accessible to anyone with a smartphone. (For this purpose I currently recommend “Amazing Slow Downer” for iPhone and Windows Media Player 10 for Windows. There are change tempo features built into Audacity and Apple’s iTunes, but the sound quality is abysmal.) I will dedicate a whole post to this at some point.

Lomb also makes some general psychological observations relevant to L2 acquisition. She points out a phenomenon that I’m sure some psychologists have a name for:

A certain sedimentation does no harm to language knowledge, just as with wine. I’ve heard that famous conductors will practice a piece inside out nearly every minute. Then they will put it aside and not touch it before the con- cert one or two weeks later. They notice that it helps the performance. In language learning, the amount of a language learned while abroad will often not show up until well after arriving home.

One thing that’s still fuzzy after finishing her book is the difference between “interpolation” and her “extrapolation” while reading. We can’t ask Lomb, because sadly she is no longer with us. But what we can do is, try to apply her methods and find out for ourselves!

That said, I’m off to read a story in a collection of 格林童话 (Grimm’s Fairytales) that I picked up in Chinatown a while back. I’ll keep Lomb’s advice in mind and see how it goes.

A Meta-Etymological Dict

Here is a very rough sketch of the idea:

motivation: aspiring polyglots face the huge challenge of massive vocabulary acquisition. Even in closely related langauges, it is easy to miss cognates because of sound changes and different orthographies. I have found that using etymological information from dictionary lookups has boosted my recall for learning from a single language — but I conjecture that this boost will carry over to other languages of interest if the dictionary would provide related words in every language of interest when they exist. However, in present form, this procedure requires searching through possibly 12 different books! I believe an electronic version would be a huge boon to the modern polyglot community.

intention: to build a tool with an online (mobile-friendly) interface for simultaneously searching the etymological entries of many trustworthy soruces and giving a digest of the relationships between words of interest in a concice manner. Hyperlinks will allow the user to jump to the original source dictionary.

input: etymological dictionaries (or normal dictionaries with etymological information) in several languages

output: a network of words with edges representing an etymological link as claimed by some dicitonary. This may be stored in XML.

usage: the user searches for a word form in any language. The program finds all matching nodes, and then for each node, lists all neighboring entries, regardless of language. The program may also search several levels deep, filtering results by languages of interest. Think of a tree-like presentation.

example: So, for example, if I search “hill”, and I have told the program that I’m also interested in French and Swedish, then I should see the Swedish “kulle” and French “collin” as results, with links showing how they are interconnected:

Eng: “hill” <> Fr. “colline”

Eng: “hill” <> Sv. “kulle”

Or something like that (I’m not claiming this etymology is right or whatever.)

The point is, is that you get just enough info on the screen so you can make a mental link between the vocabularies of the various languages and learn the word as a SINGLE word, rather than having to relearn repeatedly. — Plus, I firmly believe that such interconnected knowledge is more easily retained than simple, rote pairs like “kulle=hill”.

Syllables of Mandarin Chinese

Here is a list of the 3000 most commonly used characters in written Chinese, sorted by Mandarin reading, with tones ignored.

Some interesting points:

• If one looks at only up to the 1000 most common characters, /shi/ is the most prevalent syllable. However, by 3000, /ji/ has clearly taken the lead.
• The shape of the distribution is what I would call “Zipf’s law with a fat tail.”
• Down in the “tail”, we find that there are many familiar characters with rather unpopular readings; e.g. ‘meng’, ‘neng’, ‘gei’, and ‘nv’.
• Despite all of this syllable-level polysemy, the spoken language procedes without issue. This is primarily because of tones and the fact that many words in Chinese are two syllable, so the other syllable helps greatly to disambiguate. Also, the spoken language has a high context, which further aids in the disambiguation. However, things could get interesting if we were to work with a pinyin-based written language, especially if tones were not indicated!

Click ‘more’ to see the data.

Adding Accents to Romanized Japanese

While working through Japanese the Spoken Language (JSL), I feel the need to make Anki cards for the spoken words that I’m having trouble recalling the meanings of. Now, I haven’t yet decided exactly what card format is best, but I was dreading having to type in accents on the romanized words. (See the introduction to JSL to see what these accents are.) So, I wrote a quick program to allow easy input of accented words.

This Python function makes it easy to write JSL-romanized Japanese text with accent markings. It works by taking as input the text with capitalization indicating high-pitch, and outputs JSL-type accent marked text. This is particularly useful when entering a list of spoken Japanese words into Anki.

Example:

“KYOo” ==> “kyôo”

“aTARASIi ZIsyo” ==> “atárasìi zîsyo”

“aSITA IKIMAsu yo” ==> “asíta ikimàsu yo”

Click on ‘More…’ to see the Python code.

Theory of Deuxième Vue

The Theory of Deusieme Vue, or second sight, is something I’ve been working on for a while now. I’m not sure what the general version is quite yet, but I will give some examples:

Book Suggestions

I get more books suggested to me than I could possibly read. How do I know, then, which books actually merit my time? I could only take suggestions from a few choice people whose tastes I respect most highly. However, I find that, even for people whose tastes I mainly share, the book suggestions thus obtained are still hit-or-miss.

My solution is the following: I take suggestions from anyone who I speak to. Each time a new book is suggested, I make a mental note of it, and that is all. However, the second time that a particular title is suggested to me, it goes directly on the reading list. This second exposure is called the deuxieme vue.

Failure to add to the reading list at the time of the deuxieme vue is nothing other than closemindedness. Adding to the list prior to the deuxieme vue is often a disrespect for one’s time.

Names

I’m terrible with names. I can’t put a face to a name if I have only met a person once. Deuxieme vue says: don’t worry about it. Just make a mental note of the name, and then, when you are re-exposed to the name, in a new context, on a new day, then you can worry about remembering it.

Chinese Vocabulary

While learning Chinese, one is hit with a torrent of vocabulary. This is particularly true when one first tries to read a book. Perhaps four thousand characters and ten thousand vocabulary items must be learned, at least passively, before reading can procede effectively without a dictionary. One strategy for learning these items would be to add every new item encountered to an SRS deck. However, this results in not only a massive bloat of due cards, but also in a low quality of recall: after just one exposure to a word in-context, the chances of recall are very low — particularly if the word was not understood from context.

So, I have been applying the theory of deuxieme vue to learning Chinese as well. The trick is to only add a vocab item to your SRS deck after the second time you have seen it “in the wild”. This second exposure gives the learner a second perspective on the vocab, which is important for understanding the sense of the word. Also, it seems to be many times easier to remember something that you have been exposed to twice, which results in much better SRS success rates.

 

Scientific Basis

I do not know of a neuroscientific basis for this theory, but I feel quite strongly that one should exist! I have heard of others having success with this method for learning Chinese. Has anyone heard of research that might have something to say about la signification de la deuxieme vue?

 

American English Vowels

Inquisitor: “How many vowels are there in English?”

American: “Five. Or, six if you count the letter ‘y’.”

Inquisitor: “Ok, those are the vowels of written English. But I’m interested in the spoken language. How many vowels are there in spoken English?”

After some reflection, the American responds: “There are ten. A, E, I, O, and U can be either short or long.”

This, the hypnogogic truth we are taught in grade-school, is often where the conversation ends. But, unfortunately for would-be spelling reformists, language learners, and other inquisitive types, this is technically wrong and generally misleading.

So what would I answer? Probably something like this:

“You mean simple vowels, that is, those which may be sung out and identified at any point during the singing? Well then there are nine — or ten if you count the ‘errr’ sound. But if you allow complex vowels, those combinations of simple vowels sometimes called ‘diphthongs’, then there are between 14 and 19 — again depending on how you handle ‘errr’ sounds.”

—

Here’s a PDF of a General American Vowel Cheat-Sheet I’ve put together. It enumerates each of the aforecounted vowels, with example English words in which they resound, plus tips for French speakers to produce the English sounds properly. It includes some cursory notes on vowel length and tensing, both of which are underappreciated aspects of accent, useful to any student of spoken American English.

Now, we could take this to the next level up, we could do formant analysis, printing up graphs and diagrams and what-not. (And I’ve done this, by hacking the formant analysis of the Praat C sources — but that’s for another post.) But it would be also interesting to see how the phonological truth could be adapted, boiled-down (not watered-down), and otherwise adapted for school children. Could this help the natives too?