This morning I ran across a copy of Jane Austen's novel Emma with some of the keywords on each page translated into Welsh as footnotes at the bottom of the page. Apparently it's part of a series of classic books published by Icon into a variety of different languages and meant for language learners.

The full list of their titles with Welsh can be found here: Webster's Welsh Thesaurus Editions

I'm curious if anyone has used these before, and if so, how helpful they've found them for building their Welsh vocabulary as they read English language works.

Is anyone aware of Welsh language books that have this sort of English vocabulary cross listed on the page? (Sort of the way in which lingo.360.cymru has news stories in Welsh with English translation help along the way?)

syndication link: https://en.forum.saysomethingin.com/t/websters-welsh-thesaurus-editions/40131

https://athenaze.com/

Cross reference with Hans H. Ørberg's LINGVA LATINA for Latin.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5438280716

Manny's description of writing introductory language books using ChatGPT.

Is language acquisition a very complex method of pattern recognition?

The Language Master<br /> BBC - Michel Thomas<br /> [English CC]<br /> [Leg. PT-BR]

Michel Thomas is one of the most brilliant language teachers in the world. His usual clients are movie stars and business leaders. This programme takes him to a Sixth Form College in London to work with school pupils, to test his claim that he can teach anyone a language in a week - with no reading, writing or homework. The film also explores his personal history - as a hero of the French Resistance during WW II.

The Michel Thomas method involves: - slow build up of words, phrases, natural grammar - forced production of the language through practice - positive interaction - patience - no stress - no judgement - encouragement - constant evidence of progress

How does "understanding" of the language evolve out of this method? It's more like revelation rather than understanding...

This method appears much more atomic than that of SSiW (Aran Jones), but some of this is down to the fact that there's a live person who is able to unjudgementally prompt one with pieces which they've missed. The teacher has the context whereas the taped instructors do not. Presumably this sort of interpersonal prompting and context isn't necessarily required, but it can help to better lower the learner's stress and potentially speed up the learning process. It would require some standardization to set up a specific experiment to test between these two modes to tease this data out.

Reference key: [[Levy1997]]<br /> “The Language Master.” 1:33 : 1, color. London, UK: BBC 2, March 23, 1997. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic.

I thought Ebbinghaus did this in the late 1800s?! 😜

My Ten Years With Michel Thomas - Dr. Harold Goodman

https://youtu.be/askAFNzI9Rc

Michel Thomas taught languages conversationally in both languages by creating absolutely no pressure or worry and always keeping students in the "now".

Find:<br /> Kaplan, Howard. “The Language Master.” The Jerusalem Report, August 11, 1994.

Watch:<br /> “The Language Master.” 1:33 : 1, color. London, UK: BBC 2, March 23, 1997. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic.

The Method Gaspey-Otto-Sauer of teaching languages was popular until the 1950s and was influenced by la méthode Ollendorff from the 1830s.

reply to jo-king

https://en.forum.saysomethingin.com/t/slow-learner/38360/8

I don't do it as much as I did when I started out, but I would put the audio files into a podcatcher that allowed me to speed up or slow down the audio. The first time through I would slow the audio down to 75% of full speed so I didn't need to fiddle so much with the pause button (especially when I was listening while commuting or doing other household chores). Then I'd speed it up a bit each time until I was able to do 1.10 or 1.25x speed at which point the pauses weren't long enough to get a word in edgewise. At this point I move on to the next. Be careful here though as on some of the longer sentences at the ends of some lessons, if you play them too slowly, you'll forget what the beginning of the sentence was by the time they get to the end.

Based on a trick in my daughter's dual immersion Japanese class which used the word "wakanai" (Japanese for "I don't know"), I also formed the practice of saying "ddim gwybod" in place of words I couldn't immediately remember so that I could focus on the ones I did know instead of getting too tripped up on the ones I didn't. Eventually on repetition and revision they would slowly seep into my brain. Fortunately the kind and patient instructors on the tape never made fun of me or judged me for my mistakes and that made it much easier to eventually pick things up.

Sticking with it has become quite fun and it definitely gets easier with time. pob lwc!

reply to Share the ideas dancing in your ZK with us. February 17, 2023

Congratulations @Will on the milestone! @ctietze's analogy with smithwork is fantastic. I might also liken it to the point in acquiring a new language when one begins dreaming in their new target language. So many talk about the idea of increased productivity associated with having a zk, but most spend an inordinate amount of time on shiny object syndrome or over complicating it and never get to the point of quickly writing things out, filing them, and being able to trust that their system will just work™. When you no longer notice it anymore and it has become second nature is when the real fun (and magic) begins to happen. It also seems easier and more natural to break the "rules" once you've internalized the basics. We should spend more time talking about the value of 'zettelkasten fluency'.

I'm excited this week to be doing some work in areas of the history of misinformation, cultural myths, and 'American exceptionalism' in preparation for Dan Allosso's upcoming book club on Kruse and Zelizer's new edited book. I suspect he'll announce it shortly at https://danallosso.substack.com/ if folks are interested in joining in the discussion/sensemaking.

Kruse, Kevin M., and Julian E. Zelizer. Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Basic Books, 2023.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47p2TfnEewc

academics: Joshua Fishman and Bernard Spolsky

https://polygloss.app/posts/how-to-learn-languages-through-reading/

https://polygloss.app/posts/scottish-gaelic-and-language-jam/

Some useful resources for Scottish Gaelic.

Also interesting to see how someone else approaches self-learning a language and what they compiled.

https://mangolanguages.com/

Mango Languages

https://try.lingopie.com/

How was this not obvious from the jump? Was the author of the essay so distracted by shiny object syndrome they failed to see the obvious?

It's like taking notes in a language class... the goal is to read and write with fluency, so you practice these things regularly and gain fluency over time. Taking notes about the grammar and syntax of a language is highly unlikely to get you to fluency. Note taking is the wrong tool for a number of processes and the user should very quickly get a gut feeling for what's useful and what is not.

This author obviously missed the boat here.

https://polygloss.app/

https://ymlaenwelsh.com/2018/11/11/on-word-field-farming/

Creating world fields (groups of words related to a particular area or field of knowledge) can be helpful for acquiring vocabulary in a new language. There's no research here to back up the claim, but it's an interesting word game and method for familiarize oneself with a small area and acquire new words related to an area or various related stem words.

https://conjuguemos.com/

https://lingo.360.cymru/lingo-newydd/

Interleaving (aka mixed practice or varied practice) is a learning strategy that involves mixing different topics, ideas, or forms of practice to improve outcomes as well as overall productivity. Its opposite and less effective strategy is blocking (or block study or specific practice) which focuses instead on working on limited topics or single forms of practice at the same time.

This may be one of the values of of the Say Something In Welsh method which interleaves various new nouns and verbs as well as verb tenses in focused practice.

Compare this with the block form which would instead focus on lists of nouns in a single session and then at a later time lists of verbs in a more rote fashion. Integrating things together in a broader variety requires more work, but is also much more productive in the long run.

misinterpreted-effort hypothesis: the amount of effort one puts into studying is inversely proportional to how much one feels they learn.

Is this why the Says Something In Welsh system works so well? Because it requires so much mental work and effort in short spans of time? Particularly in relation to Duolingo which seems easier?

Because we're "social beings in a social world", we need to think about the psychology and sociology of the environments we design to help improve learning.

Link this to: - Design of spaces like Stonehenge for learning in Indigenous cultures, particularly the "stage", acoustics (recall the ditch), and intimacy of the presentation. - research that children need face-to-face interactions for language acquisition

https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/what-language-s-are-you-studying/73190

I've been studying Welsh on and off now for just over a year.

I've been using a mix of Duolingo for it's easy user interface and it's built in spaced repetition. I like the way that it integrates vocabulary and grammar in a holistic way which focuses on both reading, writing, and listening.

However, I've also been using the fantastic platform Say Something in Welsh. This uses an older method of listening and producing based teaching which actually makes my brain feel a bit tired after practice. The focus here is solely on listening and speaking and forces the student to verbally produce the language. It's a dramatically different formula than most high school and college based courses I've seen and used over the years having taken 3 years of Spanish, 2 of French, and 2 of Latin.

The set up consists of the introduction of a few words which are then used in a variety of combinations to create full sentences. The instructors say a sentence in English and the listener is encouraged in just a few seconds to attempt to produce it in the target language (Welsh, in my case), then the instructor says the sentence in Welsh with a pause for the student to repeat it properly, another instructor says it in Welsh with a pause for a third repeat. This goes on for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. The end result is that the learner gets into the language much more quickly and can begin both understanding the spoken language as well as produce it much more rapidly than older school based methods (at least in my experience, though I have known some college language labs to use a much more limited version of a similar technique). Each lesson adds new material, but also reviews over older material in a spaced repetition format as well so you're always getting something new mixed in with the old to make new and interesting sentences for conversation.

SSiW also has modules for Manx, Cornish, Dutch, and Spanish.

I find that the two done hand in hand has helped me produce much faster results in language acquisition in an immersive manner than I have done previously and with much less effort.

Is it broadly true that the first person and cognates are the last acquisitions of children and among the first losses of aphasiacs?

Manuela Macedonia's research indicates that online learners who enact specific gestures as they learn words learn better and have longer retention versus simply hearing words. Students who mimic these gestures also learn better than those who only see the gestures and don't use them themselves.

How might this sort of teacher/avatar gesturing be integrated into online methods? How would students be encouraged to follow along?

Could these be integrated into different background settings as well to take advantage of visual memory?

Anecdotally, I remember some Welsh phrases from having watched Aran Jones interact with his cat outside on video or his lip syncing in the empty spaces requiring student responses. Watching the teachers lips while learning can be highly helpful as well.

Manuela Macedonia and co-authors found that pairing new foreign words with gestures created activity in the motor cortex which helped to improve the associative memory for the words and the movements. Using images of the words did not create the same motor cortex involvement.

It's not clear which method of association is better, at least as written in The Extended Mind. Was one better than the other? Were they tested separately, together, and in a control group without either? Surely one would suspect that using both methods together would be most beneficial.

Manuela Macedonia wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory for language acquisition.

Most foreign language leaners spend all their time in classrooms or at home sitting down, listening, reading, and writing. This is antithetical to how children acquire language in more natural settings where they're able to move around, interact, taste, touch, smell, etc. as they learn new words in their language. These additional sensory mnemonic techniques add an incredible amount of information and associative hooks to help them remember new words and grammatical structures.

Can gesturing during (second) language learning help dramatically improve the speed and facility of the second language acquisition by adult learners?

Evidence in language acquisition in children quoted previously in The Extended Mind would indicate yes.

link this related research

Studies show the importance of gesturing in developing children as a precursor to language. Adults who gesture more have children who gesture more as well. There also seems to be a direct correlation to the gestural vocabulary of children at 14 months and their verbal vocabulary at 4 and 1/2 years of age.

(reputed)

Alternate translation: “To speak another language is to possess another soul.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

https://www.unige.ch/callector/lara

example: https://www.issco.unige.ch/en/research/projects/callector/le_petit_prince_abc2vocabpages/hyperlinked_text.html

Stephen Krashen's Theory of Input indicates that language learning is most successful when learners are presented with interesting and comprehensible material in low-anxiety situations.

https://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash-english.html

This is a pretty cool looking project for language learning.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Manny Rayner </span> in Manny Rayner’s review of Abécédaire le petit prince | Goodreads (<time class='dt-published'>02/18/2022 11:40:10</time>)</cite></small>

We have been doing some work recently to make LARA support picture-based texts, and this is our first real example: a multimodal French alphabet book based on Le petit prince. If you're a fan of the book and beginner level in French, you might find it fun! Start Chrome or Firefox and go here.

There's a set of 26 pages, one for each letter, and each page comes in three versions. In the Semantic version, you can click on the picture and hear the word spoken in French; hovering gives you a translation. In the Phonetic version, you can hover over the word and spell though it one letter group at a time. Clicking on a letter group will play the sound and show you other words where that sound occurs. In the Examples version, you'll see a French sentence from Le petit prince which uses the word, annotated with audio and translations both for the individual words and for the sentence as a whole.

The screenshot above illustrates. The D word is dessins ("drawings"). This is the Phonetic version: I've just clicked on the letter group in, and it's played the sound /ɛ̃/, the nasalised vowel that this letter group usually represents in French, and shown me that the same sound also occurs in invisible ("invisible") and jardin ("garden"). If you go to the Examples version, you see the sentence Mon dessin ne représentait pas un chapeau. ("My drawing wasn't supposed to be a hat") from the first chapter of the book.

Comments will be very welcome! We're thinking of doing more of these and want to know where we can improve things.

Learning and mastering an alien language takes a tremendous amount of work, taxing one's imagination attempting to come to terms with similarly alien cultural concepts.

http://nihongo.monash.edu/japanese.html Huge corpus of online Japanese resources

Learning radicals in languages like Chinese and the related Japanese can not only help vocabulary and literacy, but build cultural understanding of the language and culture.

This has been roughly my experience with Japanese, but I've yet to see an incredibly good method for doing this in a structured way.

Over the years in academic settings I've picked up pieces of Spanish, French, Latin and a few odd and ends of other languages.

Six years ago we put our daughter into a dual immersion Japanese program (in the United States) and it has changed some of my view of how we teach and learn languages, a process which is also affected by my slowly picking up conversational Welsh using the method at https://www.saysomethingin.com/ over the past year and change, a hobby which I wish I had more targeted time for.

Children learn language through a process of contextual use and osmosis which is much more difficult for adults. I've found that the slowly guided method used by SSiW is fairly close to this method, but is much more targeted. They'll say a few words in the target language and give their English equivalents, then they'll provide phrases and eventually sentences in English and give you a few seconds to form them into the target language with the expectation that you try to say at least something, or pause the program to do your best. It's okay if you mess up even repeatedly, they'll say the correct phrase/sentence two times after which you'll repeat it again thus giving you three tries at it. They'll also repeat bits from one lesson to the next, so you'll eventually get it, the key is not to worry too much about perfection.

Things slowly build using this method, but in even about 10 thirty minute lessons, you'll have a pretty strong grasp of fluent conversational Welsh equivalent to a year or two of college level coursework. Your work on this is best supplemented with interacting with native speakers and/or watching television or reading in the target language as much as you're able to.

For those who haven't experienced it before I'd recommend trying out the method at https://www.saysomethingin.com/welsh/course1/intro to hear it firsthand.

The experience will give your brain a heavy work out and you'll feel mentally tired after thirty minutes of work, but it does seem to be incredibly effective. A side benefit is that over time you'll also build up a "gut feeling" about what to say and how without realizing it. This is something that's incredibly hard to get in most university-based or book-based language courses.

This method will give you quicker grammar acquisition and you'll speak more like a native, but your vocabulary acquisition will tend to be slower and you don't get any writing or spelling practice. This can be offset with targeted memory techniques and spaced repetition/flashcards or apps like Duolingo that may help supplement one's work.

I like some of the suggestions made in Lynne's post as I've been pecking away at bits of Japanese over time myself. There's definitely an interesting structure to what's going on, especially with respect to the kana and there are many similarities to what is happening in Japanese to the Chinese that she's studying. I'm also approaching it from a more traditional university/book-based perspective, but if folks have seen or heard of a SSiW repetition method, I'd love to hear about it.

Hopefully helpful by comparison, I'll mention a few resources I've found for Japanese that I've researched on setting out a similar path that Lynne seems to be moving.

Japanese has two different, but related alphabets and using an app like Duolingo with regular practice over less than a week will give one enough experience that trying to use traditional memory techniques may end up wasting more time than saving, especially if one expects to be practicing regularly in both the near and the long term. If you're learning without the expectation of actively speaking, writing, or practicing the language from time to time, then wholesale mnemotechniques may be the easier path, but who really wants to learn a language like this?

The tougher portion of Japanese may come in memorizing the thousands of kanji which can have subtly different meanings. It helps to know that there are a limited set of specific radicals with a reasonably delineable structure of increasing complexity of strokes and stroke order.

The best visualization I've found for this fact is the Complete Listing of the 214 Radicals and Major Variations from An Introduction to Japanese Kanji Calligraphy by Kunii Takezaki (Tuttle, 2005) which I copy below:

(Feel free to right click and view the image in another tab or download it and view it full size to see more detail.)

I've not seen such a chart in any of the dozens of other books I've come across. The numbered structure of increasing complexity of strokes here would certainly suggest an easier to build memory palace or songline.

I love this particular text as it provides an excellent overview of what is structurally happening in Japanese with lots of tidbits that are otherwise much harder won in reading other books.

There are many kanji books with various forms of what I would call very low level mnemonic aids. I've not found one written or structured by what I would consider a professional mnemonist. One of the best structured ones I've seen is A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters by Kenneth G. Henshall (Tuttle, 1988). It's got some great introductory material and then a numbered list of kanji which would suggest the creation of a quite long memory palace/journey/songline.

Each numbered Kanji has most of the relevant data and readings, but provides some description about how the kanji relates or links to other words of similar shapes/meanings and provides a mnemonic hint to make placing it in one's palace a bit easier. Below is an example of the sixth which will give an idea as to the overall structure.

I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but I'd found an online app called WaniKani for Japanese that has some mnemonic suggestions and built-in spaced repetition that looks incredibly promising for taking small radicals and building them up into more easily remembered complex kanji.

I suspect that there are likely similar sources for these couple of books and apps for Chinese that may help provide a logical overall structuring which will make it easier to apply or adapt one's favorite mnemotechniques to make the bulk vocabulary memorization easier.

The last thing I'll mention I've found, that's good for practicing writing by hand as well as spaced repetition is a Kanji notebook frequently used by native Japanese speaking children as they're learning the levels of kanji in each grade. It's non-obvious to the English speaker, and took me a bit to puzzle out and track down a commercially printed one, even with a child in a classroom that was using a handmade version. The notebook (left to right and top to bottom) has sections for writing a big example of the learned kanji; spaces for the "Kun" and "On" readings; spaces for the number of strokes and the radical pieces; a section for writing out the stroke order as it builds up gradually; practice boxes for repeated practice of writing the whole kanji; examples of how to use the kanji in context; and finally space for the student to compose their own practice sentences using the new kanji.

Regular use and practice with these can be quite helpful for moving toward mastery.

I also can't emphasize enough that regularly and actively watching, listening, reading, and speaking in the target language with materials that one finds interesting is incredibly valuable. As an example, one of the first things I did for Welsh was to find a streaming television and radio that I want to to watch/listen to on a regular basis has been helpful. Regular motivation and encouragement is key.

I won't go into them in depth and will leave them to speak for themselves, but two of the more intriguing videos I've watched on language acquisition which resonate with some of my experiences are:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox6MdRTc0yE

Focused on one particular topic

Glimpses of mastery

Some basic needs of language learning are fulfilled here:

• sympathetic listener
• immersion
• role model
• 24/7 practice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox6MdRTc0yE

Talking With Stephen Krashen: How Do We Acquire Language?

Kartushina, N., Mani, N., AKTAN-ERCIYES, A., Alaslani, K., Aldrich, N. J., Almohammadi, A., … Mayor, J. (2021, March 5). COVID-19 first lockdown as a unique window into language acquisition: What you do (with your child) matters. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5ejwu

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION - LANGUAGE LEARNING

Stephen Krashen's Theory of Second Language Acquisition

This could be the first time we can talk with empirical evidence about language requiring innate components or not.