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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3583 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 21, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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German

German is an amazing language. The closest thing to a simplied-Sanskrit using the English-alphabet.

I grew up fluent in English, Marathi and Hindi. Learned a decent bit of Sanskrit grammar, but was never able to sustain a conversation in it.

German was the one language I learned in adulthood, and my 2 distinct experiences with learning German have helped crystallize certain opinions on language learning.

There is no such thing as leisurely language learning. You need to be thrown into the deep end of the pool. Now, this might seem like surface level advocacy for immersion based learning, but there is more to it. I am going to squeeze every little bit of metaphor from that analogy. Similar to drowning, you need to feel that sense of hopelessness for it to work.

I studied Sanskrit for 3 years and never got close to stringing more than 2 sentences together. I got a 99/100 in my exams for it, but leisurely learning with zero desperation meant that learning it was more like storing facts / gotchas in my head, rather than any from-fundamentals understanding of the language.

I studied A2 German for 3 months after a shitty A1 class, and the new class had 1 rule. You could not speak any other language in the class. Not with the instructor or your fellow classmates. Any mistake meant an actual monetary fine. It sounded ridiculous.

How am I supposed to ask what I don't know in a language that I don't know. How am I supposed to understand explanations for simple German I don't understand in more simple German I don't understand. It was also humiliating, because everyone else had done the good A1 class and were far ahead of me on day 1. It was desperate and the first few days were brutal.

But the human brain is a miracle machine. A few weeks in, I could almost feel my brain rewiring. It stopped reaching for English as an intermediate crutch and started grounding my understanding of less-simple German in the simplest German words. I have never since learned anything as fast in my life. In 3 months I was more fluent in German, than my friends who had spent a year or two in Germany. They had greater immersion, but they weren't desperate. They were in the shallow end of the pool. Most importantly, in 3 months, my German was better than my Sanskrit had gotten over 3 years, and both are practically the same language !

It's been 10 years since, and I have completely forgotten all my German. But, I feel confident that just like swimming, it will come back to me with a little bit of desperation.

Sanskrit is fascinating because it's useful to convey topics related to metaphysics/philosophy of mind. So many concepts it would take 12 words to explain in English you can find terms in Sanskrit for.

In autumn of last year, I learned LOGO for a class I’m teaching, and it felt amazing. To quote my own metaphor, using C++ feels like conversing in raw logic, but using LOGO feels like dancing with logic itself.

You’ve got me wanting to learn Sanskrit, and Screye has me wanting to learn German, for the same reason.

Another good reason to learn Sanskrit, is that a great many manuscripts remain untranslated. Even when they are translated, they are done by woke moralists who interpret the works through a 2023-western-woke lens.

The hard part of learning Sanskrit, is like Latin, no one actually speaks it. So you would only ever be fluent in it as a written language.

Unfortunately I don't speak it myself even though I know dozens of words in it just by learning about Buddhism/Advaita Vedanta.

I believe that is also how Mormons teach language when preparing missionaries for foreign lands - throw them way in the deep end, no more English after the first one or two days. It apparently works! IIRC the missionaries come in completely blind to the language and go out after six weeks with at least a functional grasp of it, which is incredible to me.

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