
The New Old Way of Learning Languages (2008) - oskarth
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-new-old-way-of-learning-languages/
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pnathan
Huh. Didn't know this had died out; guess I'd never thought about it when I
was learning German back in college. But, then....

> What is withheld is the information on the meanings of words, phrases, and
> sentences the students are reading.

This is not how I learned German at Idaho State University in the 2002-2003
timeframe.

Anyway, a Hebrew / Green interlinear is a very standard Bible study tool. You
can find a online example at Blue Letter Bible online. They have middling
worth, in my opinion. You can get an idea of what the sentence is, but you
lose substantial information, possibly even the key nuance of the sentence. It
would be interesting to see what an interlinear would look like for a
generally factual newspaper article, as opposed to the more symbolic religious
texts.

If someone is interested, I can probably translate a German newspaper
paragraph into a stab at an interlinear reading (email me the request, as I
have a lot on my plate and won't really be able to update it on HN).

~~~
ajarmst
It's still standard for dead languages (cf. Wheelock's Latin, any Biblical
Hebrew text, Koine Greek, Classical Greek, Aramaic, etc.). Modern languages
have tended to shift into a focus on conversational use rather than scholarly
reading. There're fairly obvious reasons for this.

------
Koshkin
I understand the (good) reason why, say, a Greek or an Armenian would want to
learn one of the "world" languages. There are also other specific reasons,
like learning to speak the language of the next-door tribe... But how would
_an average_ English-speaking person (not a scholar, a spy, or, perhaps, a
diplomat, a migrant, etc.) benefit today from learning any other language?
Isn't this just a waste of brain cells (and time)? What would we have lost if
- which is no doubt what is going to happen in the (possibly somewhat distant)
future - there was only one spoken language?

~~~
chillacy
Same reason everyone should travel: it's the best way to know more about
yourself. It's like the story: two young fish meet an older fish, who asks
them “How's the water?” The younger fish look at each other and say, “What the
hell is water?"

There's pretty decent evidence that languages have a big impact on how we
think (weak spair-worf hypothesis). It's but one easy way to introspect.

Anyways, I don't know if it should be required, but it's probably more useful
than calculus or english literature, both of which most people also don't use.

~~~
freeflight
>It's but one easy way to introspect.

So much this! Not all languages are "equal" in their ways how they can
express/define certain concepts, thus knowing more than one language helps you
define better what's going on.

A thing I personally really enjoy is reading Wikipedia articles in different
languages for a more "complete" picture of the topic because that works a
little bit like triangulation: What one language might leave out another
language might explain in more detail also highlighting different cultural
influences and giving me the feeling of having a rather universal
understanding of certain concepts, which doesn't hinge that much on merely
memorizing terminology as terminology keeps on changing while the underlying
principles don't.

~~~
rukuu001
What you're describing has actually been the most rewarding thing for me -
learning a new language is a window on a different way to think about things.

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adrianratnapala
_Hamilton also revised the word order of the original text to conform to the
word order of modern languages, overcoming perhaps the greatest difficulty for
modern students of classics._

Well now that's just silly.

It gives you have a book written in English, with some incorrect, or at best
stilted, Greek written above it. OK can you with vocab -- if you don't fall
into just reading the English.

Surely it is better to have word-by-word English transliterations as cribs for
an untampered Greek sentence.

~~~
jhbadger
The idea is that you would graduate to full unaltered Greek after mastering
the easier more natural word ordering, much as the point of learning to ride a
bicycle with training wheels is to graduate to leaving them off.

~~~
vorg
You'd need two editions of the translation, the training one and the
unaltered, which seems like wasted effort when having one translation with
Yoda-style English would be adequate for both groups of readers. It's easy
enough for a native English speaker to read a jumbled sentence when it has
enough punctuation.

Your sentence above, for example, could be " _The easier ordering of words,
more naturale; master them so after, graduate, the idea is, you would to
Greek, unaltered and full -- (just as) learn-ride a bicycle with wheels-
training, then graduate to no-wheels, is the point_ " if that's the word order
of the original language. It would also cause the reader to think in the word
order of the translated language, to discern its thematic structure as well as
its semantic structure.

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WalterBright
I read long ago that the TV vocabulary is about 2,000 words, high school
vocabulary is 10,000 words, college is 30,000 words, and there were a million
words in the English language.

What this meant to me is that in order to be passably fluent in a foreign
language only about 2,000 words need to be learned.

~~~
Koshkin
> _2,000 words_

That's about right.

It is easy to learn 2,000 words. Problem is, it takes enormously long time to
learn how to break the _live stream_ of sounds - which is what the human
speech is - down into individual words, so one could, then, apply the
knowledge of the vocabulary and possibly understand what is being said.

~~~
RangerScience
Seems like you could learn ~1k words and then just massive exposure, let your
brain do the hard work. 1k words to give a decent chance of every other word
to be one you _can_ recognize, letting your brain better begin to determine
those word breaks...?

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bsder
Do we not have _actual research_ as to the most efficient ways of learning
foreign languages given particular circumstances (online-only, in-person
teacher, vacation access, full-time immersion)?

This seems like such an obvious thing for psychology to experiment on.

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programLyrique
Why not an interactive interlinear translation, for which you can for instance
click on words of the original text to get their meaning in your language? And
there are actually apps and websites that use this kind of methods, such as
bliubliu or readlang!

~~~
a_brawling_boo
There is one I know of but only if you are interested in new testament greek
or hebrew, I've actually picked up some greek using it:
[https://www.stepbible.org/](https://www.stepbible.org/)

------
wolfgke
Some interlinear books for modern languages can be bought at
[http://interlinearbooks.com/](http://interlinearbooks.com/)

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ZanyProgrammer
How is reading an interlinear translation of the Greek classics supposed to
help you engage in a conversation with a real life Greek person in Greece?

~~~
chillacy
My guess is Hamilton was teaching his pupils to be able to read classics,
since traveling to speak with a Greek person in Greece would have been
difficult back then anyways.

To speak with people, you might look at the learning route advocated by Dr.
Pimsleur, who also started a company which publishes language learning in
audiobooks only, with the argument that most languages started out without a
written form, and when they did develop writing it was inaccessible to a
majority of speakers for most of history. Literacy is a recent phenomenon.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pimsleur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Pimsleur)

~~~
lgessler
Nearly half of languages of the world continue to have no writing system:
[https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-
languages...](https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-languages-
world-are-unwritten-0)

~~~
oh_sigh
Sure, but how many people do those 3000+ languages actually cover? I'd imagine
a lot of languages with 1-100 speakers don't have a writing system...

~~~
lgessler
The broader point here is that something most people in the developed world do
not realize at first is that a writing system is not an important part of how
many (I'd wager most) people use their language. In other words, the spoken
language is all that matters or practically exists for most people in the
world.

For almost all of history most languages were unwritten. While it's true that
today, owing to the efforts of indigenous leaders[1], missionaries[2], and
linguists[3], many languages have gained writing systems, they often are of
marginal, if any, relevance in the average speaker's daily life.

E.g., Wu Chinese, at 80M speakers, lacks a robust writing system. Many Indo-
Aryan languages (i.e. those related to Hindi) in Northern India lack a
standard written form. Maay Maay, a language spoken in Somalia with 2M
speakers, does not have a writing system.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet)

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coorgi%E2%80%93Cox_alphabet)

