
Avoiding the Adjective Fallacy - gkop
http://betterexplained.com/static/articles/adjective-fallacy/
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teh_klev
There was a fairly decent discussion about this last time around:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10296505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10296505)

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xupybd
Brilliant! I had a lot of trouble with math, until the second year of an
engineering degree, when it all clicked. If only I'd understood what was
happening with math was so much more than a series of abstract rules applied
to a problem I did understand.

When we had to model a DC motor mathematically it all started to click, the
math was simply a tool for greater understanding and prediction.

But sadly at the high school level it was just learn this and repeat it first
in the homework then in the exam....

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viraptor
> But guess what students learning English are taught?

Well... kind of. The teacher did show a similar chart, then we did a few
exercises based on it, but it was more about "see how it sounds better now?
you'll apply it automatically after a while". It was definitely not something
we spent a long time analysing / practicing.

It's good to know why some things sound wrong.

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mwsherman
One of my physics professors said that a key skill of good physicist is to be
able to characterize a system quickly, prior to bringing in numbers or perhaps
even equations. I’ve applied that to a lot of things.

It’s a proxy for developing good intuitions, but also for realizing that
formalities often _follow from_ intuitions, and not the reverse.

Language (OP) is organic, and formalities follow.

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wpietri
Just out of high school I was visiting some folks in the Amazon basin who did
oilfield support work. (Long story.) They were talking about some building
modest but non-trivial piece of engineering, like a big tank. One of them, a
grizzled old guy who looked more like a motorcycle gang leader than an
engineer, talked through the problem in just the way you describe, doing
estimates of dimensions, weight, support structure, materials needed, and the
like. No calculator, no paper, nothing but what he had in his head from years
of experience.

I had assumed that kind of work was done very formally, with equations and
blueprints and the like. It blew me away to see somebody do something so
familiarly, and I'm sure he was spot on. It definitely inspired me when I went
to college.

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roywiggins
There's a difference between acquiring language and learning one as an adult.
Children don't need to apply rules to learn a language- they acquire it
unconsciously. Adults actually DO need to learn the rules. At least, that's
what I remember from Linguistics 101.

Here's my preferred way to chop a circle up to determine the area:
[http://www.drcruzan.com/Images/Mathematics/Circles/AreaByRea...](http://www.drcruzan.com/Images/Mathematics/Circles/AreaByRearrangementFigure.png)

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GolDDranks
Not true. Adults are ABLE to learn rules, but they don't NEED to learn them
(there's plenty of evidence of adult language immersion).

Also, doubt exists whether knowing some rules explicitly is of any help when
trying to use language in a realtime timeframe. And there's also continuous
debate whether it's even possible to "transfer" rules from explicit knowledge
into an "automatized" linguistic skill.

Some researchers note that "rules" as presented on language classes have
nothing to do with the inner representation of language, and are thus of no
help. (Except when explicitly "thinking" about language.)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I agree. This has always been my feeling about learning a second language as
an adult. English is my first (only) language. I've been making a half-hearted
effort to learn Spanish the past few months. Recently someone was trying to
teach me a handful of rules and I kept trying to tell them 'I don't care, it
doesn't matter if, at this stage, I use the wrong verb ending, or even if I
say araña (spider) instead of naranja (orange), it won't matter so long as you
know I'm trying to ask for an orange to eat or tell you there's a spider
outside by the door, understanding has been achieved - that's what's
important. We are all just trying to understand each other.

Maybe children have an advantage because they _aren 't able_ to talk properly
when they are young due to physical growth limits, so we make a lot of effort
to teach them.

It takes children 5 _year_ to reach 95% - 100% language fluency, and will go
on to learn many new words over the next 15 years, and some will go on to
study their mother tongue, read, and learn more about their and, other
languages, all their lives.

 _By 5 years of age, anyone (including unfamiliar listeners) should be able to
understand the child’s speech in conversation 95-100% of the time._ [1]

I'm willing to bet $100 dollars _anyone_ in full language immersion will reach
at least that stage of fluency in 5 years. And remember, children can be very
talkative, so they're always making mistakes and learning.

I guess adult language learning is how it is because adults are generally too
busy to make that sort of commitment. It then follows as self evident that
children and adults learn languages differently. Adults solution space is
constrained. We have to try to learn a language around busy adult lives.

Children's brains are also still developing, so there's going to be some
physical differences also, it's not clear whether that should be an advantage
or disadvantage. Maybe being able to map a second language to what you already
know is an advantage, we already have a framework.

1\.
[http://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/library/2013Facts...](http://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/library/2013Factsheets/Factsheet_Sound_of_Speech_PreschoolSchool-
aged_children.pdf)

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OvidStavrica
I believe this article misses its own point. I'll keep it short.

“I” is a lie. There is no “I”.

The brain has two halves, right and left. The right side is spacial. The left
side is lingual. Generally.

Both halves of the brain receive stimuli from our senses and build models of
the environment that are optimized for their respective roles.

This gives each of us two models which we use to navigate our environment: a
spacial model and a lingual model. These models each run in their own
hemisphere and are very different from each other in both function and form.

The spatial model is innate. We are born with it. The lingual model, we
acquire. (We must learn language before we hit puberty or we lose the capacity
to do so. Search for “linguistics Genie” or “linguistics wolf boy” for
details.)

Rather, this article is a commentary on the fact that practically all schools
fail us.

In school, we sit in class, exposed primarily to lingual input. We
consequently build an effective lingual model of explicit rules of our world.
But but we are left to our own devices to build our spatial model, which we do
from our own activities while following the “explicit rules” we know.

Every once in a while, we stumble upon some visual/real world representation
that allows our spatial side to realize a concept that is well known to the
lingual side.

