
Kató Lomb - keiferski
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kató_Lomb
======
52-6F-62
Heh. One of her methods for learning a new language sounded very familiar.

> _Even she was bored with the fabricated dialogues of coursebooks, so her
> favourite method was to obtain an original novel in a language completely
> unknown to her, whose topic she personally found interesting (a detective
> story, a love story, or even a technical description would do), and that was
> how she deciphered, unravelled the basics of the language: the essence of
> the grammar and the most important words. She didn 't let herself be set
> back by rare or complicated expressions: she skipped them, saying: what is
> important will sooner or later emerge again and will explain itself if
> necessary._

Certainly sounds like my experience reading some code. Moreover, the more
familiar you are with the language itself, the more transparent different
dialects become. (Makes me wonder if she could understand Scots)

As well— the growing ability to read and generally understand some code in a
language unfamiliar. IE, for a C expert, D or JavaScript is probably
intelligible enough to understand what the program is intended to accomplish,
even if there are parts of the code or syntax that are less intelligible. I'm
sure that's been written about enough by now.

edit: grammar

~~~
meddlin
It's interesting you draw this parallel; I've pondered the same for a while
now. After programming for several years, I wonder how I would fare trying to
pick up a second spoken language using similar tactics to learning a
programming language.

~~~
kd5bjo
I’m in the middle of this process right now, actually. My programming
background has helped a lot with the written language— using dictionaries and
grammar references to write sentences is very similar to writing code in a new
language by referring to its manual. The transfer to speaking and listening is
much less pronounced, as my brain hasn’t fully realized that the spoken and
written languages are the same.

~~~
scj
The barrier I've noticed when switching from reading to listening, is adapting
to native accents.

I suppose real-time vs. at my own pace is another aspect that comes into play.

~~~
wallflower
Reading is always easier than listening because you can control the rate while
reading. With a live conversation partner, you cannot do that yet, until we
have accurate, real-time subtitling, perhaps with AR.

The hack is to find video material that has exact or near exact subtitles in
your target language. By using a short, repeatable video, you will be able to
associate sounds with the words, not the other way around. Since spoken
language is sounds, you have to start with the sounds. It can be easy to get
frustrated as it is a process of repeated listening. For that reason, choose
something you like.

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asteli
There's a formula in there that reads:

    
    
      Invested Time x Motivation
      --------------------------  = Results
             Inhibition
    

As an engineer without formal education, this rings very true. When people ask
"how'd you get into this?" typically my answer includes the phrase "interest
times time." The inclusion of inhibition in the formula crystalizes something
I've been feeling for a long time.

~~~
munificent
This resonated with me too. In particular, one of the things that's always
made software approachable to me is that my failures are hidden on my machine
where no one can see them, so I have almost no inhibition.

Learning any skill that requires social interaction is _much_ harder for me
because then all of my social anxieties and fear of failure kick in. I would
love to learn a second language, and this is the main thing holding me back. I
think I have the right mental skills to put the time in and wrap my head
around it, I just break out in a cold sweat when I imagine horribly
mispronouncing something in front of a native speaker.

~~~
jnurmine
Mispronunciation is no big deal! That is just one dimension in a language and
one which gets better over time and immersion.

If you wish to avoid the social aspects completely, how about starting with
practising to only read a language? There are plenty of newspapers and other
material to study and it helps to be able to figure out what is said from the
context. It will involve some guesswork but it keeps your brain thinking. With
context I mean that any big piece of news is likely to appear also in the news
written in a language you already know, so you can cross-reference and figure
out unknown words.

~~~
titanix2
> Mispronunciation is no big deal!

I'd argue on the contrary that it is the most important part when starting
learning a new language. People easily skip the pronunciation and phonology
part of their target language and then hit a barrier while still being at the
beginner level because they cannot go further: nobody understand them. Working
seriously on that part at the beginning is fundamental not to lost time and
waste effort later on. Heck, I've heard people with 3 years of Chinese that
still could not make most consonants correctly...

~~~
zzzcpan
It's not a barrier if no one understands you, still many years of learning to
do. To make a sound you first need to hear it many times and be able to
recognize and distinguish it.

~~~
titanix2
You don't need years to produce a phoneme that can be recognized by a native
speaker. The important point is two-fold: being close enough to the actual
sound, and working on minimal pairs where confusion can occur. It means you
don't need to sweat over how you pronounce /r/ in French because however you
make it it won't be confused with something else, but one sure should work on
making their Chinese /t/ and /tʰ/ correctly. Also for listening given the
sheer amount of audio and video that there is on the web it is easy to cram
the required hours of listening in a few months.

~~~
zzzcpan
My point is speaking early on doesn't help with learning the language and
isn't a barrier. On the contrary, it slows down progress. You shouldn't try to
speak or even attempt to write sentences until you have large enough
vocabulary in your brain with all the proper pronunciation and spelling
associations and patterns, like to understand 80% of the words in a random
article large vocabulary (or more, it takes many years to get to 99% and
higher). Otherwise you will learn wrong things and form associations with
wrong pronunciations because you had to make assumptions due to broken
methodology and those take a long time to get rid of and relearn.

------
lordnacho
A friend of mine is a translator, and similarly "earns money with" over a
dozen languages. Apparently once you've learned a few it gets a lot easier.
It's kinda fascinating that someone can learn so many languages.

My own experience with it is a it more organic and less deliberate, but I find
similar things. Once there's a sort of logic to each language that you've
acquired it gets easier to learn stuff, the holes kinda fill themselves. I've
never reached full confidence -say enough to do a degree in a non-language
course- in all my languages but a couple, but there's enough to build on for
most of them, and a lot of everyday stuff is okay. I also don't beat myself up
over grammatical issues like keeping loads of gender/subject/etc agreements.

On the software side it's maybe similar. You can group languages by various
traits like declarative/imperative, GC/manual, static/dynamic types, and a few
others. So that allows you to in gross terms translate a program from one
language to another, but it's not quite the same as knowing a language inside
out so that you fully use all the useful features.

~~~
yesenadam
I merely speak English and have been learning Spanish. (Enough so that using
capital letters for languages seems soo weird to me now!) In doing so, I've
learned at least as much about English and Latin. I wish I'd set out to learn
the other Romance languages at the same time[0], as learning one sheds so much
light on the others. e.g. in French, most words are recognizable as either
similar to their English or Spanish/Latin equivalents. And the verb structure
(the hardest thing about learning Spanish, although it almost seems natural to
me now) is very similar in all Romance languages. ('Je sais' may look very
different to 'yo sé', but (in some spanish-speaking regions at least) they're
pronounced almost identically. In spanish you usually don't say 'yo' because
the verb endings tells you who, but in French enough of the different endings
have become the same that you do always have to say who.) Romanian looks crazy
with all the words ending in -u, but all those words ending in -o in spanish
came from Latin nouns ending in -um; the -m was gradually dropped, and -u
became -o. (I can kind of read Portuguese - it's like Spanish with extremely
bad spelling - or vice versa.) I made a page a few years ago comparing common
words, verbs etc in those languages [http://www.adamponting.com/romance-
languages/](http://www.adamponting.com/romance-languages/)

[0] Well, maybe not - getting on top of one Romance verb system was enough, it
seemed soooo weird and complicated in the beginning. Although I'm still a
novice at using the subjunctive.

~~~
thraway-burnout
> 'Je sais' may look very different to 'yo sé', but (in some spanish-speaking
> regions at least) they're pronounced almost identically.

I speak French natively and Spanish fluently. I also listen to a fair amount
of Reggeaton, which is quite often in Spanish spoken with a Puerto Rico
accent.

I always find it interesting how the Puerto Rican pronunciation of "Yo soy"
sounds so very close to the southern French pronunciation of "Je suis".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syGLsyTQwW4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syGLsyTQwW4)

"Si tu eres un caballo, _je suis_ el dueño del hipódromo"

~~~
yesenadam
Ah, fascinating. They're both surprisingly similar, since I guess the spoken
language evolves not just differently but faster than the written. (I don't
think I even knew that Latin continuously evolved into today's Romance
languages until I read about the history of spanish..) My colombian friends
got me into reggaeton - I'd love some more links to your favourites please!
Thanks :-)

~~~
ivm
Check out "Calle 13" ("Residente" nowadays): he moved from reggaeton to rap
but the lyrics are decent and slow enough for a Spanish learner.

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Sharlin
This immediately brought to mind ”The Atomic Bomb Considered as Hungarian High
School Science Fair Project” [1]. Would be interesting to know if Lomb had any
Ashkenazi heritage.

[1] [https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-
consid...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-
as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/)

~~~
marton78
Given her parents' last names (Szilárd and Schwartz) and that she married a
Mr. Laub, she was probably of Jewish descent.

~~~
Sharlin
Yes, indeed!

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p1esk
She also managed to get a phd in chemistry!

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g3ph4z
bojler eladó

~~~
andrewshadura
mennyibe kerül? :)

~~~
g3ph4z
egy kormányváltásba

~~~
andrewshadura
nagyon drága

