Silly, everyone knows God speaks Esperanto

The point about creating sentences without your own grasp rather than straining too hard to express what you're unable to in the language yet is a very good one, and something I see all too commonly in students. As adults we already have developed minds capable of complex thoughts, and so when we begin learning a foreign language we think of it simply as a matter of substituting the equivalent words and grammar for what we would express in our native tongue.
I think of language more along the lines of the Saphir-Whorf Hypothesis, where language isn't simply the tool for transmission of our internal processes, but the looking glass through which we interpret and develop our own realities. As I'm sure many of you already feel from your Japanese studies, languages are never a matter of simply X word = Y word, X grammar = Y grammar, but an entirely different lense through which to comprehend and participate in human interaction. A paragraph in Japanese, when translated into English, and vice versa, is akin to a pastel painting rendered in watercolors. Yes, the same exact material is depicted in the piece, but the medium itself makes it another piece entirely.

I suppose I completely went off in a tangent there.. oh well

Back to the point about sticking with what one knows, I find that people to master material and advance more quickly if they sharpen what weapons they already have rather than going through the armory and picking out too many for them to handle, if that analogy makes sense. When I grade assignments I often notice how some students will stick to the grammar and vocabulary covered in the course, and use it without any mistakes, expressing themselves clearly, as opposed to students who try to express themselves how they would in their native tongue, looking up vocabulary and grammar out of their reach and botching it in the process.

For language learning it might be better to speak like a flawless simpleton than a drunken, drugged up intellect, I suppose

yukamina Wrote:Interesting that some people think in words and others don't.

Yes, the way people think seems to be really surprisingly variable. I think this is actually something Heisig didn't really take into account -- his introduction kind of makes the implicit assumption that everybody thinks more or less the way he does with a strong visual component... (I'm on the 'all words all the time' end of the spectrum.)

Aijin Wrote:I think of language more along the lines of the Saphir-Whorf Hypothesis, where language isn't simply the tool for transmission of our internal processes, but the looking glass through which we interpret and develop our own realities.

Interesting you mention Sapir-Whorf, because it's actually the reason I decided to study Japanese, i.e. to experience what it postulates first-hand. Of the languages available to me at the time, Japanese was the best one to do this with. Unfortunately, my proficiency in Japanese has never reached the level required to really make this test.

At any rate, current research seems to conclude that the S-W effect is very modest at best. With 20-20 hindsight, this make sense: the Japanese and the Europeans (for example) would be much more mutually unfathomable than they are if S-W were true in its full glory. It would be hard to explain how a quintessentially Japanese artist like 小津 安二郎 could enjoy such worldwide devotion if full-strength S-W were true.

But at the relatively superficial level of the casting of thought into a verbal structure, it is certainly true that very little carries over from English to Japanese, so at the time to speak Japanese the native speaker of English must start basically from scratch, like a child learning for the first time how to represent his/her mind in speech.

When I first started, I used to restrict what I thought about, and if there was a word I didn't know I just reassured myself that I'd come across it in Japanese some day, saving the need to look it up in my archenemy, English.
However, once I was reasonably happy with my skill level this came to be a pretty inefficient approach, so now I relish looking up every English word I don't know in Japanese, as it's a matter of picking up the left over scraps I don't yet know.

I think that a milder (trivial?) variant of the S-W hypothesis may be true but also probably far less amenable to controlled experiment. In this variant, language is not a direct determinant of the individual's possible range of thought, but rather a determinant of a culture's range of possible discourse. E.g. members of a culture whose language has no color words beyond "black" and "white" (and such cultures do exist, as amazing as it may sound) may have a hard time talking about anything that hinges on a distinction between, say, blue and green (though with enough circumlocutions they could manage). This doesn't mean (as the full-strength version of the original SWH may predict) that individuals from that culture would have any difficulty at all in making that distinction subjectively. (After all, non-human animals, who have no speech, can make extremely fine sensorial distinctions.) Conversely, the inference that a culture whose language has a great number of words describing qualities of snow must be one for which snow is a central preoccupation seems to me unobjectionable.

Now, to the extent that the culture in which we live, through the way it trains us, does have an impact on what we can think about, then maybe, something like the original SWH holds, but with an extra link in the chain of causation: it's not language → thought, but rather language → culture → thought. A good example of what I mean is mathematics. Mathematical knowledge is a cultural construct that is built by many people over many years. Sooner or later it reaches a level of complexity that would be difficult for a single individual to recreate from scratch, in isolation. Some training, from the culture, is absolutely required to handle the more advanced mathematical concepts at this stage. Therefore, to the extent that the language of the culture made it possible for mathematicians to collaborate and develop this complex body of knowledge, it can be said that language, indirectly, determined what a child born now to that culture can think about, namely he/she can now think about mathematical concepts that were not even conceivable to his/her ancestors many generations before. This last bit is reminiscent of the strong form of S-W, except that the role of language in it is very indirect and diffuse.

Again, this seems to me all very plausible (if not downright trivial) but also very difficult to test rigorously.

gfb345, if you haven't come across him already, you might find Dan Everett's experience and views on grammar and culture interesting. He's a former Chomsky disciple who publicly defected on the the culture/grammar/thought issue. That page has links to the debate triggered by his paper "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cogniton in Piraha". Also, a 2007 article in The New Yorker.

Thora Wrote:gfb345, if you haven't come across him already, you might find Dan Everett's experience and views on grammar and culture interesting. He's a former Chomsky disciple who publicly defected on the the culture/grammar/thought issue. That page has links to the debate triggered by his paper "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cogniton in Piraha". Also, a 2007 article in The New Yorker.

Thanks, Thora. I did see that New Yorker article. Everett is amazing!!! After I read that article it buzzed in my head for days.

BTW, anyone who has struggled with learning a language that is radically different from his/her own (i.e. most of the participants in this forum) would get a kick out of reading this article. IIRC it says that only two non-natives, Everett and his now ex-wife, have ever managed to attain fluency in the Pirahã language, and not for lack of people attempting it.

I'd really like to know more about this language; at least hear a recording of it. I remember thinking at the time I read the article that, from the way it was described at least, it seemed like a cross between human language and bird songs, or other such animal calls. I only hope that linguists get to study it in depth before it disappears. (The odds of this look grim, since it is so difficult for outsiders to learn it!)

(Now, isn't it ironic that the same economic development that enabled us to build the research apparatus needed to study languages and cultures like this one scientifically, also led to the destruction of these cultures?)

Aijin Wrote:For language learning it might be better to speak like a flawless simpleton than a drunken, drugged up intellect, I suppose

Damn. I talk like that in my native language...without the drinking... or the drugs...

gfb345 Wrote:I'd really like to know more about this language; at least hear a recording of it.

If you're interested:

thecite Wrote:

gfb345 Wrote:I'd really like to know more about this language; at least hear a recording of it.

If you're interested:

Thanks! That's really awesome. I was amazed at the repetitiveness, and also at how much Portuguese (conhece, muito, mais para cá, etc.) this guy injects into his speech. In the New Yorker article, the Pirahã are described as not only largely uncontacted, but also utterly uninterested in the "outside world", and yet this guy has picked up a fair bit of Portuguese. Then again, the fact that this guy is hanging out with Everett and letting himself be videotaped means that he is probably one of the more curious individuals of his tribe...

gfb345 Wrote:

thecite Wrote:

gfb345 Wrote:I'd really like to know more about this language; at least hear a recording of it.

If you're interested:

Thanks! That's really awesome.

This one is awesome too:

My already high admiration for Everett went up a few notches from watching that one. When he wants to he can sound like the most academic of academics, and yet his biography is anything but Ivory Tower...

gfb345 Wrote:My already high admiration for Everett went up a few notches from watching that one. When he wants to he can sound like the most academic of academics, and yet his biography is anything but Ivory Tower...

Yeah, I always reserve some respect for my fellow atheists
His speeches are very impressive, he should give a lot more.

Aijin Wrote:Back to the point about sticking with what one knows, I find that people to master material and advance more quickly if they sharpen what weapons they already have rather than going through the armory and picking out too many for them to handle, if that analogy makes sense. When I grade assignments I often notice how some students will stick to the grammar and vocabulary covered in the course, and use it without any mistakes, expressing themselves clearly, as opposed to students who try to express themselves how they would in their native tongue, looking up vocabulary and grammar out of their reach and botching it in the process.

For language learning it might be better to speak like a flawless simpleton than a drunken, drugged up intellect, I suppose

I think it depends on the context.

I feel like if I try and be creative, it helps me a lot. At least if I already feel confident in the grammar that was already taught. I would rather try and sound more natural than to sound like a textbook. Sometimes on Lang-8, I'll write a sentence that I know sounds wrong because I had to pull vocab from a dictionary, and look forward to the correction that comes because then I'll know how to say it properly. Sometimes it's a lot simpler than I expect and I can say it with the grammar and vocabulary that I know, just rearranged differently in a way that never occurred to me, and that to me is really helpful.

It'd be like, in English...
We'd say "It's hot" instead of "The state that the object is in is one of high temperature." Obviously we'd use the former, and the latter is exaggerated. But in other languages they'd express it completely differently and perhaps in a style of the latter.

It's hard to walk the fine line between arrogance and confidence though. But I was definitely more of the type to use homework and essays to write creatively, and do my tests by the book, straight up. Also, if I did anything in front of the class I would try and use what we learned instead of trying to be fancy like a lot of people tried to do because they wanted to show off how much smarter they were.