social.noyu.me

something like half of all the noob questions you see in online language learning forums are from duolinguo users who are facing the bitter struggle of puzzling out a language's grammar without a textbook, and even for similar languages this is a horrible thing you shouldn't do

and don't even get me started, don't even get me fucking started, on duolingo's terrible approach to japanese teaching

but this isn't just about languages. i think this "grammar" thing extends to similarly-shaped things in other fields. for example the fact i haven't just bought a music textbook has clearly been holding me back in my musical ambitions. my knowledge of musical "grammar" is bad

i feel very blessed in retrospect that i had the opportunity to learn some of my second languages in traditional education. it gave me skills and intuitions that the chatgpt generation will not have and that kind of frightens me

i mention specifically "grammar" because there are a lot of parts of language learning that a textbook does not do well! in the end, you only become good at a language by using it, by exposing yourself to real usage, not textbook examples. but it's critical to bootstrapping

shout out to the english wikipedia page "Swedish grammar" btw. it was literally the first or second thing i read when i started learning swedish, and it saved me a lot of hassle!

how do we solve the problem that nobody wants to buy a goddamn book anymore

maybe the answer is just that even though the market has shrunk, it is still a market for the people that need it, and while the old publishers may die, there will be new ones, and they will carry the torch

i think we are going to have to make our peace with the fact that the old world is dying. the things we care about must be saved, but the specific institutions that once provided them will not exist in a recognisable form

@hikari I'm curious to see if there will be more attempts to bring textbooks into a new medium to help address this; there have been a few attempts in the maths / graphics worlds (e.g. Interactive Linear Algebra and the Graphics Codex), but authoring seems too difficult as a whole, and it's not clear what form that would take for other fields

@philpax feels like there's a gap here. we actually had these magical tools for creating interactive content: "adobe flash", "adobe director" and so on. but they're all functionally dead if not actually literally so.

@philpax i assume everyone who takes a serious stab at this ends up inventing their own whole new pipeline, and that's wonderful for them, but it is not conducive to these becoming more common

@hikari I often think about how Flash was killed 15 years ago and there's still no meaningful replacement

despite the promises at the time, it turned out that the HTML stack can't be bent into shape; the closest I can think of is Figma, and that required rebuilding half of the web stack and still only approaches a portion of what Flash was capable of

with the passing of time, I remain amazed that Flash existed as it did, and saddened that we may never see an equivalent experience again

@hikari at the same time, I don't know what an ideal solution for this kind of thing *would* be; it's not clear to me that there is a standard suite of tools you could extract, or solutions you could apply across works

for language, I could see it being more of a hypermedia thing - being able to easily access a reference, examples of use, etc - but then you're approaching a language learning platform, and those already have their own solutions in place

@hikari how do i pick a book for picking up a language

serious question btw

@whitequark oh, that's a great question, and i'm honestly not sure i can immediately answer it. is there a particular language you're interested in learning?

@hikari it used to be german, mainly because i like how it sounds

but these days i feel like it might just not be warranted with the very few useful hours a day i have due to fibro

@whitequark oh, interesting. i feel like i'd struggle to really recommend good resources for self-directed study, but i personally have a great affection for that language and would love to answer questions about it, if you ever have them

@hikari idk i mean i could just use german to talk to you or something. probably more useful than resources per se

@whitequark Das wäre was!

@hikari @whitequark

drive-by suggestion:

https://content.csbs.utah.edu/~ehrbar/cap1.pdf

💨

@unspeaker @whitequark oooooooooh thank you very much

@hikari honestly: I love buying books, there have been periods lately books were the ONLY media I would pay for

I shy away from textbooks because that name implies to me
- bound in a space inefficient way
- instead of fucking telling you what you need to know tells you 60%-80% and leaves the last bit as a sort of Socratic riddle as "exercises"
- writing is dense yet ungainly

The exception is collegiate history textbooks, which for some reason seem to have none of these issues including binding

@mcc yeah textbook might not actually be the best word. really what i like is reference works

@hikari which is? I can't use duolingo because of accessibility issues they don't care about fixing, but yeah, why is the japanese learning module particularly bad?

@esoteric_programmer duolingo is based on this kind of idea of language immersion where they tell you as little as possible about the language and throw you straight into the text. unfortunately, this only really works for sufficiently similar languages, and you really can't treat japanese as if it's Just Another European Language. but duolingo is not the first or the last language-learning system to make this mistake

@hikari yeah, that's such a noobie mistake to make, like, not even the alphabets they write with are similar to ours, how are you supposed to learn to pronounce it?

@hikari yeah we've tried duolingo and the conclusion is that (a) it sucks and (b) the gamification shit doesn't work on me

@whitequark it maybe has some value for just getting some more basic vocabulary in your head, but you know what also does that? language textbooks. lmao

@hikari this might be a bit of a surprising statement given our background, but we don't really agree with this. textbooks are very useful and we think they should stick around as something people can reference, but we don't feel like they are necessarily a good way of learning. the "introduction to that thing -- but only for people who already know it" meme captures the essence of what we see as the problem (even though we own our fair share of that type of textbook)

@hikari it feels like what you want from traditional education is something like "a structured curriculum, including appropriate amounts of direct instruction"?

the instructors we've found most effective have had a particularly impressive ability to build curricula and lectures that don't actually contain too much "textbook" type material but instead fundamentally seem to focus on *reshaping worldviews and patterns of thinking*

@hikari e.g. there is a particular style of "fancy-university academia-brained usually-bottom-up abstraction building" approach to EE/CS especially but also other disciplines that we've noticed many of the "globally top-ranking" schools have, and which we are *really* drawn to. but this is... not something that comes directly from or via textbooks? it's just a particular _vibe_?

@hikari this worldview-reshaping vibe comes not only from worked examples in lectures but also a *particular* style of building guided homework, labs, and projects (which, incidentally, thus drags in a lot of out-of-scope-for-this-discussion problems and criticisms regarding TAs and labor relations)

@hikari the thing that really frustrates us, that we don't get and don't know what to do about, is that basically all of our own attempts to teach other people things using this vibe have not only failed but often seem to get explicitly rebuffed

we have no idea why or whether it is even something that we ourselves are doing wrong

@hikari we unfortunately didn't get a "fair" exposure to second-language learning in school (we did Mandarin and stumbled hard into the realization that normal curricula are completely unsuitable for heritage speakers), but what we've seen of (American) first-language English grammar instruction is *completely worthless*

@hikari for reasons that we also don't understand, compulsory education English teachers seem vaguely allergic to grammar, and *especially* allergic to "more academic" analysis of things such as tense–aspect–mood (imo the hardest part of English grammar)

we ended up getting taught this by our father who presumably learned it from some (possibly-non-US) english-as-a-*second*-language teaching material

@hikari whenever we need to triple-check something that we aren't sure about even as a native speaker, nowadays we tend to reach for _linguistics_ reference material and not "English grammar" reference material that we were (barely) shown back during compulsory schooling

@hikari wrt music, we actually did learn a bunch of music theory by rote memorization. it ended up being completely useless and we've forgotten most of it. it also just... never made any sense?

@hikari

... because nobody successfully performed the _worldview shift_ to explain that "this is *one* framework for applying constraints to and studying the infinite variations that is sound/music. it is useful *because* many creative endeavors involve consuming, analyzing, borrowing from, and remixing *existing* culture in a manner which is *in conflict* with the ideology of 'individual creative expression' which is being concurrently propagandized"

@hikari we eventually figured this out via brute-force after getting exposed to enough Content™️ featuring a) microtonal music done as a rejection of western music theory b) non-western music theory

western music theory of harmony also just completely doesn't seem to match how our brain actually interprets said sounds, but we haven't had a chance to dig deeper

@r bingo

@r oh yes first-language english grammar instruction is universally awful as far as i can tell

@r different kinds of awful depending on where you live! but awful

@hikari which is really weird! right??

like, academic linguistic analysis of English is actually really good and imo rather accessible as far as academia goes, and we have so much ESL curricula around the world. but it feels as if compulsory-education teachers just go "lalala i can't hear you" towards all of this?

@r it's because 1) native speakers of a language do not realise that they already know how their own language works better than anyone can teach them, 2) the purpose of teaching grammar in schools tends to be to force someone to speak in the Preferred Manner, not to improve understanding

@r purpose in the purpose-of-a-system-is-what-it-does sense, not necessarily the designed purpose

@hikari at least from what we've seen in the US, they're not even doing a particularly good job at 2, unless you take particularly uncharitable interpretations of "Preferred Manner"

in high school we happened to be one of the few people in our school who ever crossed over from the "honors/AP" cohort (vaguely "upper set") to the "regular" cohort, and we saw the following:

@hikari

* advanced class: no attempts to teach grammar at all. grammar would occasionally be mentioned when analyzing other texts, and if you didn't know it you were expected to either know how to look it up yourself or to know how to fake your way past it. everybody there had wealthy educated involved parents, after all. people who tried to be showoffs in their own writing and use e.g. some archaic subjunctive construction would be corrected if they got it wrong

@hikari

* regular class: the teacher explicitly said that he used to do explicit grammar instruction but gave up because all of the students universally hated it. he dedicated one or two lessons in the entire year to simply correcting "these are common errors that native english speakers make in formal writing, which can mark you as less-Educated™️ "

presumably the latter is what you had in mind? at least he was honest about it :/