social.noyu.me

man we are in such a bad place if textbooks die out as a way of learning. i am not going to tell you the traditional system of education is the best way for everything, but i think that textbooks have incredible value for learning about grammar for second languages, for example

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

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 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?