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

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