What is the fastest way to learn a language? I'm a reasonably smart person and mathematically minded, but it seems most language teaching materials are for teaching a language to the common person with no background in anything, whereas if you have a basic understanding of grammars, set theory, syntax, etc., it should all come a lot easier if the language is taught in this context
Are there any language-teaching materials meant for mathematically minded people to make the process faster? Or does this not help?
I've always wondered this too. Bumping for interest
Nicholas Sanchez
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Juan Morris
depends on how hard in da paint you're willing to go
if you have some understanding you can go all in with surrounding yourself with the language but try to use association to "see" the structure of what people are saying, basically you can make sentences into equations. works for german at least.
Nolan Taylor
Talk with someone who speaks both your language and the one you are trying to learn, a lot.
Provided you both demonstrate some discipline, you can hold a basic conversation within a few weeks.
Learning a language on your own is next to impossible, and you'll generally find you can only say a few simple phrases you've repeated a thousand times, and half the shit you learned in textbooks is wrong. (I mean, just look at your average English textbook, and ask yourself if anyone actually talks like that.) It's okay for vacations abroad, but that's about it. There's just so many undocumented or difficult to document nuances in every language that some of it (perhaps ironically) isn't communicable, and has to be learned by repeated practice of example and counter-example, which no text can provide, and thus far, neither can any machine.
Though setting Siri to a foreign language and trying to get her to understand you is always a good drinking game.
If you're mathematically minded, then why are you asking? You should be more resourceful. For shame user.
Scolding aside, I will tell you that if you want to learn language the "mathematical" way, you just do have to do frequency analysis. It is an extremely simple method and you can pretty much "learn" as many languages as you want in tandem. I currently have a few dozen languages pinned to my wall right now that I'm doing character analysis on. I have no problem skimming texts in any of the languages as recognizing words and phrases is easy and then deducing meaning from that is easier. If you reduce the characters of every alphabet to a finite set of marks and their arrangements, you quickly see that there really aren't any languages made by humans which are drastically different from each other. As a caveat I am completely ignoring phonetics as I have zero interest in spoken or conversational language and am only going as "deep" into syntax as regular expressions, not whatever the "actual" rules are, which I don't know or care about. I also only read subject matter I'm interested in so figuring out what is being said is never difficult. treat language like a code to be broken and it becomes a cakewalk compared to actually breaking actual codes. allow yourself to look up grammar rules and it's even easier. don't ever read "how tos" figure it out yourself.
If you don't like that, I've heard for spoken language that shadowing is the fastest way to learn a language. Shadowing is essentially trying to mimic the language while you are listening to it, speaking parallel with the audio. It helps if you walk and talk. Another good tip is to create a rosetta stone for yourself by translating one text you are most familiar with into all languages desired, the lord's prayer is a common choice for obvious reasons. making word tables is also good.
Dominic Thomas
You're suggesting I literally figure out the language entirely myself. I made this thread intending to ask for speed purposes i.e. does anyone have language teaching materials already made, taught entirely within the context of grammar, syntax, and set theory?
Not to develop these materials myself.
John Young
It all depends, i for instance i don't really like maths, but i speak 4 languages and currently taking German.
It depends a lot on your "Base" language, for me i was born in Russia and brought up in Israel, so i was speaking Russian at home and Hebrew at school / with friends, those two languages helped tremendously with learning French and English, AMA if you want.
Wyatt Torres
As a beginner: Listening > Vocab > Grammar > Reading
Once you can speak fluently it's reversed.
Language learning can be incredibly difficult and there really aren't many generalizations you can make besides practice a lot.
Aiden Roberts
the fastest way is just coming in contact with the language 24/7. You don't really think much when you use a language, it's mostly memorisation. The logic is mostly learned as a kid. Even though a new language introduces new syntax and structure here and there it mostly works similarly to your first language (unless you're learning asian, arabic or something like that). I would think learning all the logic is overkill if you just wanna speak the language
James Kelly
you get a good teacher. whole lot easier to establish decent criteria for this, than getting into language pedagogy before getting into language.
Landon Collins
to answer further your question, if you want a process for mathematically minded people to use, just look for patterns and simetries on how words are formed and categorize them. It will serve as a mnemonic device and I believe you'll memorise words only seeing them once or twice
Nathaniel Ramirez
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Angel Lopez
Natural languages are far too complicated and arbitrary to approach this way. There does exist a field called mathematical linguistics where one approaches natural languages the same way as formal languages but essentially the way it's done is by considering the language as having a ridiculously complex grammar with thousands of unknown axioms and attempting to work around that rather than with it.
In general though it wouldn't be a good approach because this requires thinking about it. When you're speaking your first language (probably English) you're not thinking about how to conjugate this or that, what tense you're speaking in, what is the subject verb, whether to say "an" or "a", etc.... Instead you just have internalized a general feel for the language with an intuition about the rhythm and sound that you want in your conjugations. The way to obtain this is by listening to the language and participating in it's communication. They're exist languages out there with hundreds of genders, cases, tenses, and other conjugations yet people still manage to speak them fluently without much effort.
Jose Ortiz
Cheater. Showing cleavage during a game of chess works too well. There should be a rule against that.
Hudson Mitchell
what you have in your pic is a context free grammar
it's impossible to use them to define a set of rules for an entire natural language
I don't know where I read it but according to some experience watching foreign cartoons can be really good for learning the new language blind
Nolan Fisher
Can personally attest, it's how I unintentionally learned English (and a bit of Japanese, but it takes a lot more than animu to learn it).
Oliver Ross
>I'm reasonably smart
People who have to call themselves smart are generally not smart. This is just some unconscious statistics I have.
Leo Perry
not by looking at pics like you posted, by practicing and immersing yourself in the language. study what you posted if you want to learn about linguistics and eventually some cs formal language stuff
Lucas Reyes
I know languages can't be generalized in this way simply and that there are lots of caveats
I'm just talking about getting the core ideas and using it as a tool to learn the language faster, not to rigorously study every single grammar rule and generalizing it all
