I recently wanted to try one of Kató Lomb's [1][2] preferred language-learning methods: getting a book in a foreign language and reading it (and re-reading it), figuring out words and phrases as if it's a big puzzle and writing them in the margins. From her book "How I Learn Languages" (1970):
> I recommend buying your own books for language learning. They can be spiced with underlines, question marks, and exclamation
points; they can be thumbed and dog-eared, plucked to
their essential core, and annotated so that they become a
mirror of yourself.
> What shall you write in the margins? Only the forms
and phrases you have understood and figured out from the
context.
> Ignore what you can’t immediately understand. If a
word is important, it will occur several times and explain
itself anyway. Base your progress on the known, not the un-
known. The more you read, the more phrases you will write
in the margins. The relationship that develops between you
and the knowledge you obtain will be much deeper than if
you had consulted the dictionary automatically. The sense
of achievement provides you with an emotional-affective
charge: You have sprung open a lock; you have solved a little
puzzle.
I can't really bring myself to write in the books themselves though, so I've been using separate paper. It feels wrong, even in a cheap book, like I'm defiling it.
I'm no polyglot, but talking and reading are very different skills.
My personal working theory:
Native speakers learn to speak first, then they learn to read and write.
From talking with high-level ESOL speakers, those that learned from written material have some very strange patterns of mistakes you can hear in their English - where they've programmed their pronunciation incorrectly very early on with basic mistakes.
Although English is an outlier here. Because English native speakers learn lots of different ways to manage how speaking and spelling are different. Plus because making speaking mistakes after learning words in books is such a social status mistake.
Personally I think if you want to learn a language, the ideal is with someone who corrects all mistakes, as though one is a baby. Although it is difficult to find this even when one can spend months in a foreign country. Not everyone feels comfortable correcting an adult.
The people that have learned English that I have spoken with that are the best all have a common trait: they've lived in a country and they MIMIC. The most amazing was a hippy Japanese guy: I remember one sentence where he shifted in the middle from broad East London to a strong Aussie accent due to where he learned the words.
I learnt conversational Spanish when I was 30. Next attempt will be 2-3 months immersed Korean as a middle aged guy so I'm looking forward to trying out my opinions!
I learned French mostly through conversation and immersion. This next language is pretty simple phonologically, and I'm not concerned about having a good accent in it, so the reading-puzzle route is something interesting to try.
Yeah, why you want to know the language strongly matters.
My natural bent is strongly focused on reading and words. Learning by talking and mimicking is not my strength at all.
I suspect that is why I've noticed the pattern that natural mimickers are the ideal language learners (who I would like to emulate).
Although my beliefs are incoherent... I want software that starts with substituted latin letters into a Korean layout that slowly morphs into Korean (maybe choosing words carefully that have been taken from English).
> My natural bent is strongly focused on reading and words.
I wonder what mine is. I feel like I don't take to reading in a foreign language too easily (though I have trouble focusing on reading generally), but I definitely struggle mimicking as well. Some times I really wonder how I learned French at all, I got to my current level of ability quite quickly, though I'm sorely lacking a lot of fundamentals both in writing and in speech.
I agree though, you can see a big difference in language learners on Youtube between those who practice speech vs those who mostly read. For example, Alexander Argüelles [1] is a famous polyglot who's written quite a few foreign-language grammar books, but the few videos of him speaking show his heavy accent.
For Korean, I wouldn't bother with Latin letters. Hangul is simple:
> A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.
– King Sejong on (what would become known as) Hangul
Reading in Korean would have been quite difficult historically, when it was mixed with Chinese characters à la Japanese [2], eg.
> 悠久한 歷史와 傳統에 빛나는 우리 大韓國民은 3⸱1 運動으로 建立된 大韓民國臨時政府의 法統과 不義에 抗拒한 4⸱19 民主理念을 繼承하고, 祖國의 民主改革과 平和的統一의 使命에 立脚하여 正義⸱人道와 同胞愛로써 民族의 團結을 鞏固히 하고, 모든 社會的弊習과 不義를 打破하며, 自律과 調和를 바탕으로 自由民主的基本秩序를 더욱 確固히 하여 政治⸱經濟⸱社會
Tribal warfare is often ritualized [1]. I remember reading that the tribes on what is now Canada's West Coast practiced real, brutal warfare compared to their eastern counterparts, due to the scarce resources.
In Burden of Dreams [2], the documentary about the making-of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, some of the tribal extras would occasionally go off in their motor boats for raids on neighbouring tribes. It's so interesting to me, tribal life would be fascinating to experience.
I didn't say "a grand time". It would also be fascinating to live through the Fall of Rome, the Pazzi conspiracy, the Black Death, or any number of other unpleasant things. I'm pretty on-edge about the interesting times I'm living in right now, but they are certainly interesting.
The suggestion has been brought up and dang has commented on it over the years. He doesn't seem opposed to it per se. It's possible your descendants may live to see dark-mode HN:
I've never seen someone miss sleep paralysis before. I get it, but the hallucinations that people describe never happen to me. I just become aware that I'm about to wake up, but I can't yet control my body or even breathing. I always know not to panic, yet I always panic and try desperately to start moving. I can always see the room, but it's a dream version because my eyes aren't really open and it looks different once I'm truly awake.
I don't have much sleep weirdness, but when I'm about to fall asleep, I frequently imagine 3D object spinning and rapidly changing size. Kinda like the 3D TempleOS sprites [1], but 5x faster and increasing/decreasing size at the same rate.
I also have a favourite string matching algorithm, the "Generic SIMD" from this post [1] by Wojciech Muła (I haven't really read the other two SIMD algorithms since I wasn't planning on working with intrinsics).
There were some good comments that post's thread [2], including from burntsushi of ripgrep.
I like burntsushi's string-searching work because it's well documented, split modularly into libraries/applications, and runs the gamut from low- to high-level (his blog posts and comments online are extremely helpful too). I use these three tools which he maintains:
Low level: memchr [1];
Medium level: Regex (Rust crate) [2];
High level: ripgrep [3].
Other names to look out for are the previously aforementioned Wojciech Muła, as well as Daniel Lemire (of simdjson [4][5]). Not SIMD-specific, but Data-Oriented Design can be a big help in terms of thinking about SIMD and cache-friendly data layout (as well as trimming down the work that the computer needs to do, generally). I've talked that to death, so I'll just link those comments here [6].
I've also implemented a SIMD accelerated, but case in-sensitive (*) search algorithm as an stb-style single header library, also based on Wojciech Muła's work.
See the performance comparison in the README, it's about 6 times faster than libc.
(*) - full UTF-8 support, but only works for UNICODE codepoints where the UTF-8 encoding lengths are the same for lowercase and uppercase. There are only 27 out of 40576 pairs which aren't handled (listed in the README).
> UNICODE codepoints where the UTF-8 encoding lengths are the same for lowercase and uppercase.
This very same property got me to post this [1], which sent me down the rabbithole of learning about Unicode in earnest and building my Unicode tool. Which may have an initial release some time this millennia... maybe.
Sometimes there's an offset (like with Latin, +/- 32), sometimes lowercase and uppercase is interleaved (eg. Latin extended), and sometimes they are in totally different blocks simply because they forgot to add both letter cases at once... (the distance of the codepoints affects UTF-8 encoding difference the most).
I've also paid attention to optimize the most common case where both UTF-8 encodings' first bytes are the same (that's 40508 pairs out of 40549). But no escape, it must handle the remaining 41 pairs specially in a slower code path, which would not be needed at all should UNICODE guys did their homework better.
One of my favourite ones in the post I linked is the "ff" ligature. It uppercases to "FF", meaning in UTF-8 it goes from one encoded character to two, and from 3 bytes total to 2 bytes total.
Lots to read about here for those interested (and that's without getting into `Casefold`, `NFKC_Casefold`, simple vs complex case mappings, the CLDR, etc.):
I think there's a lot of interest in German culture in Japan. You see German characters and phrases fairly often in anime, pronounced just as badly as English in anime.
The popular anime Frieren names all its characters on-the-nose German words. Plot twists get spoiled for German speakers, for example one of the characters is called "Lügner", Liar:
This may or may not be relevant, but one thing about lower case generally:
If you're doing string matching via Casefold or NFKC_Casefold [a], characters from both the needle and the haystack are converted to lowercase (with exceptions for algorithm stability reasons) before being compared.
Why lower case and not upper case? Theoretically, the choice is arbitrary, but given the distribution of lower-case vs upper-case characters in most texts, you can use the fact that lower case occurs more often to optimize your algorithms by skipping the case conversion for most characters.
> I recommend buying your own books for language learning. They can be spiced with underlines, question marks, and exclamation points; they can be thumbed and dog-eared, plucked to their essential core, and annotated so that they become a mirror of yourself.
> What shall you write in the margins? Only the forms and phrases you have understood and figured out from the context.
> Ignore what you can’t immediately understand. If a word is important, it will occur several times and explain itself anyway. Base your progress on the known, not the un- known. The more you read, the more phrases you will write in the margins. The relationship that develops between you and the knowledge you obtain will be much deeper than if you had consulted the dictionary automatically. The sense of achievement provides you with an emotional-affective charge: You have sprung open a lock; you have solved a little puzzle.
I can't really bring myself to write in the books themselves though, so I've been using separate paper. It feels wrong, even in a cheap book, like I'm defiling it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat%C3%B3_Lomb
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Kat%C3%B3+Lomb
reply