Tag: Education

The concentrated vs the disconcentrated polyglot

Map showing the distribution of language famil...
Supertribal linguations in geographic space

I posted this on here today, when it seemed a fruitless discussion on what should be a fun activity, a play with words, was turning into the next Punic War, if you’ll pardon the Pun.

There’s more than one way to be a polyglot. Let’s allow the not-strictly-true-but-true-enough assumption that the average word in any linguist‘s portfolio takes the same time to learn, and let’s give a value of one minute to that.

Now, say one polyglot has learned 60,000 words taking 60,000 minutes of his life but these are divided over 60 languages. This Polylot speaks 60 languages with one thousand words in each language.

Another has learned 60,000 words taking 60,000 minutes of his life, but these words are concentrated into 4 languages. He speaks 4 languages with 15,000 words in each language.

Questions:

1. Which of these two polyglots has learned more language?

2. Which is the greater linguist and polyglot?

3. Who has worked harder?

4. Who has the greater achievement?

5. Who has the more impressive achievement?

6. Who gets more utility from his work?

Anyone who can answer these questions, kindly go ahead.
Because I can’t.

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Do elephants need the Goldlist method?

The eye of an asian elephant at Elephant Natur...
The eye of one who doesn't forget in a hurry...

I’ve put down a goldlist for years and picked it back up and continued. The long term memory is the long term memory. Humans and elephants have it in spades. The difference is that we can turn ours off by switching on the short-term memory in the process of conscious cramming or deliberate rote learning. Elephants probably cannot do that – an elephant never forgets. Their sample rate is higher as their brain is 7% Hippocampus and not just 5% like ours. They have a language which we have a lot of difficulty in understanding as it is in infrasound, travels 10 km and they use they feet and trunks as well as their huge ears to pick up the auditory signals. We need machines to hear any of this, and then we don’t really experience it but see it as vibrations on a screen. They on the other hand can eavesdrop on human speech and they take a particular interest when their keepers describe what plans they have to do with them.

If elephants were formal linguists and polyglots then they probably wouldn’t need something like an SRS or a goldlist method, as they are very natural in their use of their facilities. But since we humans do very silly things with our minds in aid of learning, under the influence of schoolteachers utterly uneducated in how the brain actually works and using a “one size fits all” method for learning, we do need something that can get our minds working more optimally again while approaching the learning of other languages. And that’s what this method and some other methods try to offer.

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RL101 – 1: Some Enchanted Evening to learn Russian!

 


Production date: 12 July 2006
Playout date: 12/7/2006
Camera: Logitech webcam
Post Production: WMM
Location: Home
Soundtrack info: “Some Enchanted Evening” – karaoke version
Languages used: English, Russian
Animals featured: None

The start of what has in fact been the most popular thing I’ve ever done on the internet, this is the first ever lesson of Russian in the cult course done as Viktor Dmitrievitch Huliganov.

Here in Huliganov.tv these are going to have their own section, and each of the films will have additional notes.

The vocab of each will be listed here, and you’ll be able to ask your questions in the comments sections also, and get maybe a longer answer than the ones that it’s possible to get in the original YT format.

This was only actually going to be a series of lessons on the Russian alphabet, as the vehicle not only for Russian but for other languages also, but in the course of the ten lessons, in which there are hardly any Russian words as such in  the first few lessons, people started asking for real full Russian lessons, which is what then happens in RL102.

In this lesson no actual letters are given, only info on the historical background of Cyrillics. It still got to over 60,000 views! People simply love the mix of serious linguistic education with humour, so that’s what I tried to do with this course, each lesson of which contains some didactic material and then a joke and a song.

Enjoy!

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