tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jul 31 11:47:47 2004
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Re: mu' lo' QaQ 'oSbogh mu'tlheghmey
On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 [email protected] wrote:
> Even an infant acquires language based on what he hears spoken around him.
> Everything he hears is a "phrase from an expert", i.e. a native speaker. Of
> course, no child learns a language from some kind of bilingual phrasebook. He
> acquires it first-hand and from scratch. He creates his own internal grammar
> and vocabulary, which he continuously modifies as he hears new phrases.
Although keep in mind that when people are teaching infants to speak, they
instinctively start speaking in a manner much more suitable for the infant
to integrate. Early stages of learning involve a lot of pattern
recognition. You show a child a red ball and say "ball" a lot, and
eventually they associate it with ball. Change the colors a few times and
eventually they figure out that "ball" refers to spherical things, not
just red spherical things.
This is one of the reasons why I wish Klingon had maybe just a few more
everyday Earthling words; when I went to put notes on everything in my
cube at work, for example (to hopefully establish a more pictographical
association with the words), I found myself really stuck for some of the
more simple things like "desk" and "drawer".
> For a second-language learner, as a Klingon student must be, the expert
> phrases I advocated would take the place of the native conversations, and the
> accompanying translation would take the place of context, including situational
> context.
I just happened to be taking some time off from work this past week (one
of the reasons why I've posted as much as I have :) and I flipped on the
PBS station to find the show "Guten Tag", which teaches German. It was
really interesting to see *how* they did it. They set up a "scene" and
have a few actors go through it, using *extremely* simple dialog. They
subtitle it first in English, then they show the scene again, subtitled in
the German. It was very interesting to see, though I'm not convinced I
could learn much that way.
As an example of the dialog, the one I remember, two people were on a
stage with three different sofas. They were trying to figure out which to
buy. The dialog went something stilted like this:
"I like this sofa."
"I do not like that sofa. I like big sofas. (moves to next sofa) I like
this sofa."
"How much is that sofa?"
"600 Marks. How much is that sofa?"
"800 Marks."
"This sofa is bigger and cheaper."
etc...
So I think there's really a place for all approaches. Yes, using the
language in a conversation is definitely really good practice. The
problem is that if you have a very complex conversation, it's information
overload. I've read through some of the longer all-Klingon messages,
using things like pojwI' to translate the words I don't remember, but
there are so many words I don't remember that when I'm done, I still have
no association of word-to-meaning. That's just me, YMMV.
What's unfortunate is that we really need a better medium than just text
to really teach a language well. We can get by, reinforcing the
Klingon-to-English translation, but I think to really internalize the
vocabulary, one needs to establish a better mental relationship with it.
This is where the "See Spot Run" books come in. :)
Maybe someone needs to come up with a web CGI or something that can show
pictures with words. I know having pinned a piece of paper with the word
/quS/ to my desk chair at work has helped me remember *that* word. :)
Hmm. Maybe I'll try to work up a rough example tomorrow. :)
...Paul
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