=thinking =language =education =neural networks
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
— Richard Feynman
Here is a simplified diagram of the mind of someone reading English text and writing English text in response:
Here is a simplified diagram of the mind of someone fluent in English who is beginning to learn French and studying using flashcards with word pairs:
Red arrows indicate the main path
of information from flashcards. Maybe you can see the reason I don't
consider flashcards an optimal approach to learning languages. That approach
can load word associations into a vector lookup system, but what's needed is
encoder/decoder training. For that to happen with flashcards, the best-case
scenario is training across the entire chain of two encoders to increase
similarity at the concept latent space, and flashcards are inefficient for
that because they provide a small amount of data without context. Anyone who understands neural networks knows that large amounts of
in-context real data is better than repeatedly using small numbers of small
fragments.
So, instead of using flashcards, I think it's better to
read pairs of complete paragraphs with the same meaning, without repetition.
For example, reading a book together with its translation. The foreign text
not being understood as it's read doesn't mean that reading it is
ineffective as an approach.
One reason flashcards are overrated is
that a lot of language tests are for "vocabulary" because association
between word pairs is easy to test.
Align your spine.
Once someone has become fluent in a 2nd language, they typically gain the ability to write and understand sentences using words from both languages. That implies integration of the encoders and decoders, which presumably happens via distillation, as in this diagram:
Considering that this happens
with more practice and is seen in more-fluent people, it's probably better
overall.
This integration of multiple systems for different languages
seems to me to be fundamentally the same process as integration of
understanding of multiple scientific fields. The equivalent of reading a
book together with its translation for that would be reading a book that
considers questions and problems from the perspective of one field and then
from the perspective of a 2nd field. However, that's less available than
translated literature, because there are fewer multidisciplinary experts
than bilingual people, and multidisciplinary expertise is harder to evaluate
and thus harder to find. Also, people capable of doing that would probably
instead write a single version that integrates their understanding of both
fields. That would be fine for learning from but possibly undesirable for
students trying to pass a class or people trying to fit into an established
culture of a field.