Efforts toward effort-less language acquisition

December 23rd, 2022

The purpose is to explore HCI in language acquisition in reading while interacting with the real world, besides the general language learning methods such as grammar rules, non-compelling exercises, forced to speak, and so on.

A question: Am I learning?

Repeat words as a way the world makes sense to the mind.

Literature or reading is always the driving force of my personal language learning, I was commented 'you are not learning anything!' by my italiano teacher when I wrote a paragraph on a vocation to Padova using words and grammar she didn't teach. Yes, I referred to something from the books I read, and abstracted symbols from the journey, while consulting my friend about grammar. Besides the negative feedback, I had much fun constructing the little piece.

"Wasn't I learning the language?", I questioned. This is really something that I can not explain in the language class, still, I can hardly speak and remember&apply the Grammar quickly and well.

"Wasn't I acquiring language?" when I first hear the phrase"language acquisition" by Prof Stephen Krasen, the doubts and self-deny were somewhat relieved (it's like I found a proper explanation for my language failure). I started to think about what I have done, naturally, as a language lover.

As I said, my interests in multi-lingual come from reading. I m just fond of words(text) and stories, not only what the stories are but how they are told. I m curious about the magic words lego world opened but also hidden by the translator.

The intention for me to go to Italy and study is from a book series and an author --L'amica Geniale, written by Elena Ferrante. This is also the first time I felt Italiano as “una lingua bella”. The 1st sentence I knew is "io non ci sto".

During my travels around Europe, I went to ancient bookstores where I m surrounded by weird words, and classical music from nowhere but the books.

I talked to the place owners about the representative authors and the reader-friendly copies for language beginners. I got recommended from an owner in Frankfort on Schopenhauer's "the world as mind and representations" after we exchange ideas about Filosofia; I came across the story of human stupidity(umana stupidità) and economics in the Middle age(Pepe, vino e Lana economico in mezzo) in Padova; I was introduced to a collection of fairytales (fiabe) with dialogues (dialoghi) written by an Italian author Luigi Capuana in Forlì…

The purpose is to give one or two product ideation and show some HCI designs in progress, to 'promote' language acquisition through reading and text recognition which I found super interesting,

almeno.

Culture Acquisition

I have no intention of proving this reading to be whatsoever functional, but to offer an aspect of thinking on language acquisition. It is quite hard for one to be a master in R,L,W,S in many languages, but it's quite possible that we can read and merge more words under comprehensible context(stories, science fiction, academic writings, fairy tales, poems, quotes in the lucky biscuits 🥠 etc).

In terms of cultural acquisition:

In the course of my travel and study, I discovered the richness of European languages and texts. For example, many Chinese readers are influenced by writers such as Schopenhauer and Han Byung-Chul (German), Elena Ferrante or Carlo Cipolla (Italian) mainly through the mouths of one or two translators, it's awesome though, I wonder if it is possible to establish some connections between texts (the intertextuality). People would become more interested in the language&culture behind the stories. For example, my interest in Italy and Italiano was born from reading Ferrante's work <L'amica Geniale>,; I could easily recognize other works by Han Byung-Chul in German bookshops after reading his ; not to mention my love for the writers such as Saussure, Norman Chomsky, Aby Warburg, Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin, Derrida, Schopenhauer, and I was not content to receive translations up to this point, but to come further into the culture to build my own version of the translation and understand the intertextuality between languages.

Aby Warburg only seems closer via a translation copy in italian--, and Paul Valéry was introduced by an English interpreter Berkay Ustun.

Nachleben der Antike Warum baut ein Privatmann eine Bibliothek?

Intertextuality is one of the driving forces for building word block, which makes it a cross-linguistic literary linking tool, embodying an infinite regression of meaningful links in different versions of the translation through the same identifiers(works, authors, abstractions). To simplify, It is like a literature dictionary.

Merge

Words are the unique identifiers of a person's thoughts. Concepts merge within and between books. For instance, when I read by Eric Lenneberg, he mentioned 'language' many times.

(VI) His hypothesis that language is a central,maturationally defined mental function which is relatively independent of learning, that "language is the manifestation of species-specific cogitive propensities."

(P3)The growing conception that language is essentially a localizable cereal function.

language* is "the expression and reception of ideas and feelings."*

Or the brain

His conception of the brain was that of a highly integrated organ constantly changing over time according to certain epigenetic trajectories. Therefore information-processing or man-machine models of cognitive functioning were of limited value to him because they ignored the forth dimension of time.

Across #Language, Here we do a bit of merging: (blocks shown below are from my own reading fragments)

Language* is a computation system based on recursive enumerable digitally infinite entities, the simplest way of computation is binary set formation called Merging.*

--Norman Chomsky

Writers spend their lives searching for the right combination of words, finding the right tools of expression: what language, rhythm and sense of speech are appropriate to tell what I know and what i learn. Without the right vocabulary, without a long training process of learning to combine words and language, it is impossible to produce something authentic-- the truth that emanates from a properly worded text, dissolves in the language; it is directly linked to the energy that emanates from the sentence.

--La frantumaglia, Elena Ferrante

Things become diverse:

…Ethereum does this by building what is essentially the ultimate abstract foundational layer: a blockchain with a built-in Turing-complete programming language, allowing anyone to write smart contracts and decentralized applications where they can create their own arbitrary rules for ownership, transaction formats and state transition functions…

--Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum whitepaper

Most likely, both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.

--Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

Zipf discovered the law through the observation of the frequency of words in the English language, but the law holds even for randomly generated "languages," as well. The law states that, "given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc."

--Zipf’s Law

etc.

I m not intended to summarize or manufact the relationship or weights of those sentences(for now), but to propose a possible way that the mind computes, through merging to understand the concepts.

we merge those concepts not in a linear order, just like Chomsky said "mother nature doesn't care about linear order".

writing is the result of reading, borrowing the right words from others‘ writings, and re-organizing (ordering) them. There is no beginning and no one knows when it began. For me, the meaning of multidisciplinary reading is to know the concept even explained in quite different contexts.

texts or words themselves are not mathematical notations which more formally defined and applicable, but they are notations for thoughts while reading and writing. Behind it now we have explanations like universal grammar (Noman Chomsky).

Product design

A literature dictionary of multi-lingue

word block as a text interface
- data storage with ownership
  - the text and its metadata will be stored on IPFS, a content-addressing data storage network.
- multi-search
  - by topics ##
    - #Schopenhauer #Ferrante
  - by key words /
  - by DID
- merge
  - when similar text is found, can do merge (save to folder-- *dataverse)

A tool to record the fragmented reading

an android app to be more touchable
- real location
- ease of input and search

Blockchain in the design

IPFS storage

CID-based content addressing
- your text is not removed by anyone

Ceramic data streams

data model design to enable complex query

DID

control the ownership and access of their data

Filecoin Virtual machine (FVM)

write smart contract
tokenize word blocks

中文

以下文字目的是探索人机交互在阅读中的语言习得，同时与现实世界互动。除了一般的语言学习方法，如语法规则，非强制性练习，强迫说话等。

一个问题：我在学习语言吗？

复述词语是大脑理解世界的一种方式。

文学或阅读始终是我个人语言学习的动力，当我用语言老师没有教过的单词和语法写了一段帕多瓦之旅的小片段时，我的意大利语老师评论说 '如果你这么干，你就什么都没学到！'。是的，我引用了我读过的书中的一些东西，并从旅途中抽象出一些符号，同时让我的朋友帮我修定了语法。除了不友好的反馈，我在构建这个小作品的过程中很开心。

"我没在学习语言吗？"，我质疑道。这确实是我在语言课上无法解释的事情，我还是很难顺溜地开口，也很难快速地记住和运用语法。

"当我第一次听到Stephen Krasen教授的 "语言习得 "这句话时，我的疑虑和自我否定得到了一定程度的缓解（为自己的语言失败找到了一个恰当的解释）。我开始思考，作为一个语言爱好者，我自然做了什么。

正如我所说，我对多语言的兴趣来自于阅读。我只是痴迷于文字和故事，不仅是故事的内容，也是它们如何被文字本身所讲述的。我对译者 打开但也掩虚的门：那神奇文字乐高世界 感到好奇。

我去意大利学习的意图是来自一个系列的书和一个作者--埃莱娜·费兰特写的《L'amica Geniale 我的天才女友》。这也是我第一次觉得意大利语是 "一种美丽的语言"。我记住的第一个句子是 "Io non ci sto"。

在我环游欧洲的过程中，我去了一些古老的书店，在那里我被一些奇怪的词句包围着，还有一些除了书以外不知道来自哪里的古典音乐。

我和店主们聊起了有代表性的作者和适合语言初学者阅读的读本。在法兰克福，在我们交流了关于哲学的观点之后，店主给我推荐了叔本华的《作为意识和表象的世界》；在帕多瓦，我看到了人类的愚蠢（umana stupidità）和中世纪的经济学（Pepe, vino e Lana economico in mezzo）小册子；在弗利，我被安利意大利作家Luigi Capuana满是对话（dialoghi）的童话故事集（fiabe）。

这片文字目的是给出一两个产品的想法，并展示一些正在进行的人机交互设计，通过阅读和文本识别来 "促进 "语言的学习，至少我觉得这超级有趣。

文化习得

我无意证明这种阅读有多实用，而是提供关于语言习得的一个方面的思考。一个人要成为许多语言的听说读写（R、L、W、S）大师是相当困难的，但我们很有可能在可理解的语境下（故事、科幻小说、学术著作、童话故事、诗歌、幸运饼干🥠中的好话等）阅读并合并更多的词汇。

在我的旅行和学习过程中，我发现了欧洲语言和文本的丰富性。例如，许多中国读者受到欧洲作家的影响，如叔本华和韩秉哲（德国），费兰特或卡洛·西波拉（意大利），主要是通过一两个翻译家的介绍。与此同时，我在想否有可能在文本之间建立一些联系（互文性），那么人们会对故事背后的语言和文化增添兴趣。例如，我对意大利和意大利语的兴趣来自于阅读费兰特的作品（陈英教授的翻译版本）；在阅读了韩秉哲的《倦怠社会》之后，我可以很容易地在德国书店里认出他的其他作品；更不用说我对索绪尔，阿比·瓦尔堡，保罗·瓦莱里，沃尔特·本雅明，德里达，叔本华 等作家的喜爱。我并不满足于到此为止接受翻译，而是要进一步走进文化，建立我自己的翻译版本，理解语言之间的互文性。

阿比·瓦尔堡第一次显得靠近时，我只是听说了意大利语的译本《日志》，而保罗·瓦莱里是由英语翻译者Berkay Ustun介绍的。

Nachleben der Antike Warum baut ein Privatmann eine Bibliothek? ——Aby Warburg

互文性是构建词块的驱动力之一，这使得它成为一个跨语言的文学连接工具，通过相同的标识符（作品、作者、抽象）在不同（翻译）版本中意义的无限回归。简而言之，它就像一本没有中心的文学词典。

合并

词语是一个人思想的独特标识。概念在书中和书之间合并。例如，当我阅读埃里克·伦尼伯格的<语言发展基础>时，他多次提到 "语言"。

(VI)他的假设是，语言是一个中心的、成熟的、相对独立于学习的心理功能，"语言是物种特定的认知倾向的表现"。

(P3)越来越多的人认为，语言本质上是一种可定位的大脑功能。

语言是 "思想和感情的表达和接受"。

他对大脑的概念是一个高度集成的器官，随着时间的推移，根据某些表观遗传的轨迹不断变化。因此，认知功能的信息处理或人机模型对他来说价值有限，因为它们忽略了时间这个第四维度。

在#语言 概念下，我们做一点合并：（下面取自一些我自己的阅读片段）

语言是一个基于递归可列举的数字无限实体的计算系统，最简单的计算方式是二进制集合形成，称为合并。

--诺尔曼·乔姆斯基

作家们一生都在寻找正确的词汇组合，寻找正确的表达工具：什么样的语言、节奏和语感适合讲述我所知道的和我所学的。如果没有正确的词汇，没有一个长期的学习组合词汇和语言的训练过程，就不可能产生真实的东西--从一个措辞恰当的文本中发出的真理，溶于语言中；它与从句子中发出的能量直接相关。

--碎片，费兰特

语境多样一点：

...以太坊通过构建本质上是最终的抽象基础层来做到这一点：一个具有内置图灵完备编程语言的区块链，允许任何人编写智能合约和去中心化的应用程序，他们可以为所有权、交易格式和状态转换功能创建自己的任意规则…

--Vitalik Buterin，以太坊白皮书

最有可能的是，八卦理论和近水楼台先得月理论都是有效的。然而，我们的语言真正独特的特征并不是它传输关于男人和狮子的信息的能力。相反，它有能力传递关于根本不存在的事物的信息。据我们所知，只有智人能够谈论他们从未见过、接触过或闻过的整个种类的实体。

--尤瓦尔·诺亚·哈拉里，《智人》(Sapiens)