Tested for Japanese. No problems so far, except sometimes repeating the desired number of times didn't work (mobile). Seems to work now.. But looping infinitely produces only three repetitions.
Really good UI with little friction: easily hone in on sentences, easily move on or jump ahead, see vocabulary, create Anki deck. Took a while to discover loop settings, but it's a good choice.
Only now discovered the "custom span loop mode". Great! I was about to ask for it!
AI mode is unobtrusive and helpful.
At last, found something that could need a touch up.. The starter deck from the example story is a bit nonsensical. It features words like URL and site from the Librivox intro. お is "translated" as "honorific" which is kind of true, but it's only a marker. A beginner might not know this. たち shows as answer "plural marker", there it worked.
Integrating a flashcard app is no small feat. Impressive. I wonder what algorithm was used. Does it scale?
And wow.. you did seem to go out of your way to stay ahead of those comments. Respect for that.
And my respect for dissecting this aspect of Japanese grammar. You seemed to be dissatisfied spending time learning something that, in your eyes, wasn't yet condensed to its most basic rule. And I agree with that feeling. It leads to truely understanding how something became, eventually to discovery. Your article reads like you did that research mostly for yourself, but wanted to share what you found. That's a refreshing attitude, although the chances are high that field has been tilled thoroughly by Japanese linguists. I have to say I can't remember having seen any explanation about secret vowels/consonants in Japanese grammar books - I know some. But that may be because 1. I haven't read every there is, 2a. it's sort of doing archaeology on language and/or 2b. it doesn't add much to simplify learning the rules.
I confess my affair with grammar was always a cursory one and that may be because it proved to be so much more effective to go with examples, and pick that conjugation up as a side dish. But that's just me.
Compressing the rules does make sense, but at some point you just have to learn what's there. Language and grammar is always more or less arbitrary. Elegant yes, but arbitrary. It can't be derived from fundamentals. But the payoff makes it a worthwhile endeavor learning a language so strange from English as Japanese: you get a glimpse what the essence of language is. What a great motivation that was and is.
Some things that might spark your interest and keep exploring:
There are ごだん verbs that look like いちだん:
要る, 帰る, 限る, 切る, 知る, 入る, 走る, 滑る
Verbs with the same dictionary form but belonging to different conjugations:
切る/着る, 帰る/変える, 要る/居る, 減る/経る, 湿る/閉める, 練る/寝る
Keep up the good work. Doing research with the door open is a noble endeavor in its own right.
I'm leasing my kidney. I'm 27 and did the calculation, it's just more profitable than selling. Picked this trend up on TikTok and can recommend. When I retire I plan to get it back.
Agree. Experience shows that fluency arises when you don't have to think about rules anymore. My advice is to not spend too much time learning grammar rules (actually, no time, like native learners). Leave the rule discovery to your unconscious brain and get going with rote repetition.
Your brains "language module" is not a slow computer, computing rules, it's a fast lookup-table.
The topic brings an interesting melange of people together. That makes up for it and made me upvote.
I too noticed a shallowing of the piece somewhere in the middle. It started with an interesting observation but ended with triviality (like you'd expect from a synthetic mind without a body).
Really interesting someone brings this up here. It's kind of an obscure little piece of text. But I always thought, yeah, this is more or less how we produce thought, and how LLMs operate, too.
You are compressing thoughts/ideas to symbols. Via a visual feedback loop your mind can operate on more complex ideas as your working memory doesn't need to hold everything at once. The term "second brain" really applies here. While you're "doodling forth" you become proficient in your on-the-fly invented symbol language.
Key is also the slowdown effect of being careful to draw properly. It's like a harness for your thought process. Fixating your thoughts on paper is a way to be safe not to go astray; like a climber who puts hooks in the wall.
It's really more complex than it seems from the outside. A picture of a group of people drawing lines in the sand comes to mind. And one wonders - once again - how language came into the world.
Thanks for sharing! Today I discovered the Jibun Techo. Always great to discover products made by people who put so much thought and craft in. Not surprising the Japanese excel in this art.
Set the mood for today.
Unfortunately can't upvote.. your karma says 6666. May return when the spell is broken.
As soon as we'll have sufficiently advanced BMIs the so called hard problem will go away by itself.
Consider probing a midlevel mobile phone at some hundred contacts. You might be convinced to have a thorough account of the physical reality yet still no idea of (and no way to know) whats going on.
To the problem of qualia.. I think it's the mechanism of the brain to default-name recurring patterns, being part of a simplification/compression process, without which reasoning (computing) or reasonably storing experiences would be impossible. I guess visual qualia like color and shape have to be the first things the brain learns and attaches "default" symbols to. Consider other basic qualia too, like to be saturated, to feel warm and then higher qualia that build on these like to feel loved or accepted in a social community.
It's difficult to argue how there could be a fundamental truth to qualia. But consider that there'd be no difference in our communication, even if your red is attached to a symbol signified by 8NCYUW6D0H5C (lets just assume this) while my red is encoded as being GAUTP1P6YUUZ (those patterns obviously have to be encoded as frequency patterns as we perceive close colors as similar without computational overhead). Eventually it will turn out, qualia from person to person are encoded quite similar, as we are genetically so similar. But consider also synaesthetia. Wrt animals, it WOULD feel strange to be a bat or any other animal as some of their sensory apparatus is so different.
To this, author makes a good point: "Today, we do not have an exhaustive external account, but this is not the same as having proof that no such account is possible."
I imagine consciousness as 'theater mode' of the perceiving mind. As such it seems to be one part of the brain that integrates all sensory inputs into one Multimodal Experience Stream™.
As to TFA.. - I'm by no means up to date to the current affairs of the consciousness debate, but - is there really a "fierce debate [...] raging"?
Check out Joscha Bach who argues consciousness is an illusion. Looking for some material to back up, I hit on this text. Flying over it I already find it more enlightening than the posted article, so I post it here (without guarantee):
"The simulation becomes “more real than real” in our experience because it constitutes the entirety of our conscious access to ourselves and the world (Metzinger, 2003; Seth, 2021)."
"This perspective doesn’t diminish the richness or importance of conscious experience. On the contrary, it highlights the remarkable complexity and sophistication of the processes that generate our subjective experience. The constructed nature of consciousness isn’t a defect or limitation but a remarkable achievement — a way of making an unimaginably complex reality manageable for finite cognitive systems (Clark, 2016; Dennett, 2017)."
> If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of
> soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is
> also a collection of atoms.
sounds cynical in my ears. energy demand of these toys will cause many problems, people elsewhere starving being one of them.