I am learning a bit of 3D modeling in Blender so I can mod games that I like (just for private use), I do get stuck sometimes on the silliest things and Blender docs don’t help, but neither did LLMs tbf when I tried to troubleshoot issues with them. I wonder how I can make it a bit less tedious.
I see. Well, I already outlined why I thought the situation was happening — if you were trying to teach, I think you did it poorly and oscillated in your messaging from “this just works for me, personally” to “this my unorthodox method of teaching/explaining conjunctions in Japanese” (it’s clear even in comments here that you had to clarify multiple times your goals to different users).
Perhaps I am wrong but I personally don’t believe good teaching would get rejected by people (not organizations — this does happen) because of dogma. Being taught/explained something well is a very visceral experience, dogma can’t override it.
The other problem (people mistaking your personal experience for something else) could be improved by changes in your writing and messaging, and this is what I attempted to advise, I suppose. The writing will likely still be misinterpreted to a degree if what you’re saying about dogmatic thinking in the community is true, but, well, that’s the nature of communication — like with teaching, it involves working with particularities of other minds, simply being correct, methodical and rigorous in how you present arguments/topics can still result in failed communication.
Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable conversation. I apologize again if I came off negative or if my criticism was misplaced. Certainly wasn’t my intention. I genuinely enjoy many of the raised topics and was just interested in talking about them.
P.s. I would love read your failed experiences learning the language you mentioned in the blog and the comments here and what/how the traditional methods failed for you, if you ever decide to write about that, btw. I think it is a very beautiful moment when something one struggles with finally “clicks” —- I am fascinated by it and how it happens for different people.
I did, I didn’t have a problem understanding your goals as I said in one of the comments in the beginning:
> I understand you were writing about your own process of filling the gaps (btw, I also find it easier, or at least more fun, to understand the basics of grammar before memorizing all the specific forms)
(you focused on the fact that you also aimed to teach and we discussed that aspect a little bit), but a lot of people in the comments didn’t understand the goal of your post — why do you think it happened?
And I said that, in my opinion, this is where your post failed to communicate what you intended to communicate and you have a crowd of “aktshually, this is wrong” in the comments.
Seriously, without any snark intended, if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and this is how I solved it for myself”.
Bad teaching elicits negative response, so don’t mislead people into thinking you will teach them anything. If they learn because your heuristic works for them, they will.
I might be wrong, of course, but I believe (and hope) that you will have a lot more empathetic and friendly response.
You didn’t hit a nerve, I just like talking about communication and learning.
No, that’s just rigorous writing. Rigorous pedagogical approach implies helping other minds to solve problems and obstacles with acquiring knowledge. Your approach results in coincidental learning because you don’t care about the mind of your learners and their problems, you care about your own.
I do suggest to experiment with your writing — try writing only about your own journey (and nothing else!), try sitting down with another person, multiple people, and teaching them the same thing. Try writing a post for them and them only after the session and see whether there are any differences.
A good teacher is not the one who proclaims themselves to be one.
As I said in the comment above, I do enjoy it as well, what I am pushing back is calling it pedagogical approach or teaching.
If you taught, you know that you and your mind don’t matter much in the process of teaching, your student’s mind is in the center.
Talking about something based on your own experience into an abstract void and hoping that some lurker’s mental model matches yours is not a rigorous pedagogical approach.
Well, if it’s teaching, it’s not very good then as you don’t seem to know much about your supposed students struggles with learning this concept. You only know your own.
E.g. the visualization you’re proud of — what problem does it solve for your potential learners? Do they actually have this problem? Not your assumption of the problem but you actually seeing them experiencing this problem and offering them visualization and seeing how it helps them to close the gap? If yes, why do you think your approach failed for HN audience?
Someone learning from your journey is not you teaching them.
Teaching is a very particular skillset and craft, especially teaching languages. It should be grounded in a teacher’s own experience learning something as it helps them to empathize with the learner but simply talking about how you learned something is not teaching.
You don’t explain conjunction in such details as as well and it is not universally present feature in all the languages though.
Writing about learning languages is tricky because you cannot write for a universal audience, you have to write for speakers of a particular language (I suppose English in this case, since the article is in English), you’re also lucky if you know whether they have ever learned any other foreign language, and what particular education system they’re coming from (some education systems teach basics of linguistics and its terminology, some don’t — a language teacher might find themselves having a class full of people who have never learned what a clause, subject, object, or conjunction are, who don’t have the mental model to operate with these categories).
I don’t speak any Japanese and your explanation was understandable to me (even if there were some redundancies) but I think the negative reaction in the comments is just because of mismatch of your mental model of a language and people’s mental models.
I understand you were writing about your own process of filling the gaps (btw, I also find it easier, or at least more fun, to understand the basics of grammar before memorizing all the specific forms), but I think it’s not very clear from the article as some in the comments seemed to expect to learn from it, rather than learn about how you solved a particular obstacle in your learning.
I hope I am not coming off as bashing you or your writing. I now regret writing my original comment now that I read all the other replies — it looks like I am your work calling the article redundant, I am sorry for that. I hope you continue writing about your learning path — language learning is fascinating, and the more information we share about how we learn, the easier it is for everyone. And Japanese is a very beautiful language! Kudos to you for tackling it.
As an unrelated tangent, I love seeing it when the “thinking” in a native language leaks into the writing in another, I find it so endearing and intriguing. My French colleagues sometimes produce the weirdest English sentences (perfectly understandable just unusually phrased), that alone occasionally sparks my interest on picking up a bit of French — I just want to learn how different the grammar and sentence construction is!
Obviously, it applies to other languages, I’ve just been working a lot with French. Well, and my own language often leaks into English, of course.
I wonder what the author’s native language is as they seem to struggle with the concept of alternation.
For me, the first half of the article could be removed and the learning could simply start with “there are two types of verbs in Japanese (+ some irregular verbs), one type conjugates without alternation in the root, the other with”. That’s enough to get the mental model but my native languages have alternation to begin with so it’s an intuitive concept.
I can image that because of motivation to sell his ideas and writing, he is in incentivized to sensationalize the research he refers too. Not that the author claims to be a scientific writer but many people find it intellectually dishonest to try to push your opinion and often clever but, ultimately, anecdotal observations about the world via “scientific” language.
Oh god I love how quiet European trains are. I used to take trains a lot in my childhood and until my 20s in Ukraine. Sometimes trains were buzzing with voices during the day, especially if someone was drinking. Not all rides were like this, of course, but in general I remember a lot of noise. German trains are so soothing in comparison!
I am autistic. I can’t even count the number of times I got into dangerous situations because of my crappy social skills when strangers chatted me up. I don’t know, maybe strangers are well-meaning and kind to neurotypical people, or maybe people with good social skills can understand the intentions of strangers fast and cut off suspicious interactions before they are harassed or conned while I realize what’s happening only when it’s already happening, or maybe shitty people can sense my chronic social confusion and target me specifically… but I personally quite enjoy modern headphones etiquette where I live and the norm being not having random interactions. It feels way safer than in pre-headphones era (I grew up in a relatively low tech environment in a small town).
Plus, processing spoken language is physically exhausting even when I am having an enjoyable conversation with someone I love.
Other people already commented on the overstimulation aspect.
Not suggesting that the world should be remade to accommodate my needs, of course, just wanted to share my experience, I guess.
Ah, I see, sort of like figuring out the boundaries of your knowledge base and seeing if you have missed any connections between concepts?
I suppose it might be useful for learning/ideation. I should try something like that — it could be an interesting synthesis/writing exercise to try to connect concepts that are far removed in your own mental model.
I don’t personally use Zettelkasten but I can see how it benefits from the visualization — the system itself is basically building a graph (cards are nodes and links are edges), it makes sense to have a tool that lets you work with it visually.
> Aren't you curious what this KB contains and how it has evolved over time?
Can you give a more specific example of what you have found in this data?
I already know what KB contains and how it evolved — I was the one who put things into it, after all.
Just to clarify — I am not being snarky or criticizing your project, I am genuinely curious. I like data visualization.
P.s. Also, as an unrelated tangent, please feel free to ignore it — why did you put a hypothetical wife’s insights into quotation marks?
Because modern tech and modern tech support has a terrible UX in general built by engineers around their engineering heuristics.
By the time a non-tech user reaches the point of seeing an error they are cognitively overloaded and since the errors are pretty much incomprehensible to the users, the user doesn’t get the feeling of it being anything that’s tied to their actions. It’s just anxiety-inducing noise, it never registers as something that has a meaning, so even copying and pasting an error feels like a meaningless step that their overloaded and already anxious brains skip.
If errors are meant to be shared with tech support, the UX should reflect that (and some interfaces do that where you just have a button to send the crash report or smth). If errors are meant to give users agency to solve the problem on their own, the UX should reflect that too.