I feel like the big language models have proved this style of learning a language is the wrong approach.
I learnt Japanese; I studied it for 4 years and spent a year in japan.
You know what worked?
Lots of examples of people using particles.
What did not work?
Text books explaining what the particles do.
A grammatical study of particles is only useful after you’ve gained an understanding of when you should use them from shed loads of examples.
It helps you refine specific fine detail points of when to use them technically, and in formal writing.
For early learning, I posit it’s next to useless.
Language is not a well designed programming language full of orthogonal concepts.
This has long been an argument, but language models reallly nail down the fact that a probabilistic approach to “similar to existing examples” approach to language is categorically superior to attempting to construct semantically correct statements from “rules”.
And all language models of any use also have way more data than a human could read in a lifetime.
Look, you learned a basic understanding of particles and had some _meaning_ associated with them, before going out and practicing and finally learning the language.
No one is saying you’ll learn a language by just reading grammar rules. What text books on grammar says is that it’s a good support to give you an understanding that helps you process and create sentence so you can get to listening and speaking and learn to use the language.
I find that examples and technical explanations complement each other. Examples are important, but the grammar explanations help give an idea of what to focus on in the examples.
In fact I see it as a gradient. Vocabulary that stands on its own (like "apple") is best learned through examples. Stuff that is extremely structural (like how verbs conjugate in Japanese) is much easier to learn through explanations, instead of going through examples trying to find the pattern yourself. And there is of course middle ground, like grammar particles, which are vocabulary that also obey lots of rules.
Inferring rules from shed loads of examples instead of coding them explicitly is only superior for big language models because machines are faster at processing examples than humans are at implementing a comprehensive set of rules for the machines to follow. So it's a trade-off between slow and expensive human labor vs. fast and comparatively cheap machine labor.
When it's a human learning a language, that speed difference doesn't apply. When the choice is between a slow human processing a lot of examples vs. a slow human processing a small number of examples plus a description of the rule governing them, it's no longer so obvious that the first approach is better.
> it's no longer so obvious that the first approach is better.
That’s an easy arm chair argument to make.
I won’t argue it because, because there’s plenty of literature about the topic of immersion vs book learning for languages. I’ll just tldr; I spent a lot of time on this, and I am convinced you are just flat out wrong.
…but, instead of arguing over a difference in opinion, how about this?
Given that in digital products space is not at a premium, why not, instead of one or two contrived examples of each particle, have 50 examples of usage of each?
It’s easy. It’s addresses the problem of rule based approach vs examples by having both.
…because, a trivial example and a rule is quite useless for real world purposes; and if you cant make a bunch of different examples, you don’t understand the particle and shouldn’t be trying to teach it to people.
I mean, here’s a specific example:
> Just like the particle ? (ni), ? (e) is used to indicate destination or direction. They are translated as to in English and are often interchangeable.
> e is also used as a term to which we turn our actions.
> Also in this case it can be replaced by ?.
Are they totally interchangeable? Nope.
When do you use which? It depends.
Guess how you figure that out? Examples.
In many cases, both in English and Japanese rules become long lists of examples and specific cases when they are made complex enough to encapsulate the full range of when to use when.
Language models show categorically that predictive models of language work well. Anecdotally, the same approach works well for people too.
Why not offer both approaches? There’s totally a place for rules too. Let people pick what they want to use, try both and pick what works for them?
I'm not sure what qualifies his argument as an arm-chair argument relative to yours.
Grammar is a shortcut to a basic understanding, the primary complaint of users of Duolingo is the lack of grammar lessons, and having to infer rules solely through examples.
I don't know of anyone who is arguing for a single approach to language learning either. Pretty much everyone who has ever worked through a textbook recommends supplementing with real content, examples, media, conversations and so on. It doesn't invalidate the use of a textbook focused on grammar.
As for language models they're pretty much entirely irrelevant to human learning.
> Language models show that language is predictive, not rule based.
Training language models by making them predict missing words in a text is a trick to optimize their ability to extract information from text. That doesn't mean that making humans do the exact same task is the optimal way to learn a language. And it definitely doesn't mean there are no rules.
Millenia of linguistic research have succeeded in identifying a lot of rules in every language. You don't have to learn them explicitly, but it speeds things up a bit.
If you think there are no shortcuts to learning, you're either blind to the shortcuts you used, or you missed out on a lot.
Like dictionaries. They just tell you what a word means in a language you can understand! That saves a lot of time compared to having to figure out everything from context.
The Wiktionary entry for the particle ? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%AB#Particle lists eight different uses and has a note on the different nuance of ?. Do you think this entry is completely useless? If someone looks up ?, what information should they get?
The rules of a natural language are not prescriptive, but descriptive. Studying the rules may work if the language's grammar is similar to that of one's native language.
The answer usually comes from experience. Once you've learned a language through immersion and deliberate practice, you can never go back to the classroom setting.
Language learning gets obfuscated by the profitable industry that has sprung up around it, but in the end it's clear which method works the best.
There is an entire book (in Japanese) about ? vs. ?. I have read it. It breaks down hundreds of use cases and provides a generic guide to which one is correct. But it as nowhere near as helpful as just reading and listening to a ton of Japanese until I had a sense for which one was correct automatically.
edit: what I really want is a list of sentences which are exactly the same except the particle is different, and an explanation of how the meaning changes. I haven't found any resources like that online.
Agreed. One thing grammar books also ignore is that spoken Japanese skips lots of particles: nobody ever says ? in casual speech, and ?, ?, ? are often disposable. Okaasan mise itte pan katta, not *okaasan GA mise NI itte pan WO katta".
I'm curious why this occurs in Japanese and not English (or I assume other similar languages). It's easier and just as clear to say "mum went shop bought bread" but you very sound like someone that hasn't learnt the language properly.
On the flip side it's the things that don't get omitted in the Japanese despite being superfluous (the o- and -san!) that makes it even more peculiar.
Not a native in either English or Japanese, but fluent in both, and I feel that skipping particles in Japanese doesn't alter the flow of speech (because Japanese doesn't really have consecutive consonants), while it does in English (at least in your example).
I agree 100%. One big problem with Japanese textbooks is that they usually cover formal Japanese only. You encounter Japanese in the wild and see a lot of things handled differently from textbooks or at all. All Japanese All The Time was an intense early solution to this based around learning sentences over specific parts of speech and you intuit as you go.
I learnt Japanese; I studied it for 4 years and spent a year in japan.
You know what worked?
Lots of examples of people using particles.
What did not work?
Text books explaining what the particles do.
A grammatical study of particles is only useful after you’ve gained an understanding of when you should use them from shed loads of examples.
It helps you refine specific fine detail points of when to use them technically, and in formal writing.
For early learning, I posit it’s next to useless.
Language is not a well designed programming language full of orthogonal concepts.
This has long been an argument, but language models reallly nail down the fact that a probabilistic approach to “similar to existing examples” approach to language is categorically superior to attempting to construct semantically correct statements from “rules”.
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