Cascade Languages

Q1: How long should a unit of vocabulary be?

Q2: What is a word?

I have started with these two questions because my objective is to expand you view of language and make you see it more abstractly. Here is a third question:

Q3: Do words need to be what words are?

I bet you have never wondered that! Let’s return to Q1:

How long should a unit of vocabulary be?

Consider time, time is an abstract thing that exists in the world we were born into. Though we did not make time, what we did do is discretise it. For the purposes of analysis and reference, we decided to subdivide it into units. The basic unit we called a ‘second’, moving on to ‘minute’, to ‘hour’, ‘day’, ‘week’, etc. Though we made a minute 60 seconds, if we wanted to, we could agree to change it and make it, say 83 seconds. If we did that, we would not be changing time but we would be changing how we subdivide it.

Back to language, consider the string of language below

sheisabeautifulbookkeeper

That there is a string of English language. Just like with time, no person reading this can say that they created/invented the string of English. That being so though, we do however have the power to choose how we unitise the elements that make it up. This takes us into the field of vocabulary and words. The current standard way would be to unitise it as

 [she] [is] [a] [beautiful] [bookkeeper]

  . . . and to name these standardised units ‘words’. That’s how we the humans, with our conscious minds have chosen to standardise and unitise the English language. Perhaps our subconscious minds do things differently. There would be nothing wrong with unitising the elements of the string of English as

 [sheis] [a] [beautiful] [book] [keeper]

 Perhaps this is even how our subconscious minds unitise the string. The point I am trying to make is, the way we have chosen to unitise English may not be the same way our brains do so. Maybe our brains have a mind of their own.

 I theorise (without any proof) that our brains store and unitise language differently to how we do. This theory stems from observing how language learners produce language in different stages of proficiency. I outline the stages below

Beginner:

In the earliest stages, language learners produce language one word at a time. They pause between words and you can even see them thinking as they workout what their next word will be.

Advanced Beginner:

Though still beginners, when it comes to topics they are most comfortable with or expressions they most commonly use, advanced beginners do not produce language one word at a time. Some word combinations come out as one unit. Examples of these could be [I-am], [why-is], [how-do-you], [we-are-not], etc

Lower Intermediate:

More than just producing some word combinations as units, lower intermediate speakers produce some whole sentences from templates. For example, consider [I don’t want to ______ because _____]. For an intermediate speaker, this template is saved in their brain as a unit then when it is needed, the speaker extracts it from memory and inserts the appropriate words or phrases where the blanks are. It is almost like the template is a root/infinitive and the completed sentence with inserts is a conjugation of the template.

Intermediate to Advanced:

In the Intermediate to Advanced stages, learners have more and longer units saved in their brains. Not only this, they are faster and smoother at extracting these units and personalising/conjugating them as need be.

Is it better to teach yourself a language or to use a teacher? That is the question. In this blog, I make the case that it is better to use a teacher. To understand why a teacher is better, let’s analyse how self-taught people learn languages. Teaching yourself a language consists of 3 things:

(1) Compiling resources (i.e. books, apps, websites, podcasts, etc)

(2) Developing a study plan

(3) Self-teaching (i.e. the actual learning)

On top of this, self-teachers spend a considerable amount of time adapting and experimenting with the three things above. This is because self-teachers have a lot that they have to figure out. A self-teacher wanting to learn a new language does not know where to start. There is a plethora or language learning resources out in the word. A self-teacher has to find the resources, sort through them and then select a few to use. They won’t know how good the resources are until they use them and what’s worse, the very best resources may not even be in the mainstream. A self-teacher has no choice but to use a trial and error method to find resources that are good enough. I say ‘good enough’ because one can’t trial resources forever.

Resources are the What. A study plan is the How. How do you use your resources to teach yourself a language? Should you use a textbook and go through it page by page? Should you use all the resources equally? In what order are you going to study the topics? How often will you revise? All this pertains to the study plan. Just like with resources, some trial and error will be necessary.

Finally, the learning itself. This should be the only thing a learner spends her time doing but, if the learner is a self-teacher, it unfortunately won’t be. Self-teachers spend a significant amount of their time preparing and planning how they will learn. For learners using teachers however, things are different. A learner using a teacher outsources the preparation and planning to someone else and only has to do the learning. That is why I it’s better to use a teacher than to teach yourself. There is a caveat though.

Aliens from the planet Cascadia arrive on Earth one day. These aliens are language enthusiasts and have come to Earth to learn English. No one on Earth can speak Cascadian and so there is no one who can teach them English. That’s not a problem though, the Cascadians have a machine that can process the text of any language and extract the vocabulary and grammar contained in it.

They go to a library and scan all the books in the library. They obtain two printouts. One contains a list of all the grammar rules of English and the other all the words of English. This is where you come in. You have been assigned to the Cascadians to help them learn English. The first question you have to help them answer is

Question: Should the Cascadians learn the Grammar or Vocabulary first?

Not only do you need to provide an answer, you also have to justify it. Fortunately, you read our article about the Best Method for selecting words to learn. You know how to answer the question.

You take the two lists and append columns to them. Next to each word on the vocabulary list, you write how frequently each word is used in English. You do the same for the list of grammar rules.

After doing that, you reorder the lists from most frequent to least frequent. That was all good and clever, but you haven’t yet answered the question. Grammar or Vocabulary first? The analysis continues.

It’s clear that the best way to learn grammar and vocabulary is not to learn them separately. The best way is to combine them and then to first learn those grammar rules and vocabulary points that are most useful (i.e. most frequently used). That being your reasoning, you combine the lists.

To the question, grammar or vocabulary first, your response is:

Answer: Both. Combine the two and learn the vocabulary and grammar in the order of most frequently used.

I spoke with a guy once who told me that he learned Italian without learning the grammar. Was he right? Is it possible to learn a language without learning the grammar? The answer is no. One cannot form language without knowledge of grammar. What was the guy saying when he said he learned Italian without learning the grammar? To answer that question, we need to explore what grammar is and see how it differs from its frequently confused cousin.

Grammar is what makes one of the sentences below correct and the other incorrect:

a)    See her I yesterday

b)    I saw her yesterday

Though one of the sentences is incorrect, they are both trying to convey the same message. Sentence (b) is the grammatically correct sentence and sentence (a) has a few things wrong with it. Grammar is the stuff that makes (b) correct and (a) incorrect. You need to know grammar to know a language but the thing you may not need to know is its cousin linguistics.

So, what is linguistics?

To explain linguistics, let’s do a linguistic breakdown of sentence (b)

I - Subject pronoun (1st person)

Saw - Verb (past tense verb form of “see”)

Her - Object (3rd person feminine personal direct object pronoun)

Yesterday - Adverb

Linguistics is the technical side of grammar and what makes it tangible. You don’t need to know linguistics to know which sentence is incorrect, but linguistics is what you need to explain why (b) is correct. Here is how you would do so:

English is an SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) language. The subject “I” is said first, followed by the verb “saw”, followed by the object “her”. The last word in the sentence is “yesterday”. “Yesterday” is an adverb and sets the context of the sentence. “Yesterday” tells us that the context of the sentence is in the past and is also the reason why “saw” is used instead of “see”.

You can know and even communicate in a language without knowing its linguistic technicalities but you do need to know what makes some sentences correct and what makes others incorrect. This knowledge is grammar and every proficient speaker of a language has a good (though maybe intangible) grasp of it.

The guy who told me that he learned Italian without learning grammar, what he meant by that is that he learned Italian without learning linguistics.

Though not many attempt it, languages can be learned and taught while teaching little to no linguistics. Take Cascade Languages as an example, it teaches Spanish and French using stories and lessons and it does so without the use of words like verb, pronoun, preposition, conjugation, conjunction, infinitive, adverb, clause, etc.

Imagine I played you a podcast in the language you are learning and I slapped you every time you heard a word you do not know. On average, how often would I slap you? What a weird question to begin with, right? It may not be obvious yet, but the answer to that question is a very good way of measuring your language abilities. If I were cocky, I would even say it’s the best method.

“Okay, Mr Cascade Languages, prove it,” I hear you say. “My pleasure”, I respond. The measuring of language abilities has at least one thing in common with the measuring of rainfall. With rainfall, you first need to choose the part of the world whose rainfall you want to measure. With language abilities, you first need to specify the environment against which language abilities need to be assessed. Let me use an example to demonstrate what I mean.

Hiroshi is a Japanese high school student who is studying English so he can study Philosophy in Australia. ASR is a good method for measuring Hiroshi’s English abilities (I’ll get to what ASR stands for in a minute). The environment in the case of Hiroshi is that of a Philosophy student in Australia. The first step of ASR is to sample the environment. Australia already has Philosophy students and sampling the environment would simple consist of recording the speech and language interactions of Philosophy students in Australia. We find some Philosophy students (say, 5 or so), then stick recording devices on them and record all the English they are exposed to for a semester. This will include everything they say, hear, read and write. The second step of the ASR method is the most fun (for us, the assessors).

Having compiled a recording that is representative of the language environment of Australian Philosophy students, we assess Hiroshi against it. We play the recording and whenever Hiroshi is exposed to a word he is not familiar with, we slap him. Not only that, we keep track of the frequency we slap Hiroshi. When Hiroshi is still a beginner, we would be slapping him at a high rate (e.g. 200 slaps a minute). As Hiroshi’s English abilities improve, the rate also reduces. After Hiroshi’s abilities have improved to a level where we would consider him proficient, the slap rate will be low (e.g. 5 slaps an hour). Oh, ASR stands for Average Slap Rate.

The moment has come. We have discussed the Perfect method, the Good Method, the Better Method and now we are up to the Best Method. At this point you are wondering, “huh? What are these methods about?” Good question! Let me remind you.

This is the fourth article in the series about methods for identifying and selecting words to learn. The Perfect Method for identifying words to learn involves using a device that can look into your future to identify the words you will need the most in the future and then noting them down and learning them. It’s obvious why this method is perfect.

The other methods, (i.e. Good and Better) involve identifying useful words to learn by analysing datasets of recordings of speech. The dataset could consist of all the episodes of your favourite television series or a recording of all the conversations your sister had with your grandmother last summer. It’s obvious that the Better Method is the one that involves a dataset that is more relevant and more similar to the environment you will find yourself in. That’s the recap, now let’s get to the Best Method.

The Best Method simple involves improving on the Better Method. In the last article, we analysed the example of Ana who was learning Spanish so she could talk to her grandmother who only speaks Spanish. Ana identified the most useful words to learn for this purpose by analysing (pun not intended) recordings of conversations between her sister and her grandmother. The Best Method involves improving on where this method is weak.

One of the ways in which Ana’s method is weak is in how it only involves one set of recordings. If in addition to analysing the conversations of her sister and her grandmother, Ana also analysed the conversations of other grandmothers and their grandchildren, this would improve the method.

The other improvement is an improvement that should be made with great care. There are many things about the future which you cannot control nor predict, but as someone who is guaranteed to always exist in your own future, there are some elements of your future that you can control. Another way you can improve on the Better Method is to incorporate into it words related to topics you will make a great effort to talk about. For example, If Ana’s grandmother was a teenager in the sixties and the sixties are a period that Ana is very interested in, she can choose to make it a topic she will make/encourage her grandmother to talk about. At the top, I said this improvement should be made with great care. The reason I say this is that if you select a topic that you don’t end up talking about, instead of it being an improvement, it will be the opposite.

To summarise everything, the Perfect Method is an impossible method but the Good, Better and Best methods are possible but imperfect. The method which is best, is the one that is closest to the Perfect Method. Put differently, the best method is the method with the least amount of error between it and the Perfect Method.

This is the third article in a series. The first article is called The Perfect Method for selecting words to learn. As the name suggests, this article named and discussed the Perfect method for selecting words to learn. Though perfect, a shortcoming of the method is that is an Impossible method.

The second article is called A Good Method for selecting words to learn. This article discussed the Good method. Unlike the Perfect method, the Good method is a possible method. You could actually use it! That said, you are a demanding person and you are not happy with it. It has a problem. The problem is that it is not personal enough. You want something more personal to you and your circumstances. That is what this article is about. Let’s begin with a Q and A:

​Question: Why are you looking for the best method for selecting words to learn?

Answer:  You want to identify the words that will best equip you for the environment you will use the language in.

If you are learning Spanish so you can talk to your grandmother in Mexico who only speaks Spanish, your goal is to identify the words that equip you the best for having grandchild – grandmother conversations. A better method than the Good method needs to be customised to you and your environment/situation. This being the case, I will show you what the Better method is using a specific example.

Scenario

Ana is an Australian with a grandmother who lives in Mexico. Ana wants to learn Spanish so she can converse with her grandmother. As discussed in the last article, a good way for Ana to identify words to learn is to use a collection/dataset of Spanish speech. She could arrange the unique words in the dataset from most common to least common and then focus on learning the most common words first. That is a good method, now for the Better method.

The Better method involves a better dataset. It involves a customised dataset.

Ana has a sister called Canella. Ana can use Canella to create a better dataset. All she has to do is send Canella to Mexico with a recording device. Canella can interact with her grandmother, recording everything they talk about, then, at the end of the trip, give the recordings to Ana. Ana can then analyse the recordings and identify the most useful words for her to learn.

The Better method is better because it is highly customised to Ana’s situation. Words to learn are identified using a dataset of interactions between her grandmother and someone very similar to her, all in an environment most similar to the one Ana will be in.

At this point you are wondering, if that’s the Better method, what does the Best method look like?

This is a follow up article to the one titled, The perfect method for selecting word to learn. In that article, as titled, the perfect method for selecting words to learn was discussed. To recap, the perfect method involves a crystal ball. You use the crystal ball to look into your future and identify the words you will need the most in the future. The method is perfect because it identifies the words you will definitely need the most. Though perfect, it’s an impossible method. The method requires a device that allows you to look into the future and no one has one of those.

Since the perfect method is impossible, a person trying to identify the most useful words for him/her to learn has no choice but to pick from one of the imperfect ones. The question then is, what is the best imperfect method? Before answering that question, I’ll direct your attention to another question.

How do you know that a method is the best method? The answer is simple, we compare it to the benchmark method. The best imperfect method is the method which is closest to the perfect method.

Since the title of this article is “The Good Method”, by analysing a good imperfect method and improving on it, let’s see if we can’t get close to the perfect method and thus discover the best imperfect method.

​Method  A

Use a frequency list compiled from analysing a publicly available collection of speech.

I use the term “speech” loosely. For example, a collection of all the magazines published by Time magazine would count as a collection of speech. Another example, a collection of all the episodes of the TV show Friends counts as a collection of speech. What about a frequency list, what is that? Once you have a collection of speech, if you were to analyse the collection and then order the unique words that are in the collection from most common to least common, this would be a frequency list.

Back to the method. Using a frequency list compiled by analysing a publicly available collection of speech is a good way of identifying words that are useful for you to learn (first). This is the Good method but it’s “goodness” for you is limited. It’s OK to be selfish. You are looking for a good method for YOU. Though a publicly available collection of speech (e.g. all the episodes from Friends) will be very good at identifying words that people commonly use, the collection is not personal enough. A method that would be even better is one that is personalised and tailor made for YOU.

So, you are learning a new language and you want to know how to select new words to learn. Here is the perfect method for doing so:

The perfect way involves a crystal ball. Take the crystal ball and look into your future. As you do so, make a list of all the words you will use or need in the future. Not only that, tally the number of times you will need or use each word. Look through a certain period of your future, say a month or so and at the end analyse your list.

To identify the words you should learn, sort the list by tally size from highest to lowest. The words at the top of the sorted list are the words you should select.

There you are, that is the perfect way of selecting words to learn. You look into the future and you select the words you will need the most in the future. The reason this is the perfect way is because it identifies the words you will definitely need. There is no guessing involved and you aren’t just selecting words from a list you found on the internet. You are only selecting what you know for sure you will need.

Ok, there is a problem with the method, you may have noticed it. The method involves a crystal ball that can look into the future. No one has access to such a device. The method is perfect but it is not a method anyone can use.

. . . and there boys and girls is the message of this article. It is impossible to learn words perfectly. You have no option but to use an imperfect method.

Q: Ser and Estar, why does Spanish have them and does English have something similar?

Anyone who has studied Spanish knows that saying “is” and “are” in Spanish is not as straightforward as it is in English. You have to choose between a word that is connected to Estar and one that is connected to Ser. Why is Spanish so complicated?

A better question to ask is “why isn’t English as complicated?”. As English speakers, we may be able to understand Spanish better by exploring English. Let’s do just that.

Are you happy?

Though it is only one sentence, “are you happy?” is used to ask two different things. The question could be inquiring about something deep and asking if you are content with your life. The question could also just simply be inquiring about something not so deep and simply asking if you are in a state of cheerfulness. There are two kinds of happiness, one is deep and you carry on you like a skin and the other is fleeting and is more like a t-shirt. A miserable man laughing at a joke is happy (t-shirt) since he is laughing but at the same time is not happy (skin) since he is miserable.

Exploring happiness in English helps us understand Ser and Estar. The concept of traits having skin and t-shirt versions exists in both Spanish and English, it is just more explicit in Spanish. The word for happy in Spanish is ‘feliz’ and there are two ways of saying “are you happy?” [using casual language]:

Estás feliz? (t-shirt)

Eres feliz? (skin)

The explicitness of Spanish makes it such that the question “are you happy?” cannot be ambiguously interpreted. If I am inquiring about how happy you are with your life, I have to use a word that comes from Ser (eres) and if I am simply asking if you are cheerful, I must use a word that comes from Estar (estás).

Not only is the skin/t-shirt concept more explicit in Spanish, it is also more extensive. It is not just happiness that has a skin and t-shirt form. Let’s explore. The word for young is ‘joven’. Using casual language, to say “you are young”, you say “eres joven”. ‘Eres’ is used instead of ‘estás’ in this case because youth is a skin trait and not a t-shirt. Youth is not permanent but, it is not so fleeting that it’s a t-shirt. Just having said that though, there are times when people do say “estás joven”. “Estás joven” is used in a sentence like:

Estás muy joven con ese vestido (You look very young in that dress)

In this case, ‘estás’ is used to convey that with that dress on you, it’s like you have put on youth. Another trait which has a skin and t-shirt form is slimness. The word for slim is delgado. Compare the sentences below:

Eres delgado (You are slim)

Estás muy delgado! (You are looking very slim!)

Though some adjectives can be used with both Ser and Estar to produce different meanings, this cannot be done with all of them. There are cases in which only Sercan be used and others where only Estar can be used. Consider the sentences below:

El café está frío (the coffee is cold) [Estar]

Soy de Bogotá (I am from Bogotá) [Ser]

Está roto (It is broken) [Estar]

Mañana es sábado (Tomorrow is Saturday) [Ser]

Donde está Burgos? (Where is Burgos?) [Estar]

As far as I know, there is no single explanation that perfectly explains all the uses of Ser and Estar. Looking at the sentences above though and thinking in terms of skin and t-shirt traits, you may see why some sentences use Ser and why others use Estar.

Beatrice decides to open a bakery. She has the space, she can bake and she has the money. She decides she will spend $1000 a week on ingredients. The first week, she takes $1000 and goes and buys $1000 worth of flour. Beatrice’s reasoning is that flour is the most important ingredient and so it makes sense to buy flour first. Beatrice’s reasoning though seemingly sound, is flawed. She has done something very unclever. Have you spotted it?

The unclever thing that she has done is spend the whole of her first $1000 on one ingredient. You need flour to make bread but flour alone can’t bake a single loaf. Beatrice begins the week with no bread and ends the week with no bread.

How does this compare to learning languages? I am glad you asked.

Learning a new language is like starting a bakery. Beatrice has $1000 a week to spend on ingredients and you have a certain amount of time a week that you can dedicate to learning a language. Beatrice needs ingredients to bake bread and you need new language knowledge to produce sentences. Though it’s how just about everyone does it, it is unclever to spend your first week’s worth of study time studying one topic. If you are learning French and you spend your first week learning about French nouns, come the end of the week, you won’t be able to do anything. Just as flour alone cannot bake bread, nouns alone cannot produce sentences. Procuring one ingredient at a time is not is a clever way of going about making things.

So what is the clever way?

Trish decides to start a bakery. Just like Beatrice, she has space and she can bake. Unlike Beatrice however, she only has $100 a week to spend on ingredients. The first week, Trish takes $100 and buys some flour, yeast, sugar and salt (water is free). Though Trish has less money than Beatrice, Trish is cleverer than Beatrice. She had less money to spend, but with a mix of ingredients, Trish can at least make some bread in her first week.

Back to learning languages. What we learn from Trish is that the clever way to spend your study time is to spend it studying a mix a of things. Instead of spending a week only learning about nouns, spend it learning about a mix of things. A bit about nouns, a bit about verbs, a bit about pronouns, etc.

There it is! That is the link between starting a bakery and learning a new language. There is a clever way of doing it and an unclever way of doing it.

Ok, it is not as simple as that. The truth is learning a new language is more like running a restaurant. There are a myriad of ingredients to select from and determining the right ones to select in a good order of selecting them is not a straightforward thing. It is a task as hard as learning how to use the ingredients themselves. Lucky for you, you have been spared of the work. You know a guy who does the hard work for a living.

So, you are learning a new language and you want to know how to select new words to learn. Here is the perfect method for doing so:

The perfect way involves a crystal ball. Take the crystal ball and look into your future. As you do so, make a list of all the words you will use or need in the future. Not only that, tally the number of times you will need or use each word. Look through a certain period of your future, say a month or so and at the end analyse your list.

To identify the words you should learn, sort the list by tally size from highest to lowest. The words at the top of the sorted list are the words you should select.

There you are, that is the perfect way of selecting words to learn. You look into the future and you select the words you will need the most in the future. The reason this is the perfect way is because it identifies the words you will definitely need. There is no guessing involved and you aren’t just selecting words from a list you found on the internet. You are only selecting what you know for sure you will need.

Ok, there is a problem with the method, you may have noticed it. The method involves a crystal ball that can look into the future. No one has access to such a device. The method is perfect but it is not a method anyone can use.

. . . and there boys and girls is the message of this article. It is impossible to learn words perfectly. You have no option but to use an imperfect method.