including brain science
How to Learn Any Language in Six Months – Transcript. Welcome to the Transcript page for How to Learn Any Language in Six Months. Content reproduced here with permission. Read on! Or scroll to the bottom for the pdf download link.
If you’re wondering how long it would take to learn Mandarin Chinese, the answer of course has to be: “it depends”. If you make a decision to use your brain and your time in the correct way, and put in adequate time, then you could be communicating competently at a basic level within a few months. You Can Learn To Speak Mandarin in Six Months For me personally, from a completely zero base (i.e. complete beginner) I was very competent at Mandarin speaking within six months and reading and writing within a year. In my case I was able to do this because I moved to Beijing and although I was doing classes at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages (as it was called at the time), I actually…
Why aren’t artificial neural network systems replacing people? In AI, machines should replicate what we do, not perform statistical calculations. What can we do with a thought experiment to improve our AI? Photo by Kazi Mizan on Unsplash Progress in AI and AGI has had slow enterprise adoption because today’s generative AI don’t work as predicted by big tech CEOs. We’re told fantasy stories about how all of science will soon be solved by machines that gather the statistics from existing scientific papers. But if the scientific papers included the answers to future science, what benefit do we get from AI, since the science is already written? AI today is obviously missing the key piece – how the world works in all its multisensory glory…
How to build AI that’s like us and its benefit to society! Language, like our ability to navigate the world with our senses and muscles, comes from our brain. AGI needs better ‘cognitive AI.’ We choose our words carefully, because amazing precision is what our brain does. Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash I’m writing a new book explaining how AGI works with cognitive AI. I will publish the sections for comment before the final book is compiled. You’ll be able to follow in LinkedIn, Speech Genie, Substack and Medium for the series. I invite you to debate and correct me where you disagree with the model. I want to shine the torch on much-needed science, so let’s do some science! My goal is to…
If you want to learn Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language — what’s known in Chinese as duìwài Hànyǔ jiàoxué (对外汉语教学）— there has never been more opportunity than right now. Online tools, apps, courses, and communities have made it possible to begin learning from anywhere in the world. But opportunity doesn’t automatically mean effectiveness. And for Mandarin specifically, there are challenges that most online platforms handle poorly. As someone who learned Mandarin in six months and has spent over forty years refining the methodology behind rapid language acquisition, I want to be honest about both the challenges and the solutions. The Unique Challenges of Learning Mandarin Online Tonal Complexity Mandarin has four tones (plus a neutral tone), and word with the same pronunciation will have…
Most language courses start with a textbook, a vocabulary list, and a grammar table. They’re built around what’s easy to teach, not around how the brain actually learns. After more than forty years of working at the intersection of psychology, linguistics, and learning design — and after learning Mandarin Chinese myself in six months — I’ve identified five principles that underlie rapid language acquisition. These aren’t tips or tricks. They’re the foundations. Get these right, and everything else accelerates. Get them wrong, and no amount of study hours will save you. I laid these out in my TEDx talk, “How to Learn Any Language in 6 Months.” Here, I’ll go deeper into each one, and explain why they matter whether you’re learning Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish,…
Background In the 1930s, the American focus on behaviourism turned the linguistics world from the science of signs (semiotics) to one aligned with one of the great scientists in history, Pāṇini, who lived perhaps as far back as the 7th century BC. The use of Pāṇini’s linguistic model by Leonard Bloomfield led to linguistics excluding meaning, such as in the influential Chomsky monograph, Syntactic Structures, published in 1957. My proposed move back to semiotics is a side effect of the highly influential work of Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., whose development of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) over the past 40+ years creates a clear distinction between the words and phrases in a language (morpho-syntax) and their meaning in context (contextual meaning). RRG views the world’s diverse languages with a…
We learn all the time, continuously, regardless of our age. We never stop, but would it surprise you that many scientists propose the model where we stop learning while we are young? That is false, although more research would help prove the point. We just need some people to use experimental science! Inside view of the ground floor of a Starbucks in Tokyo – wow! The perfect venue to learn more about language and our ability to understand — with coffee! OK, how can I claim that learning doesn’t stop while we are young? Why so confident? Do you know the (made up) word Preada? It’s a brand that sells glasses, like Prada. Preada puts additional effort (E) into the designs of Prada,…
For most of my life, I have pondered a question that sits at the very center of howour brain works: how do we understand language?The question isn’t how we repeat language, nor how we recognize its surfacepatterns, but how we understand its meaning in context. If you ask ten expertsabout this subject, called Natural Language Understanding or NLU, you will getten different definitions because there are many theories available in academia!These tend to have origins in the 1950s or before and can be seen as validcompetitors in the absence of working solutions.But to most people, understanding is simple. It is the moment when wordsconnect to meaning. You do not ‘predict’ meaning (a popular paradigm in today’smachine learning community): you experience it. To many of us,…