[injb]

This.

The author of the article says:

"If there were someone who knew how to learn new languages, we would all know it. They would be uniquely and unquestionably skilled at producing new language speakers. They would be very visible: everybody would be flocking to their doors and imitating them."

He seems to be confusing "learn" with "teach". All of the above would be true if he said "if there were someone who knew how to teach new languages...".

Lots of people know how to learn, but no one wants to hear about it, because the answer is: work really hard.

"Everyone wants to be a bodybuilder, but no one wants to lift no heavy ass weights."

[tomxor]

> He seems to be confusing "learn" with "teach". All of the above would be true if he said "if there were someone who knew how to teach new languages...". Lots of people know how to learn, but no one wants to hear about it, because the answer is: work really hard.

Exactly, the author is talking about teaching from the perspective of a _shortcut_ (which most teaching does, since there would be no point to teaching if it didn't enhance the learning beyond making information available), but many skills or working knowledge are "irreducible" from a learning perspective, in the sense that they must be acquired from the ground up.

He implicitly states this goal much later in the article here:

> learn a new language like a baby! Start learning by babbling single syllables and eventually move on to whole words and sentences. Culminate in advanced classroom instruction. The problem is that, taken as a literal model, this will take you 18+ years. This is not a practical way to learn a new language.

We can't assume that something is always reducible (mathematically there are many things that a provably not!), that there is a trick to it that we can cheat nature - that is the old scientific way of thinking.

All language teaching methods i've been exposed to assume this to be the case as they are all based on the idea of bootstrapping the process with our existing native language... I suspect this never actually works, just that a few individuals who are intuitively clever enough quickly and unconsciously discard this relationship as a basis of the new language.

TL;DR when the author debates whether it is actually possible to "teach" a new language, what I see is the question of whether the process of fluently learning a new language is computationally reducible.

[james_s_tayler]

You nailed it with final quote. You can say shit that might motivate people but you can't reliably engineer them into the emotional state required to pull off disgustingly hard shit like like becoming world class at something. That's just an internal state that you either wind up at or you don't. And its the key ingredient.

[retiredcoder]

Unrelated but not everyone can be a body builder.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myostatin

[shard]

I'm not sure what you wanted to point out in the link that you shared, but it seems to me that being a body builder is like being a painter or writer or skier or marathon runner, you just get the tools and do it. There's no need to be at a level where you can make a living from it to participate.