Tips for Language Learning

Since I've been working on languages so much since, well, high school, I figured that I would jot down some of the things that I've found have really helped my own language acquisition. These are mainly for written languages; spoken, contemporary languages would require a different take, I think, though these tips I suppose would work with them as well. These are not tips to make learning easier, mind you; they are tips to make learning effective and rewarding, once one gets serious about it.

In looking over the tips, I think that they mostly boil down to one thing: forcing yourself to actively learn details. Details are important in language learning, and I know that I hate learning them. So, the point of these tricks has been to put myself in situations where I have to think of the details, to train myself to notice them on a regular basis until they become second nature, and to find different ways of of doing this which reinforce each other.

1. Use flashcards. This is a non-negotiable; you need to keep a lot of information in memory over a long period of time. You also need to have a system for reviewing flashcards on a regular basis, based on how well you can recall them. The best program I've seen yet for flashcards is Anki, and it's completely free and available for multiple operating systems. The next few points will deal with ways of using flashcards.
2. When making flashcards, don't just make vocabulary items. Make full sentences illustrating grammatical points. For instance, I'll take Hansen and Quinn's Intensive Greek, or Coulson's Teach Yourself Sanskrit, or Wheelock's Latin and copy down a sentence or two for each section; I choose these books precisely because they offer plenty of example sentences. It makes remembering the different forms of, say, conditional sentences, or of the uses of the locative case, much easier. Plus, it makes you learn some vocabulary in context, which sticks much better than isolated words.
3. Learn flashcards in both directions. You may only want to read the target language, but trust me, it helps tremendously to be able to go from English to Latin/Greek/Sanskrit/Arabic/etc. It forces you to pay attention to the details of the word; something which one-way flashcards overlook. For instance, I may remember that a given Hebrew word, qol has a given English meaning, voice, because I have no other Hebrew words yet in my vocabulary that start with q. This will let me pass my flashcard test going from Hebrew to English, but I do not know the word. More commonly, there are strings of words that look similar in the target language, and having to remember them from their English meanings forces me to distinguish between them; for instance, the Greek huphiemi, huphistemi, ephiemi, and ephistemi, all terms used often in Neoplatonic writings. Note: this tip doesn't just work for vocab flashcards; it is helpful for sentence flashcards as well. Sure, it's difficult, but it makes you internalize those sentence patterns, and that becomes quite nice when you are trying to make sense out of a difficult passage and need some intuitions to guide you.
4. Make cram decks (Anki has a cram feature built-in). If you only cram the material, you'll never remember it, but the occasional cram on top of steady long-term usage can do wonders. First, it really helps when you input a bunch of new vocabulary items. You can't just remember the individual words, but you also need to see how they compare with the other words you will be learning, and a single cram session with the 100 words you need for the current chapter can help you make those interrelationships in a way that learning them 5 at a time will not. Don't worry about retention; just gun through them, expecting to get them all wrong at first. You'll start to recognize them in time, and a basic recognition is all you're going for. Also, the occasional cram helps with those languages which you haven't really been working on for a while but want to keep up anyhow.
5. Speak the language out loud. Not only that, say it with feeling. This is an actual language you are learning, and it made (makes) sense to people as a language and not as a cipher for English. Pay attention to the little grammatical details as you emotively speak it, trying to make yourself feel the difference between, say, the accusative and the dative (I feel an accusative before its verb like a G 7th chord before a C Major, and subordinate clauses are like key changes, but that's just me). This will help you get a sense for the cadence of the language, and keep reading from being merely a parsing exercise.
6. In line with the above, learn some poetry or something else fun. I have the first few lines of the Aeneid memorized, and occasionally when I am bored I'll recite them. But this isn't about rote memorization; again, the point is to pay attention to what the language means at every step, and a piece of poetry is something which I would have analyzed in detail at some previous time so as to be intimately familiar with how it fits together. Plus, poetry tends to be more complicated than prose, and so it gives a mental workout to a mind used to working with, say, Aquinas.
7. Work through the language word by word. I have come across the idea that one should start working through a Latin sentence by looking first for the subject, then for the verb (or vice versa). This seems to me to be detrimental and silly. You look first for the first word; this is how it made sense to the original audience, and this is how it can make sense to you with some hard practice. The subject/verb searching should be reserved for cases in which you cannot make sense of the passage after having tried going straight through, or for when you want to double-check the meaning of the passage. Otherwise, hold each word in its full ambiguity until you find how it fits in the rest of the sentence. This requires some recognition of its semantic relations to the rest of the passage, and not merely syntactical. This article explains what I mean here.
8. Read through a passage before resorting to a dictionary. This is most useful once you have reached an intermediate level and can recognize a decent amount of vocabulary, since (as above) the meanings of the words can be very important in determining how they fit in the sentence. However, once you have some idea of the vocabulary an author uses, make sure you try to read passages and make as much sense out of them as you can without resolving every single word. This will force you to pay more attention to the grammar and to context clues.
9. Learn other languages. This tip won't work for everyone, but if you have the time, ability, and/or need, different languages can help reinforce each other. Learning Sanskrit has opened my eyes to all sorts of phonetic and morphological principles in other languages, because the Sanskrit grammarians focused so much time on this aspect of their language. Reading Classical Arabic has helped me to pay more attention to syntax; there are case endings, but most of these are unwritten ad so must be supplied from the context. I found that due to this practice in Arabic, I had absolutely no problem understanding German sentences even before analyzing all the noun declensions. Learning one highly inflected language will sharpen your grammatical skills in others, and the more vocabulary you have at your fingertips, the easier it is to form associations with new vocabulary items in other languages.

The Meaning of a Poem

I've been musing about the act of writing poetry as of late. I sat down to pen a couple while fidgety at a conference. But what are the meanings of these poems? This got me thinking about the meaning of writing in general. I know many have brought up this topic, and I haven't really read them, but here are some of my own naïve musings on the matter.

The gut instinct for many is to refer to authorial intent. But, I noticed that even when I had penned a poem with a very specific situation in mind, I could also take the poem and look at in in other lights expressing other matters. Are these matters any less "meant" by the poem, even though they were not what I had intended? Perhaps to an extent, but even I, the author, with full knowledge of authorial intent, want to say that there is meaning exceeding what I had thought.

So, is it about the reader's response? But different responses could be better or worse, and so this cannot be constitutive of the meaning. Some responses take into account more of the poem, for example, while others are more persuasive for one reason or another.

I would hold that a better place to locate meaning is in the poem itself. More coherent responses from the reader which take into account more of the poem are better responses because they more accurately represent the object which is the poem. Maybe more powerful and persuasive interpretations are the same. Whatever I had intended as the author is certainly one of these, but there may be other coherent ways of approaching the poem as well which are legitimate. The poem is a concrete object really existing (in a way) in the world and every interpretation of it will give a different perspective of it. A multitude of perspectives, no matter what the source, can coexist, since the poem is an object standing outside of us. Language exceeds both the author and the reader.

Of course, this view has its own problems. What is the poetic object? If I change a word, is it still the same poem? How about when language itself has changed in the next couple hundred years, or in a different community? Is a translation still the same poem? I think that at this point, it is easiest to say that the poem is a pragmatic object; I can consider it as an individual object for practical reasons and really work with reality in this way, but it is not ultimately speaking and apart from certain uses an individual object. This does not mean it is not real; it means that a full description of its reality must include a complex network of interrelations, and the poem itself is an ill-defined and fuzzy (but actual) region of this network.

Another way of thinking about the place of a poem is on the level of mathematical objects (as much as non-mathematicians may balk at the idea). What is the number 2? Is it this quantity of boxes, or that of books? Is it a measurement, capable of being divided as many times as I please, or a count, which only comprises this individual and that? Is it the start of the prime numbers? Is it a symbol with relatively little meaning other than the fact that it does not have a rational root? Even if the number arises in a concrete setting, say, in my count of how many boxes are in front of me, this does not exhaust the meaning of "2". Each of these other meanings are also in a way included implicitly, and new applications and branches of mathematics can expand the meaning of (or at least our awareness of the meaning of) "2". "2" is a mathematical entity which is its own objective reality even while having meaning in various contexts.

The difference is that I have no problem considering "2" as a real object; unlike the poem, "2" and other mathematical entities are very clearly and precisely defined. Something is two, or it is not, and if there happens to be any ambiguity then it resides in the question instead of the entity "2". So, maybe we can metaphorically consider math as the "discrete" version of that which poetry (and perhaps language in general) is a "continuous" version; I can pick out the mathematical objects (even in talking about "continuous" phenomena like the real numbers or functions) one by one, while all attempts to do so with language must flow into "surrounding" objects.

God and Personality

One of the theoretical I've been struggling with in my religious thoughts is whether God could even be a personal being. I've been thinking that the cosmological argument may be sound; but if it is, it may actually work against the typical religious notion of God.

First, what is a person? It seems that to be a person, one must be both finite and infinite. What the heck do I mean by that? I mean that one must be delimited in certain ways: one makes some actions instead of others, is in encounterable in some times and places instead of others, and so forth. Without these delimitations as well as contingency, I really don't know what it is to be personal in any contemporary sense. But at the same time, persons also exceed their given situations. A person is not merely their current circumstances, but can continue past them. A person is open to new thoughts, new experiences, new life, and in this way is not delimited.

So, if this is what it is to be personal, then there are two ways in which something could be impersonal. A rock, for example, is subpersonal. It is finite, but it lacks the openness which constitutes persons. It may not even technically exist at all because of this as an individual rock, but I leave that for another discussion. Alternatively, something could be suprapersonal by lacking finitude.

Now, the cosmological argument basically says that everything we encounter is finite and contingent, and that some infinite, necessary cause grounds the world. But, if this cause is truly freed from all concerns of finitude, then it would for that reason be suprapersonal. How does the infinite and necessary choose to create this world instead of that? How does it answers these specific prayers and not those? How is it encountered in this way and not that? How does it make these decisions and then those? These are all contingent and finite actions. The Necessary Existent, by constrast, must be by its very nature necessary and infinite; these are not simply added accidents, but constitutive of what it is. I'm pretty sure that such an Existent must be simple too, though I realize that this is not popular in much modern thought.

If this is the case, then, then that which grounds all reality, the Ultimate Being, is suprapersonal. It is not the God which many people go out to worship; the God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But if the cosmological argument does not work (and I think that the ontological argument would result in the same problem), or if it somehow gave us a being that merely had the status of being a brute, necessary fact about the world (whatever the heck that might mean), then it would be useless for showing that there is any explanation for the world as it is.

Does this mean there is no personal God, then? I'm not sure that it does. It merely shows that such a God cannot be the Ultimate Being. But must God be such a being? Maybe God is merely the highest personal being; that being which, although finite and contingent in many ways, is still more powerful, wise, and worthy of worship than any other personal being, and enough so to run the world of other contingent and finite beings. Such a God would not have created the world ex nihilo perhaps, but maybe that is not required either (Genesis doesn't require it, for example); God would then be a demiurge instead, like in the Timaeus or in some Hindu thought. And maybe worship can only properly be given to another person, so the fact that God is still below the Ultimate Being (or being itself, or the ground of being) isn't the worst thing in the world. Although it would still seem to make God a relative end, rather than an absolute final cause of the world and our affections, but that is another issue.

Musings on the Intellectual Life

I have a few ideas which I've been tossing around to post here, including a discussion of whether math is created or discovered with reference to Schelling's aesthetics (in short, it's both), as well as working on some arguments from Plotinus to the effect that there must be more than the material world to explain the beauty of this world. And I just finished Crime and Punishment; perhaps I'll jot down some thoughts on that. Maybe I'll actually get around to posting those at some point. But for now, I'm just going to think out loud as to what I'm trying to accomplish in my field, to try to recover some sense of what my purposes are. It'll be a bit of a hodgepodge.

So, I'm committed to searching out the truth through intellectual analysis. What does this entail? What does this leave out? It means that I will never really be able to commit myself to anything involving a substantial historical component; history can never be well-enough established for complete committal.

I'm skeptical about what reason can attain; I don't use it because my own reason is a great tool, but simply because it's the best one that I have and the views of most other people have not shown them to be trustworthy enough. Even if I "prove" another side wrong, it could always be my own lack of insight and imagination which leads me to my conclusion. Great minds in the past have often blatantly misrepresented their intellectual opponents, so why should I think that I will necessarily do better?

While reason and history don't really satisfy me, they are what I have. Proving someone wrong or right may not really prove anything, but it is a way to get deeper into the issues; Shankara may have completely missed the point of Buddhist and Jainist arguments, but his refutations still helped to delimit his own views and increase his insight into reality. So reasoning does have a point, if I leave aside my foibles about really being correct in all my references (but more on that in a moment).

In addition, historical analysis helps me to see the human side of thinking, how many people have struggled with these issues; this struggling itself seems to be where I can really see the issues, rather than in some proposition or in some single argument from some single source. Plus, I tend toward odd views; just because they aren't popular or even considered viable today, doesn't mean that they aren't deserving of attention. If nothing else, a revival of odd views helps to challenge reigning orthodoxies.

Both the historical and the philosophical sides of my work, though, are in vain if they are for me to get things right. I probably won't. Instead, my goal really should be to further our knowledge as a human community; I'll be one step in that process, just like all those authors which I read and appreciate, or even like those who have been forgotten but who were necessary at one point. My goal should not be to get the arguments and the scholarship right; it should be to make a worthy contribution. Sometimes that comes about better by being wrong, but being wrong spectacularly. It's hard to look for the truth while simultaneously knowing that it will most likely only be found long after one is dead; but it is some comfort to think that progress is possible and that one's work may be a step in the right direction. And easier to justify as being possible.

If I really am committed to the truth, this can either be as something for myself to possess or something which I want o be made clear. The former is selfish if taken on its own; the latter is what is truly important, that I can help to make the truth clear to others. And that does not require that I understand it all myself.

So, that is how I think that I should see my goal of pursuing the truth, and to some extent the pursuit of it by intellectual analysis. But why intellectually? I would want this pursuit to be open to all. Regardless of the Bhagavad Gita's whole view of the caste system, it does have one uplifting analysis of it toward the end: people from all walks of life can attain the religious goal without leaving their natural inclination. Rulers attain Brahman by ruling well, servants by serving well, and so on. In fact, if one is by nature a servant, one should not try to attain the goal by intellection, nor should the intellectual by war and ruling. While there is much to dispute about the caste system as a caste system, this insight of the multiple ends for the human person seems attractive.

More than attractive; I look around, and it is a good thing that non-intellectuals can attain the ultimate end of human life. Intellectuals often do not seem to be the best role models out there, while there are many non-intellectuals who do seem to be exemplary (St. Francis of Assisi, anyone?). If only intellectuals could attain the human end, than this does not bode well for humanity.

But there are also reasons for why the intellectual life seems worth pursuing, and why it seems to be more tightly connected to living the good life. It is only (at least as a necessary, though probably not sufficient condition) through the analysis of reasons that one can attain to a non-accidental understanding of the good. It might happen to be that we can trust our intuitions and feelings, it may be that we can trust Religious Authorities X Y and Z, but these do not in and of themselves show the necessary connections between themselves and the good. Thought does not make walking the path any easier, but it is the only tool we have for mapping out that path with any degree of accuracy.

What does this say for the role of the intellectual in the community? How does this work, if there are multiple ends open to humanity but only reason can really test the paths to see what is good (or at least, reason does it better than any other tool we have)? Does this mean that the community lives and dies by both the quality of its intellectuals and the degree to which it listens to them (for good or ill depending on the ideas proposed)? Or is there another path which not only gives a subjective feeling of certainty (shared by many of the opposing views in any case), but also provides the necessary connections to ground that certainty?

It would seem that the good is ultimately something immanent; if you can't tell that it really is good itself, then how is it good? Reason is necessary then to show what will be good in the future, say, or what would be a better good, but everyone has access to what the good is right in front of themselves. So the intellectual isn't quite as important. But I'm still uneasy about jumping from here to saying that everyone has access to the knowledge of their ultimate ends with the same degree of accuracy as the intellectual. It seems that even if I have established that the good is immanent for every person, and that everyone can understand that immediately within their own position, it still would take reason to establish that point and keep it from merely being some whim.