holistic-language-learning

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 18:45:17

NB: All video links are to an Invidious instance.

The only person I’ve seen who talks about what is dubbed “holistic language learning” is Days and Words (Lamont) on YouTube. It is basically incorporating your language learning into your life such that your non-language-learning habits influence, and are in turn influenced by, your language-learning habits, in a symbiosis. That might be a vague description, but there are simple enough examples to point towards: see his video on language learning and exercise, or cold showers.

A big part of Lamont’s central thesis is that putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, whether it be on a physically strenuous run or an ice-cold shower, or waking up to an alarm you set purposefully at 4AM, ends up lowering the activation energy that is required for you to face the discomfort of listening to your target language. It’s analogous to the fable about the frog being put in a pot of boiling water.

In another video, he recommends taking notes while watching videos (instead of forcing yourself to pay attention to every word spoken) or playing mindless games while listening to audiobooks (somehow, the low-level stimuli leads to a drastic increase in your percieved endurance at listening to audio you can only partially comprehend).¹ I’ve found that I can easily be listening to a book in Russian for up to 3 hours while playing 2048 or Tetris, something I definitely could not pull off if I were just listening to the book and doing nothing else.

I wonder if such actions and habits could be generalized to other skills outside of language learning, such as programming or drawing.

Some people might say it seems cynical to have to reach for ways of “engineering” yourself to do what should be innocent hobbies whose impetus is purely powered by “passion”.

The truth is that you can be truly passionate about something but still never quite seem to be able to pull together the intention to do it. A pithy example: I love to read literature, but I can rarely get myself into the state of solid focus that is required to go through a dense novel for meaningful lengths of time, not just in fits and starts.

My thoughts on this topic stem from observations about learning that I’ve been thinking about more and more lately:

1. The foolproof way to get better at something is by doing that thing many times over.
   1. There are very few exceptions to this across most fields and skills.
   2. There are caveats (of course, there is a spectrum from inefficient ways of practicing to more efficient ways), but the core statement still holds.
2. Learning something deeply requires near-constant skepticism and self-assessment.
3. The more you know, the more you learn.
   1. This may seem unfair (surely, the people who need to learn the quickest and the most are beginners) but it’s just the way it is.

Though this might seem like a given, it’s crystallized for me recently in ways that I just can’t ignore. Of course, there’s always some resistance. From talking to my friend about autodidactism, I’ve noticed that we tend to put all of our attention onto the how of our plans, but never end up actually executing said plan.² At the risk of repeating myself from the virtual memory post a few weeks ago, it’s far too easy to fool yourself into thinking that you’ve understood something, when you still have gaping holes in your mental model.

Is this just me regurgitating the basics of Dunning-Kruger? Probably. But I’ve been working on generalizing that mindset so that I can find better ways to combat it, regardless of what it is I’m trying to learn. Because of course you’re not motivated to learn when you have the (false) belief that you already have a handle on things.

I’ve been trying to combine Lamont’s notion of “holistic” learning and the three tenets that I mentioned above, in order to create a practice that will work with me, and hopefully this gives you some food for thought as well.