Introducing the Tibetan by Osmosis Experiment
With multimedia in foreign languages ubiquitously available on the internet, I am going to see if I can attain fluent comprehension of a spoken foreign language, learning mostly by osmosis.
In particular, I’m going to work on the colloquial Tibetan language
osmosis |oz-moh-sis| figurative the process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge, etc.
The plan is to simply listen to an hour a day of audio in Tibetan, and see if my brain eventually learns to understand it perfectly. My main source of audio will be Radio Free Asia’s hour-long daily podcast of the news in the Lhasa dialect of Tibetan.
To help out, I also have the Lonely Planet Tibetan Phrasebook
Why Tibetan? There are many reasons, but the most important are:
• I have a personal interest in the language. I like the Tibetan people, their flavor of Buddhism, and the beauty of their land. Somehow I feel that understanding their spoken language will give me further insight into their way of life.
• I don’t know much Tibetan. For this experiment to be of interest to others attempting to acquire languages, it’s best that I start with one that, apart from a handful of words, I don’t know at all.
• Tibetan might be easy. Might be? I don’t really know for sure. On one hand I’ve heard that it’s a “farmer’s language” and not very complex. On the other I’ve read that much is communicated through implication, so you have to be able to read between the lines. One big advantage of Tibetan though is that it is not tonal!
• Tibetan is quite dissimilar to English. I think it makes it more interesting to go with a language that isn’t from the same family as my native tongue.
So to conclude, the goal of this experiment is just to see if it’s possible to use the internet to attain a high level of listening comprehension in a foreign language not so much by studying the language but just by letting my brain do what neural networks do - recognize patterns that they are repeatedly exposed to.
For the record, I recognize that this way of learning will most likely not give me conversational skills.
Technorati Tags: Autodidact, Buddhism, Dalai Lama, Foreign Language, Language, Tibet, Tibetan
September 14th, 2007 at 1:52 am
This is not simply the most awesome and focal drilling application of emotive understanding. I’ve never seen the like on the computer (web or other resource); I’ve been doing the same thing; in my mind at least, I’ve been listening to japanese pop and anime for years in native tongue; with and without subtitles; I’ve picked up numerous words and the like. My main struggle with with emotional association (tonal associative emotion-pattern interpretation foregainng on the words.) This idea is a bit problematic, and encountering it; I’ve first started learning via books; they made less sense than the first time I encountered the symbols -> vocalization ( as language in my belief is symbol to vocal association, leading to bleeding of emotive states concurrent with learning the symbols into a confusion-state (in which comparitive is not exclusive) leading to assumptive association about words, new ideas that are idealistic in manner of “there’s no way I can know that baka means idiot, as well as smart-ass”; in [specific Japanese) Language, to be patronitic in statement is what (in my humble opinion) breeds dialectic diaspora from a root symbol (vocal) language; as that came before [symbols in painting, graph (i think of cuneiform) usage and finally complex-symbol systems] complication of language; interpretation is based on a duality (yet again another assumptive reasoning I have [I am not belittling myself, imitation is the highest form of complement; as fear, imitation, paraphrasing attempt to motivate an author’s perspective, change it, to subjective interpretative “chaining” or harnessing or the language. This is mainly for vocal form, which in emotive states (pressures from outside contradicting lead me to have emotion-blockage, that I assume is my own “mental block” to learning, and when I realize this is not my thought, or methodology and reject this as “an other form”; foreign influence, I achieve mental clarity whereupon I get afraid, as if this learning-methodology is true, then nascient-form (osmosis) is true-to-life and exclusion through symbolization in writing (true to life excludes not-true-to-life, does it not?) doesn’t interfere; subjective second person view would lead to views of “freudian slips”, “odd statements”, “delusion of meaning”; as I read japanese now I find myself “misreading” / “misinterpreting” the language in written form; this is my unconscious mind interpreting it; upon deep analysis, I find that what I was thinking about before I started reading as well as “what I was destined to think”; ie; what my consciousness filters out as it is uncommunicable and unconsciously tenable; let me further describe this latter statement as my predisposition, my nature…what I would “of course do” when a working model of my tendancies are mapped. I have hope for this, as I believe relative-superpositioning and entanglement, to coin two terms (which by the by have many interpretations defined by description of various theoretical physicists) from modern physics (quantum).
Good luck, to me and you both; I suggest also (and highly reccomend) glottal stoppage and variant body-associative charting at wikipiedia; I’ve been focusing on glottal stops (wherewhen in a language the glottis (a biological mechanism) closes, common to all vocal language; Tibietan, I assume you (conscious or not of it) picked as, to quote, wikpedia entry on tibetan language,
“Although Classical Tibetan apparently was not a tonal language, some dialects have developed tones. This is particularly true in the Central and Kham dialects, while the Amdo dialect and some in the west remain without tones. Tibetan morphology can generally be described as agglutinative.”, learning to compensate with an atonal language, or tonal variants as you’re finding on Radio Free Asia, concurrently using English, a highly tonal language that is yet to be defined (such as tones we demark as “sarchasm”; these have direct concurrent correlation and relate (again, I disclaim my opinion(s)) directly to tones in various dialects of chinese; a special tonal language (special as in specific, not “i like it”) (which is amusing to me as my example directly relates to affectation on Tibetan language by Maoist China.) of the nature we (which we) descript from very very emotio-tonal language; such example would be french, latin, greek and influence on English Language At Large (As English Is A “Bastard-Language” for lack of a better term). Further historical relief is made by studying punic phoenician and trends of superstition, religious belef and like anthropological fact, which oppose punic belief, then in a time-line form, Latin is counterpoint to greek as they were highly conscious of their greek slaves when they destroyed the greek (empirical) civilization, and furthermore the development of various dialectic thought of and on European tongues; different tribologies may be assumed (without further description of the nature of this commentary) through the meanings attached to same-characters and vocal-characterization (adverse to character-vocalization which happened in prehistory to develop language-written) by referencing meaning of the common glottal stop to words such as “moon” and in another geography and region, commonality of the sound with the meaning “axe”.
To describe a summary of this would again suggest from my finite undertstanding of this “phenomena” (which in fact is nascient in language-drift) (natural as opposed to empirical discovery, that which is bred into us both in stock (genetic trait) and environmental factorization of conditioning (learning) and conditioning-biological-affectation (environment); check out the rosetta stone computer program (i hate to plug anything that is a specific technique, but as there is no open-source equivalent, I digress in this specificity) and wikipedia’s charts; I’ve learned rudimentary and dialectic chinese (specifically mandarin and influence-understanding of “using poetic form” cantonese). Thus my tendency to use chinese as an example as chinese characters are used in a form of writing in japanese (kanj, if i recall correctly); I’ve learned (non fluentially) german, latin, japanese, tagalog, russian, japanese) to realise that words, while having defined meaning through description filter through as phonetic-meaning “mind” in mind; this association can’t be prevented. (argue this, but when I say “there is much I need to do, go away” and a second person subjectively “misunderstands” or “only hears in partiality”, this person, in subjective predisposition (as they may be acquanitned with typical human and specific subjective behavior that would be response); Thus I take liberties and would digress at the point of Psycholinguistics and Ericksonian Hypnosis. (On Which Such Word Salads As) (Eyes, Open) (Nice, Clothes) are interpreted filtered through conscious, in a form of natural conversation which leads to subconscious and sub-liminalistic action (embedded commanding).
Thank you for your time and indubitably for enabling me, through your publication and revitalization of my mind through your Works And Efforts In This Project.
T.