At the moment

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June 29, 2003

Thoughts about language acquisition: No,

Thoughts about language acquisition: No, I don't think that I've discovered anything anyone else has ever published before. But, I am realizing that perhaps the brain has a "symbol table", a concept familiar to us computer programming types. In order to become "fluent" in a language, we need to bypass the first path that is created for any given word, which goes from the foreign word, to our native word, to an image of what the thing really is, and instead create a pathway from the foreign word directly to the image of the "thing". I.E. creating new symbol table entries for the foreign words, as opposed to creating an intermediate table whose entries point to the native language table, which is what most of us do at least in the beginning.

So, perhaps one key to aiding the aquirement (is that a word? ;-) of language is to repeat the word in your mind, and visualizing the image of the word, so as to facilitate creating that pathway, minus the intermediate step of "translation". I notice in my attempts to learn spanish, that some words I hear I immediately understand, and others I have to go through the translation process, which of course causes me to miss alot of what the speaker is saying. Can I facilitate this path to direct recognition in some way? Can I create a learning tool, methodology, etc, that would facilitate this?

Ok, aquisition is the word I wanted ;-)

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Posted by shland at June 29, 2003 12:14 PM

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