Self Taught or School Taught?

Post Reply New Topic

My AS hasn't hindered me from learning languages... I find the grammatical systems easy, and I have what my parents call a natural language learning ability. Once I understand grammar well enough I can tell whether something is right or wrong and make right sentences without having to double-check... although you have to work hard, and read a lot of books too...

Gee, Ironically, the only language I have seen so far that really required studying the grammer a lot was German! The word order can be VERY different, precedence is important(to be proper), then there is declension. YIKES! With french the hardest part is negation, and the way sounds vary. Spanish is even easier, and danish is even easier. Apparently hindi and arabic are similarly complex, and probably a bit harder than danish. Did you know that Hindi and Arabic really have NO way to conjugate a verb as simply first or second person? In both cases you add the sex! The verbs conjugation actually contains information about the sex of who it is about! GRANTED, that is relatively simple, but another thing to watch and have a problem with!

My hardest part, and ironically it seems it is an AS symptom, as I recall I read that someplace. Is that I want to know the PARTS first. So I am studying vocabulary. THAT is the hardest part for ME right now. Of course I AM studying a LOT of languages, and have apparently NEVER mixed them up! I guess I can be happy there! I haven't mixed up the accents, vocabulary, spelling rules, conjugation, grammer, or anything else. My grammer in english suffered a bit, but not because of mixing anything up. If I wanted to say "I painted the house yesterday", I would never say "I have yesterday the House painted" although that might be used and more appropriate in German. IRONIC that a person with AS would have trouble with VOCABULARY. And SOMETIMES I get LUCKY! I may never forget the spanish word for cat because I saw it too much on TV, the french word for cake because it sounds so much like spanish cat, the french word for fish because it looks like poison, and I have heard it on TV, poison is gift in german, widow is the same in hindi and german, knives almost looks like it came directly from danish, cup is the same in hindi, english and danish,It is also the same, albeit a different word, in German and Spanish etc....
That kind of thing IS supposed to be better with AS, so who knows, maybe that is an AS benefit!

Still, sometimes you REALLY have to watch it. 8-(

BTW Mushroom. You said you wanted to "learn japanese badly". Maybe next time you can leave the "badly" off! Sorry, I couldn't resist. STILL, some talk of self talk, etc...

And HEY, Japanese doesn't appear THAT bad phonetically, etc.... But I'm sure the reading/writing can take a LOT of getting used to. devanagari, for hindi, has only about 150 letters(Some indians would claim it is about 50, because of compound characters, but it really isn't NEARLY that obvious.), and take a LOT of liberties with the apparance to have form over function(or appearance over legibility), so I have been slow to even TRY to learn the whole thing. Even corrected to 20/20 my eyesight isn't good enough to even properly discern the difference in some characters. I'm sure the Japanese have done the same with their script.

Steve

Uhm...that more or less forces one parent
to stay at home, no? Thus, all that labor saved
(say 1 adult per 20 students) would be replaced
by 1 per 2 children in the home. Inefficient.

Yeah, individual attention is the best way to
teach, but is this cost worthwhile, across the
board?

Actually, the instruction SHOULD be done ANYWAY! Teachers often say that and make the PARENT the scapegoat! There have been COMMERCIALS on TV and RADIO saying that! Getting rid of the school scam, with proper enforcement, would INCREASE the number of efficient workers, increase education, decrease costs ACROSS THE BOARD, etc.... ALSO, if parents can't do that(thus admitting they can't properly care for their kids), maybe they should just not have kids! THAT would solve a LOT of problems!

HECK, I knew where the library was, had a GOOD dictionary, spoke to people about their jobs, had a (ahem) hobby of electronics, etc.... With the proper books and time, MATH would have been added to the other things I learned well, which included english, economics, electronics, chemistry, etc.... You can learn a lot as a little kid just by living life in a good area. I don't know where the good areas are now. I once lived in van nuys, panorama city, and sherman oaks, and NOW they are practically all GHETTOS. The whole culture has changed. They were once good middle class areas though. 8-( I think even the magazines I used to subscribe to were dumbed down. 8-( My favorite electronics one merged with the second favorite in 1999. It shut down in 2002! It STARTED in 1929! I probably subscribed from 1968 and read my last issue around 1981. As I said, it was dumbd down. NOW, it is GONE! So what still exists of it?

Probably this site that doesn't even do it justice! I mean they had COMPUTER SCHEMATICS in a 1971 issue! Back then, some people may have considered that a FANTASY, and who would have guessed that its next version(The very NEXT generation!) would be adopted a decade later by IBM and end up in almost every home?

http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/RadioElect ... ronics.htm

Steve

stay home while the other one is at work. The school system is very high priced child care.

Just think if parents where around raising their children how much less law enforcement would be needed. less cops.courts and jails. The school system has failed to fill the roll of parents.
50 years ago with stay at home moms we didn't have the youth problems of today.

my former town in CT. employed 1000 people for 6000 students, plus the bus drivers.
Teachers,janitors,lunch servers,office help, crossing guards.Add in all the outside vendors involved in supplying things.

Can't just base the figure on a parent would stay home full time until the child was 18. Most kids 14 or older could be left alone or with an older sibling or grandparent.

Many of the kids would take jobs once they where free'd of the chains of the government school schedule.

In most suburbs just a few parents being home during the day would keep the neighborhood in check.

We could go on and on about how messed up the school systems are and will never see any change in our lifetime.



society would save a fortune even if they gave the parents all sorts of of tax breaks for keeping their kids out of the school systems.

I plan on learning German after my Japanese is decent enough, but I'm not really enthusiastic about it... mostly due to the complexity, like how they have nine forms of plurals.



I know... we're taught Arabic in school, and while verb conjugation is my strongest point, I still have to think over it so I don't claim that I understand Arabic all that well... they have 14 pronouns... it's worse than French.


lol, I have a rather well vocabulary in all the languages that I know (6000+ in English, 3000+ in Persian, 2000+ in French and about 1000 in Japanese), but except in Persian and English, my receptive vocabulary is REALLY higher than my expressive. I forget most words when I want to use them.



That wasn't me, that was jijin lol. But I'll take your advice so I won't EVER do that.



About 3000 kanji are regularly used in Japan (I know about 200 and currently remember about 130)... katakana and hiragana aren't really bad, especially since 1/3rd of them is created by another kana and a simple " like thing on the right (I forgot the name...) however to learn kanji one needs a really excellent memory and a lot of time... my photographic/musical memory is really above average and I still can't remember all that I've learnt. Reading them is worse though, most of the time I see kanji compounds I understand them but I can barely read them.

Well, that makes me feel better. I know tens of thousands in english, thousands in german, danish, french, spanish, and hindi. In spanish and hindi, my BASIC vocabulary(the first 1000 words) is a bit spotty. My goal is to have a vocabulary of perhaps 6000 in each, and know the first 1000 words thouroughly.



WOW, maybe I really do hav a photographic memory! I always viewed it as the same as eidetic, but more and more are saying it isn't.