living, thinking and writing
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| PRACTICE living, thinking and writing |
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Tuesday, April 27, 2004 Learning language I thought I know how to write in English, but every time I had my writings (mostly academic writings) edited by native speakers, it turns out that I was still the high school students struggling with basic grammars. It seems ten years didn’t change anything, I still don’t know where to add “the” and “a”, when to use “to do” or “of doing” and how to arrange the words in a sentence. I really don’t think there is a standard rule to follow in English; the right sense seems more important than right grammar. Talking about rules, I often think of a scene in “I love Lucy” where Ricky Ricardo tried to makes sense out of the different pronunciations of “ough” in “bough”, “through”, “ought” and “dough”. Well, that might not be the best parallel, but it comforts me that I’m not the only one that get lost in this language. Go back to the thought of writing: the most frustrating part is that I could seldom plug into the writing of the vocabulary and sentence structure I learned from readings, which is hitherto an accumulative of a good size. Repetition of same word and expression even bore myself away from reading my own writing, especially on academic one, which I have to deal in daily base. Recently, I’ve tried to learn some computer languages, starting with C and Python, so I could handle the huge dataset for my dissertation project. Computer language has much more straightforward and unequivocable rules to follow-compared to English. Learning programming is just like learning a set of traffic rules, both of which are binary featured, 0 or 1, yes or no, right or wrong. Neither it is difficult to follow what those sample codes lead to; and you think, well, it is not a big deal, I understand these codes and I know how they work. But once you try to get your hand dirty and program for real, you feel so helpless and not know how to start. And it makes me thinks back on learning English: like even you manage to understand every word in New York Time, or Harper, or even diary of Sylvia Plath, it doesn’t mean you know how to write out something like these. So I speculate that, in the process of learning a language, either English or C, there must be a metabolic phase, where what you learn can be transformed into some capability that empowers you to use what you learn. I hope this function is not decided by gene, but rather something can be improved by practice. posted by lmeimei @1:34 AM| permanent link| | |
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