Re: Lack of systematic teaching of Go

On Wed, 02 May 2007 19:42:29 -0700, Lawson English wrote:

And I disagree about the foreign language thing, too.

I wasn't speculating, I was writing about my own experience, the experience
of other people who have learned a foreign language, and of what is fairly
known to teachers of foreign languages (you hear this relatively often in
courses).

Even kids who grow
up in bilingual houses use English words when they can't think of the
Spanish word, and the other way around.

This isn't what I was talking about. When you start learning a new
language, you translate what you say, hear, read and write in your mind. At
some point, usually after a few years, you suddenly begin to skip this
extra step and "understand" what you read/hear without first translating
it, and you express your thoughts verbally or in written form without
translating them in your mind. In short, you "think" in the foreign
language when you deal with (or in) it. Around the same time you also begin
to dream in the foreign language.

It does not mean that you don't also think or dream in your native
language. It depends on the material you face, the environment you're in,
and the people you talk/listen to. It also doesn't mean you will never lack
the vocabulary. That happens to native speakers who are monolingual as
well. If you speak two or more languages, you have a larger pool of "words"
to choose from, so if you speak to someone who is also multilingual it
isn't that unusual to mix in words from other languages if they seem more
accurate or descriptive of what you want to express.

Go is a bit like a language.

M.
.

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