abadideaJun 16, 2025

People often complain "why is this language-learning app teaching me phrases like 'the radishes are scheming' and not 'may I have the bill'? I have a vacation in this country next week!"

If you have a vacation in that country next week, google a list of tourist phrases and memorize it by rote. These tend to be non-generalizable fixed phrases of complex, even archaic grammar. If you want to learn the language – which will not happen conclusively by next week – memorably whimsical sentences like "the radishes are scheming" teach you far more about modular, generalizable information you can use to build thousands of different sentences.

#language #languagelearning

Show threadsotolf
@0xabad1dea Yeah, I loved making up absurd examples while learning languages, things like "There are some missing ingrediences to my pencil eraser soup, we will need to correct this or the ceremony will be an awful failure" It's how I make things stick better in my mind, but yeah, for something more immediate it probably won't work, and taking a phrasebook along, and looking at memorising the most important ones are going to give you a way better time :)
Jun 16, 2025 at 10:34amWeb