![]() ![]() And that can be done with less than the full set of all English words. It's clear to me that you use language as a social signalling method, "that person doesn't know what NASA is, hah, they're dumb and I won't associate with them as a result." That's fine, but there is another aspect: explaining ideas. You have to separate language out into the multiple dimensions that it encompasses in order to understand certain aspects. NASA on its own tells you nothing about what they do, for all you know it could be the National Agricultural Sabotage Administration, and their goal is to blow up farms. Obviously if someone uses it and you don't know it, you're stuck. I've found through learning other languages that rare words are actually very rare and of extremely limited use. If you're lost somewhere and need help, nobody cares that you sound like a stupid child. Rather, achieve fluency in a subset, then work on becoming more idiomatic. Nobody is saying "learn 1000 words of English and you're done for life". The same applies to language.įirst off, there are many dimensions to reading new languages. There's also Einstein's dictum: make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. Finding an author who does this well and with skill is truly impressive.Īnd the good ones expand your vocabulary. ![]() But the best presentations I've encountered include both solid facts and a story which ties them together. Our minds typically work very well with narrative, sometimes too well, as false narratives can be constructed. One of those topics is of data and narrative, and the difference between a dry factual presentation (say, a data table, or a simple list of events) and a story which weaves these into a consistent whole. It is impossible to tell a narrative clearly if you've not organised your own thinking about it. Once you get over a slight old fashionedness of the writing, the thoughts are clear. Pop open a book of Darwin or Adam Smith (I've been reading both) and turn to a random page. That's a frequent problem with many Wikipedia articles, or much academic writing of the past few decades (older works - say, 1950 and prior, to the 18th or even 17th century - are often far clearer).īut the problem most often isn't just the vocabulary, it's the structure of the writing. Yes, it's possible to have confusing writing on account of unfamiliar terminology. The problem with stunts such as this - and there are others, the "if you stop writing for 5 seconds your text starts disappearing" demo a few weeks back comes to mind - is that they confuse the medium with the message. Writing is the problem of communicating ideas, and doing to to a sufficiently prepared audience, effectively. You're not, and you beat me to writing the same comment by 10 hours. They help us do easy and fun stuff for money. I now want to thank the people who went to school for a long time and made the things that turn human words into computer words. We go there to share stories about the things we build. That's what many of us in the "Thing Building News" place do. And if the thing you build actually helps other people, you can get a lot of money for it. Just imagine: you could build a whole new thing today. But today, many people like you and me build them for money or just for fun on their free time. It's still a little bit hard, but you can learn the simple stuff in a few days.Ī long time ago, only a few people could build new things for computers. Thanks to them, you can write stuff that feels pretty normal to you, and still be able to make new things for a computer. To make them, they had to know all the human words and all the computer words too. Those things were made by people who went to school for a long time. To make it easier, there are things that take human words and then write them out as computer words so you don't have to do it yourself. People usually only talk to other people, so talking to a computer using only computer words is very hard. You have to use strange computer words, not normal human words. If you want to make new things for a computer, you first have to write them down in a way that a computer can understand. Here's my attempt to describe compilers, which ended up going a little off-track: It's much easier to fix errors after finishing a sentence than it is to fear every word you type.
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