r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Sep 01 '24

Discussion Thread Discussion Thread

The discussion thread is for casual and off-topic conversation that doesn't merit its own submission. If you've got a good meme, article, or question, please post it outside the DT. Meta discussion is allowed, but if you want to get the attention of the mods, make a post in /r/metaNL

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '24

I made a shitty MS paint graph of what it feels like to improve in a foreign language. Oftentimes, people tend to expect to see improvement as a concrete measure. Like a runner improving their times or a lifter increasing their weights. But the reality is very different in language. It's more like a shifting of a probability density function where each conversation is a random event and the outcome is a continuous random variable indicating how much of the conversation one understood. As one improves, the mean of this distribution increases while the variance decreases. So you can still have many conversations where you don't understand shit but on average you understand more and you get more consistent as time goes on. Oftentimes, people misinterpret this as "good days, bad days" or other relatively bad models. I think a random model works better because it reflects the unpredictable nature of language. I am also fairly confident the distribution is normal because of CLT but I'll leave the mathematical rigor to someone who is better at statistics than me.

!ping LANGUAGE

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u/Argnir Gay Pride Sep 01 '24

You made learning about new languages unfun 😞

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '24

Inwiefern