I met a man on a sleeper bus going from Haikou to Nanning. He is from Switzerland, if memory serves me right. He is a middle aged business man who speaks German, English, and now Chinese (and maybe another language?). He is studying Chinese in Chengdu. Anyway, he noticed me working on Chinese flashcards and mentioned his website and a learning theory. His website is www.chinglish-online.com.
I have begun to get serious about learning Chinese and remembered his website. I went to his site and poked around, finding the learning theory by Sebastian Leitner and wanting to learn more I went to answers.com. This is what I found:
***
Sebastian Leitner (1919-1989) was a German commentator and science popularizer.
As a student in Vienna, he was briefly kept in custody by the Nazis in 1938 because of his opposition against the annexation of Austria into Greater Germany. Later he moved to Frankfurt to study law, but he was recruited by the Wehrmacht in 1942. After spending several years in a Soviet prison, he returned to Germany in 1949 and started a career as a commentator.
At first, he focused on legal and sociological topics, but later he took medical and psychology-related subjects as his theme. His book So lernt man lernen (How to learn to learn), a practical manual on the psychology of learning, became a bestseller. In this often-cited book he described his Leitner System (see flashcard) for learning by spaced repetition.
***I am curious. I follow the links: flashcard and spaced repetition. Spaced repetition leads me to Pimsleur language courses and I am then asking, "What is a constructed language and how good is Pimsleur*?" So I follow the constructed language link and find the following in the entry, which you should really read in full, because it is funny:
"Thus, a "better" language should allow the speaker to reach some elevated level of intelligence, or to encompass more diverse points of view. A constructed language could also by this hypothesis be used to restrict thought, as in George Orwell's Newspeak."
Then, I follow the "Newspeak" entry, because I like George Orwell and remember this is something important. People like to use this term a lot in political circles.
Then, I follow the "Newspeak" entry, because I like George Orwell and remember this is something important. People like to use this term a lot in political circles.
Then I came across this: Two plus two make five - some nice quotes:
- "I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too."
- ThinkGeek produces a popular t-shirt that says "2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2" as a parody on the concept of mathematical approximation.
- "2 + 2 = 5, for sufficiently large values of 2" is a reminder about the way estimation errors compound in numerical calculations. One example is when rounding is directly involved: 2.4 is rounded down to 2 ("a large value of 2"), while 2.4 + 2.4 (which is equal to 4.8) is rounded up to 5.
"One documented buzzword bingo occurred when Al Gore, then the Vice President of the United States known for his liberal use of buzzwords hyping technology, spoke at MIT's 1996 graduation. Hackers had distributed bingo cards containing buzzwords to the graduating class." Click here to see the bingo card and instructions.
*How many words do you need to read Shakespeare's Macbeth? http://www.cateeslanguageworld.com/pimsleur/100words.php
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