Learning curve and curved hands: irrepressible fantasy + research physicist Jeffrey West
People live well without knowing English. Without English, you can easily go to the store, hold a sofa analytical consultation, pay bills and speak out about the advantages of your opponent's nurse.
Under the cut - some interesting graphs and the evolution of complex systems. And what to do with it.
')
Let's start from afar - with this dull picture.
Curve learning seen in their lives. She says that the further you progress in your skills, the slower and more difficult is progress. This thing has a couple of logical consequences:
The more complex the skills, the less people own or want to master them.
The closer we are to the beginning of the curve - the more people are concentrated there and the easier it is to build their learning process. For example, it is easy for people to tell about the basics of arithmetic, and many people already possess this information.
The higher we climb the learning curve, the fewer textbooks and teaching tools we find. There are hundreds of resources for learning the basics of English grammar. And there are almost no services that would allow to learn, for example, English legal terms.
Why it happens? To maximize profits, businesses and startups are targeting markets where there are more customers and lower product development costs. It is easier to sell sets of simple exercises to novices than to develop hardcore training materials for specialists at a level well above average.
Nothing personal, this is business.
Dinesh is a promising software student from Pakistan who moved from a small village to the city of Islamabad to study. He is interested in recurrent neural networks.
In the village, Dinesh spoke mainly Urdu. English is not a native language for him, and this is a problem for his interests. All the valuable programming and math materials almost always come out first in English.
Of course, over time, this ceases to be a problem. A year, two, three - and Dinesh will begin to understand all publications relatively easily. However, learning professional mathematical English requires additional strength and slows down the consumption of information. So other things being equal, Dinesh will be somewhat inferior in results,
for example, an English-speaking student from Islamabad.
The more actively Dinesh will be engaged in - the higher the learning curve he will climb and the more difficult the next step will be.
All that is in the market of educational services for learning English -
This is “pass these stupid tests and get a new level and a beautiful picture.”
The market likes to sell to a simple and massive buyer. People with more specific requirements were out of work.
And again - nothing personal, this is business.
In one of the acute bouts of procrastination, I came across a presentation by physicist Jeffrey West on TED .
Mr. West showed some curious patterns in the development of large systems. In the examples, cities, living organisms and corporations were shown, but in the pictures there was a curve that strongly resembles a learning curve (if you fold the first flat part of the curve).
It turns out that the processes that can be described by this function are found everywhere in nature. The learning curve and the evolution of systems have deep roots in common.
Mr. West talks about one curious detail - often the curve of the evolution of systems does not look like we used to. A rapidly evolving system at some point begins to collapse.
Here is an example of how this happens.
There is a small regional city. He is on the outskirts, there is little work there and, as a result, people are a little tight with money. A certain corporation is building a large enterprise there. The company gives new jobs, people have more money.
More cafes / restaurants / shops and more cars appear in the city. The standard of living is growing.
But the moment comes when growth gives negative consequences. The ecology in the city is deteriorating - there are more cars, the company is spoiling the environment, residents produce more garbage. The cost of living grows in proportion to the development of the city. There is a great demand for real estate, the rising cost of rent.
The corporation discovers that it is the largest employer in the city and without it people will find it difficult to find a job - the wage growth in the enterprise is frozen and as a result, the average wage in the city begins to fall relative to the average wage in the country. The standard of living begins to decline and part of the urban systems begins to collapse. People spend less on restaurants and entertainment, small businesses suffer.
Here is another example. How much knowledge remains in the average head 15 years after graduation? This is also an example of the collapse of the system.
Geoffrey West tells us that the collapse is an ordinary phenomenon and people have already dealt with it at the very different levels. In order to move to a new stage of evolution and not to start collapsing, the systems are explosively introducing innovations. While there is innovation, the system grows and does not collapse.
Innovation is not only technical change. For example, living organisms introduced innovations millions of years ago, having chosen their water to land. Or creating a complex brain. Or going from single to multicellular.
And humanity successfully passed from horses and plows to a couple, to oil, and then to mass production, atomic energy, and, finally, to the information age with all kinds of bigdats and quadcopters
For many, the learning process also leads to collapse. People happily begin to use all sorts of services and textbooks. The level quickly grows, and then the motivation falls (well, here you have 100 levels in language games, and what) and further the interest and learning process collapses.
A possible solution we have already seen above is to arrange several different and useful methods for learning a language along a learning curve. Upon reaching a certain stage in learning a language, people will be able to restart their learning curve from a new point, avoid the degradation process, speed up learning processes and get better results with less power.
Now let's screw this all to the study of languages.
Up to a certain limit, the curriculum for any language is clear and understandable - the alphabet, general grammatical rules, simple and necessary words. After that, the person must decide for himself what and how to teach him. And most importantly - why.
In English, according to various estimates, from 600,000 to 1,500,000 words. All these words, of course, do not need a living person. First of all, only those words are needed
which you will use in work / school / life. And everyone will have this set.
The doctor needs the word thorax (chest), the architect will use the word buttress (buttress, support). And mathematics is first of all good to understand what inequality, reciprocal and quotient are.
I collected several hundreds of thousands of text documents, classified them by topic, and extracted statistics from them. This statistic allows you to evaluate how useful a word is for proficiency in a language as a whole and how useful it is for a particular person. The benefit to the person is calculated on the basis of what he does. You read a lot of mathematical texts - you need more mathematical words. You take a great interest in biology - the utility rating will be headed by biological words.
Then I put together a simple interface and screwed it to my site. You can throw links to the wiki, blog posts and in general any links to pages containing articles in English.
This is not the first attempt to develop tools for learning the language while consuming your regular content. Earlier, I wrote articles about automatic adaptation of books and subtitles .
This is not the final product and not ready service. But he can help you progress in the language and in your business at the same time. This is an easier access to professional materials for those who previously had English texts with difficulty and learning languages ​​was not glued.
All this goes to a system that monitors all the content in a foreign language that you absorb. If you need to - the system will help to read complex text (as in the case of articles on the screenshot above). And if you don’t need it - just say that you watched “Game of Thrones” in English - and this alone is enough to slightly change and improve your language training program (you can count the words you need most from the series and include them in the list of words for studying, calculating a place in the list for the value of each word)
The second thing to do is to learn idioms, jargon and popular language constructs. Most people speak a foreign language like ten-year-olds - using the simplest phrases and words. If given the opportunity to learn interesting and popular jokes and phrases, it will become much richer. A person will be able to speak in a living language as a carrier. And even build jokes based on puns.
In our everything is changing very quickly. And those who can learn 10-30% faster and more efficiently than others and digest new information 10-30% faster than others receive an advantage.
Life has become too fast to learn languages ​​by doing exercises and tests.
PS To thank those who are not afraid to work with the first versions of the software - here's WE-LOVE-GEEKTIMES code as a gift to you. If suddenly ever paid features or advertising appear on the site - this code will save you from both the first and the second.
Under the cut - some interesting graphs and the evolution of complex systems. And what to do with it.
')
1. Intro - learning curve
Let's start from afar - with this dull picture.
Curve learning seen in their lives. She says that the further you progress in your skills, the slower and more difficult is progress. This thing has a couple of logical consequences:
The more complex the skills, the less people own or want to master them.
The closer we are to the beginning of the curve - the more people are concentrated there and the easier it is to build their learning process. For example, it is easy for people to tell about the basics of arithmetic, and many people already possess this information.
The higher we climb the learning curve, the fewer textbooks and teaching tools we find. There are hundreds of resources for learning the basics of English grammar. And there are almost no services that would allow to learn, for example, English legal terms.
Why it happens? To maximize profits, businesses and startups are targeting markets where there are more customers and lower product development costs. It is easier to sell sets of simple exercises to novices than to develop hardcore training materials for specialists at a level well above average.
Nothing personal, this is business.
2. Meet Dinesh
Dinesh is a promising software student from Pakistan who moved from a small village to the city of Islamabad to study. He is interested in recurrent neural networks.
In the village, Dinesh spoke mainly Urdu. English is not a native language for him, and this is a problem for his interests. All the valuable programming and math materials almost always come out first in English.
Of course, over time, this ceases to be a problem. A year, two, three - and Dinesh will begin to understand all publications relatively easily. However, learning professional mathematical English requires additional strength and slows down the consumption of information. So other things being equal, Dinesh will be somewhat inferior in results,
for example, an English-speaking student from Islamabad.
The more actively Dinesh will be engaged in - the higher the learning curve he will climb and the more difficult the next step will be.
All that is in the market of educational services for learning English -
This is “pass these stupid tests and get a new level and a beautiful picture.”
The market likes to sell to a simple and massive buyer. People with more specific requirements were out of work.
And again - nothing personal, this is business.
3. Mr West
In one of the acute bouts of procrastination, I came across a presentation by physicist Jeffrey West on TED .
Mr. West showed some curious patterns in the development of large systems. In the examples, cities, living organisms and corporations were shown, but in the pictures there was a curve that strongly resembles a learning curve (if you fold the first flat part of the curve).
It turns out that the processes that can be described by this function are found everywhere in nature. The learning curve and the evolution of systems have deep roots in common.
Mr. West talks about one curious detail - often the curve of the evolution of systems does not look like we used to. A rapidly evolving system at some point begins to collapse.
Here is an example of how this happens.
There is a small regional city. He is on the outskirts, there is little work there and, as a result, people are a little tight with money. A certain corporation is building a large enterprise there. The company gives new jobs, people have more money.
More cafes / restaurants / shops and more cars appear in the city. The standard of living is growing.
But the moment comes when growth gives negative consequences. The ecology in the city is deteriorating - there are more cars, the company is spoiling the environment, residents produce more garbage. The cost of living grows in proportion to the development of the city. There is a great demand for real estate, the rising cost of rent.
The corporation discovers that it is the largest employer in the city and without it people will find it difficult to find a job - the wage growth in the enterprise is frozen and as a result, the average wage in the city begins to fall relative to the average wage in the country. The standard of living begins to decline and part of the urban systems begins to collapse. People spend less on restaurants and entertainment, small businesses suffer.
Here is another example. How much knowledge remains in the average head 15 years after graduation? This is also an example of the collapse of the system.
Geoffrey West tells us that the collapse is an ordinary phenomenon and people have already dealt with it at the very different levels. In order to move to a new stage of evolution and not to start collapsing, the systems are explosively introducing innovations. While there is innovation, the system grows and does not collapse.
Innovation is not only technical change. For example, living organisms introduced innovations millions of years ago, having chosen their water to land. Or creating a complex brain. Or going from single to multicellular.
And humanity successfully passed from horses and plows to a couple, to oil, and then to mass production, atomic energy, and, finally, to the information age with all kinds of bigdats and quadcopters
4. Putting it all together
For many, the learning process also leads to collapse. People happily begin to use all sorts of services and textbooks. The level quickly grows, and then the motivation falls (well, here you have 100 levels in language games, and what) and further the interest and learning process collapses.
A possible solution we have already seen above is to arrange several different and useful methods for learning a language along a learning curve. Upon reaching a certain stage in learning a language, people will be able to restart their learning curve from a new point, avoid the degradation process, speed up learning processes and get better results with less power.
Now let's screw this all to the study of languages.
Up to a certain limit, the curriculum for any language is clear and understandable - the alphabet, general grammatical rules, simple and necessary words. After that, the person must decide for himself what and how to teach him. And most importantly - why.
In English, according to various estimates, from 600,000 to 1,500,000 words. All these words, of course, do not need a living person. First of all, only those words are needed
which you will use in work / school / life. And everyone will have this set.
The doctor needs the word thorax (chest), the architect will use the word buttress (buttress, support). And mathematics is first of all good to understand what inequality, reciprocal and quotient are.
5. Decision
I collected several hundreds of thousands of text documents, classified them by topic, and extracted statistics from them. This statistic allows you to evaluate how useful a word is for proficiency in a language as a whole and how useful it is for a particular person. The benefit to the person is calculated on the basis of what he does. You read a lot of mathematical texts - you need more mathematical words. You take a great interest in biology - the utility rating will be headed by biological words.
Then I put together a simple interface and screwed it to my site. You can throw links to the wiki, blog posts and in general any links to pages containing articles in English.
- I will extract the text of the article by reference, mark up complex words in it and insert the translations directly into the page in advance. Thus, you can read and even more or less understand even texts that you would otherwise have had to read with a dictionary.
- Read and understand the text - one. But to progress in learning a language is another. Therefore, for each of your links, I will count the statistics that will help you form your training program. The list of words can be sorted by “usefulness”, mark among the words that you already know and choose those that you should learn.
- All power - cars. On a separate page, I collect all the words from your documents and rank them according to the level of complexity and utility. If you are engaged in IT and threw into the service a lot of references to IT texts - you will receive a list of words that will help you to quickly and easier understand IT materials + will be most useful for understanding the language as a whole. The word that you take from the top of your list and learn will always be most useful for your goals and activities. And you will always see what you teach. The list is updated with each new article that you analyzed.
6. What's next
This is not the first attempt to develop tools for learning the language while consuming your regular content. Earlier, I wrote articles about automatic adaptation of books and subtitles .
This is not the final product and not ready service. But he can help you progress in the language and in your business at the same time. This is an easier access to professional materials for those who previously had English texts with difficulty and learning languages ​​was not glued.
All this goes to a system that monitors all the content in a foreign language that you absorb. If you need to - the system will help to read complex text (as in the case of articles on the screenshot above). And if you don’t need it - just say that you watched “Game of Thrones” in English - and this alone is enough to slightly change and improve your language training program (you can count the words you need most from the series and include them in the list of words for studying, calculating a place in the list for the value of each word)
The second thing to do is to learn idioms, jargon and popular language constructs. Most people speak a foreign language like ten-year-olds - using the simplest phrases and words. If given the opportunity to learn interesting and popular jokes and phrases, it will become much richer. A person will be able to speak in a living language as a carrier. And even build jokes based on puns.
In our everything is changing very quickly. And those who can learn 10-30% faster and more efficiently than others and digest new information 10-30% faster than others receive an advantage.
Life has become too fast to learn languages ​​by doing exercises and tests.
PS To thank those who are not afraid to work with the first versions of the software - here's WE-LOVE-GEEKTIMES code as a gift to you. If suddenly ever paid features or advertising appear on the site - this code will save you from both the first and the second.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/372533/
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