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A lesson in housekeeping (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by [M] to c/facepalm@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

foreign language book when your knowledge of the language is merely basic

There are dictionaries for this too.

one actually learns faster at the beginning by just keeping on reading even if not understanding a lot of things.

Yes and no. I used to do this, but when I sat down with dictionaries and translated one giant chapter of fanfic without skipping unknown words and preserving all jokes, I greatly improved my understanding of foreign language.

so it's hardly surprising if many people just chose to blindly use something as advised

Many people don't even have RTFM skill, so they can't follow advises they didn't read.

At the same time, the information that comes with from expert domains in things targeted at non-experts should be as much as possible reduced to common language (though even that is a balance,

If you don't, then expert domain becomes common language. How many people don't know what voltage is?

since a ton of things required several layers of explanation to fully explain to non-experts).

Try to open wikipedia article for something very common. Soon you will end up reading 5 articles about scientific disciplines and 6 articles about mathematical fields.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    It's funny because i learned 6 foreign languages, 2 of which to fluent level and another 2 to good level (and the other 2 to "I manage to get away with it" level ;)), and the approach of using of a dictionary to learn the meaning of the words which I tried at first didn't work at all well (it was slower and way more frustrating) and what did work best was just exposing myself to the language (in two different ways for two different languages, one by just consuming media of that language whilst the other by living in a country were people spoke the language) and going along with the flow without worrying about the words I didn't know, so quite a different experience from that.

    Anyways, my point isn't that most people can't dig down on things by for example going into Wikipedia or that I wouldn't prefer if they did, it's that most people either don't have the time or the inclination to do so, and expecting them to be different is denying human nature.

    In my experience with explaining expert domains to non-experts, you have to try and meet them in the middle, which will pull more people in to try and understand it that merely standing fast on my side of the domain language barrier and demand that the climb that mountain to get to me.

    That said, some people will never even try, no matter how much effort you put in making it easy for them, and sometimes it's not even stupidity (which, as something one is born with, it's kinda excusable, IMHO), it's just laziness.

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