And with regard to the German language I want to, after some back-and-forth pondering regarding the lack of reference to those complementive means of complexityenhancingplaceholdercompoundlatinismnoun- constructions, and under the notion of the similarities between the Germanic languages English and German, add that this holds only in certain settings (conferences!) and in some minor degree true in the written world, as in spoken communication we usually do not know where we started anyway with our sentences which doesn’t really matter as actually nobody cares because just in Chinese 90% of the information is infered from context.

Much of verbal, written and stand-up comedy relies on the audience’s natural function of looping and contextualizng all data as it comes in. Jokes depend on the predictive quality of the mind, to make you laugh.

Think of any punchline; it’s probably funny because it broke some structure the comedian led you to believe existed before the last line, or the switch, or the reversal.

For Example:

…um… hmm… if I knew any clean jokes, I’d print them here.

You get the idea… right?
jonathan

You tell ‘em! I think your avatar says it all. we will prevail.

Ken Carroll

Nice editorial on the link you posted. I will be very interested to see that concept of mobile language learning play out with Nokia.

Ken,

James touches on the environmental aspects of e-learning I was going on about in my letter.

The “can of worms” quote you almost didn’t mention, may be true in ‘Theory’. Let’s invite them to comment on it AFTER a generation of Chinesepod listeners are functional or fluent as a result of our learning of the Mandarin ‘Encoding’ process. Right now, after less than two years in existence, we’re just a community of thousands of enthusiastic, leading-edge, maybe even addicted participants in the Chinesepod ‘encoding’ process. In just a few short years, we’re going to be a global village of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of functional Mandarin Speakers.

Will we infer the meanings of the Mandarin speaker’s sentence correctly every time? No, of course not. But I’ve been speaking English for over 30 years, and I still misunderstand people all the time.

The bottom line is any time you have two people communicating, there are layers of blocks that cloud meaning. Language is just one of the separators. Intent, emotion, subtext, purpose, urgency, context, Fruedian needs, wandering minds. You name it-we navigate it to communicate with one another, whether we know it or not.

Jonathan
TaiPan

You’ve opened a can of worms. Beleive me…

I beleive listening and speaking are different skills, but are joined at the neuron: Both rely ultimately on a cache of acquired items, somewhere in the reticlulated folds we call our brains.

To your other point: Parsing is real, but it’s done in collaboration with a multitude of other activites. (I mentioned some of them above.) We have the ability to do it at an alarmign rate, but we generally don’t need to rely entirely on parsing because the information from the environment (and other factors) usually suffices. (Most conversational communication is said to be body language!)I doubt if we could use parsing alone to tell much about the reality of two human beings arguing over the price of fish, but it certainly provides some clues.

Two things occur to me at this point. First, as Eric Lennenberg pointed out as far back as the 60s, all speech, regardless of language, tends to be uttered in short bursts of emphasis, rather than a consistent stream. (Just read that last sentence again, pasuing on the commas, and you’ll see what I mean.)These bursts are called intonation units, and they exist for a reason: respiration. (Ouch!) It could well be that we decode in lexical units because we encode in lexical units, and we do that because we have to breathe! (Lantian, where are you?)

The second thing that has been on my mind is actually pretty scary. In fact, I almost didn’t dare write it in the original post, but hey! I quote from Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson

“.. the linguistic meaning of an uttered sentence falls short of encoding what he speaker means: it merely helps the audience infer what he means.”

At best, all of this is probablistic.

I’ll let you do the inferring now as to why this is potentially so scary!

Ken Carroll

I listen to a podcast at least once a day driving to work. I don’t put any expectations on myself to have remembered much of it. It’s like an introduction. The next time I listen (on my lunch break, when I can concentrate) I’ve already heard the dialog, even if it was peripheral. Repetition, repetition, repetition…