Mr. Bitter's Business

I mentioned Vygotsky in my post last week, but I wanted to bring his ideas in again this week since we just read him, and since he is, after all, Russian. I’ve been trying to think what he might say about language learning and Rosetta Stone. First, I’m sure he would approve of their consistent use of images in connection with words. The image, of an egg for example, is the thing itself, or I think he would say it is the “external stimuli,” whereas the word “egg/ яйцо ”, whether written or spoken, is just a symbol of the object, and is an “artificial stimuli.” In other words, we’re essentially labeling the things around us, storing these labels/signs in our memory, and then using them to communicate with others and ourselves when we do not have the actual stimuli in front of us. This process helps with our development because we are not like apes, only reacting to things in our immediate perception, which is the “elementary function.” We instead store these signs in our memory and use ...

I haven’t said much in my learning blogs about the social aspect of my Russian learning, but it is there, if only minimally. When I’m going over the Rosetta Stone lessons I will often ask my wife, a native Russian speaker, how to pronounce something or what a certain word means. The translation is helpful because RS does not give the English translations. I’m still thinking of how much this kind of social interaction relates to Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. But there are other times, however, when my wife will quiz me on certain words, forcing me to recall them and helping to extend my potential. This also goes both ways because she always asks me how to pronounce a certain word in English or what a word means. For example, we made hot chocolate in a pot the other day and the directions said to stir it until it was “frothy,” but she had never heard that word before. I tried to explain what it meant, but since I’m an expert [recall the Ambrose article] in English, it can be ...

There are a few things I went over this week. The first is writing. I don’t have to include the writing portion in my Rosetta Stone lessons, but I choose to just to help with further review and familiarity with words. The writing lessons are probably also the funnest part, and not terribly hard either, mainly because the keyboard is mostly phonetic, and RS also has the keyboard right on the screen. I was also finally introduced to numbers. Counting is always the first sign of knowing a language. Один (1), два (2), три (3), and so on. But one, two, and three is really all you need to know when it comes to picture taking. I remember learning these numbers when I was in Russia taking pictures, and so was able to recall them this time around. Here it is asking me to say the number. I think I nailed it. And speaking of recall and having things more solidified in my long-term memory, I came across some words in a new lesson that I was already familiar with because they...

A few of you have commented about how I have the intrinsic motivation to learn Russian. At the risk of making myself sound less awesome, that’s only partly true. I do want to learn Russian, but I had more intrinsic motivation to learn it when I was over there for three weeks than I do now. (If my wife didn’t speak perfect English then that’d probably be different.) There are a couple reasons why I don’t have a ton of intrinsic motivation to learn Russian. One is what I already said about not living there and also not having it as a necessary part of any communication that I do. The other reason is that it’s hard. This is a totally new language with a new alphabet, which doesn’t at all build on my understanding of a Latin-based language like Spanish. At this early stage, the challenge level is still beyond my grasp, especially knowing how long it can take to learn a language. I’m not exactly sure what learning theory to incorporate here to explain the gap between challenge and abil...

I think one of the biggest obstacles for me in learning Russian will have to do with the encoding specificity principle. In other words, is my learning of Russian, primarily through Rosetta Stone, going to be context dependent? I said in my previous post that RS is always trying to get you to associate words with images, and vice versa. However, will I be able to transfer these words that I learn to other contexts? Or, even more difficult, will I be able to recall and use these words when I don’t have images to look at? After all, it’s not like all of our communication only points out the things we physically see in front of us. Encoding specificity tells us that what we learn is best recalled in the context that we learned it in. In a recent lesson I learned some colors, none of which I can recall right off. But if I go into RS and do the color lesson, then I am much better at recalling those colors and matching them up. On the other hand, it will probably just take time to be ...