Re:Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service
by Jugurtha on Friday November 06, 2020 @08:22AM
(#25007403)
This is how I learned languages non-natively as well. But even learning a language natively is done that way: you don't give babies grammar books.
We do that as programmers as well: we get familiar with a syntax/grammar just enough so that we could get to reading source code, learning idioms to do things such as open a file, or make a request, or use a regex. The quick tutorial + cookbook works very well in programming.
This is one reason I lean towards Stephen Krashen's work on language acquisition, and his "input hypothesis"[0].
The way I learned every language was by consuming content that increased in complexity and variety. Patterns were acquired.
As in machine learning, just throwing a bunch of training data at my brain (in the form of complete, native sentences) way outperforms building a rule-based system to the point where I just don't bother learning any rules at all.