I doubt I will ever gain this feeling (for lack of a better word) with another language. I mean how could I? Everything sounds weird and "off" when you're a beginner, right? For example: el bano, el agua, la naranja, la sillas. You're constantly suppressing warning signs flashing in your head.
For example, I remember being forced to memorize the multiplication tables. I doubt we do that in schools anymore. I feel like all that time could have been better spent learning something else.
You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.
This is such a weird and amazing analogy. Thank you for sharing it! I don't know if I've ever heard this concept explained in quite this way before.
Actually, I don't agree with that. If I look around the room I'm in now, there are a LOT of different objects, and I can imagine what they'd feel like on my tongue, even though I've never physically licked the vast majority of those types of objects. To give a couple of examples: a partly used candle, the "lighting" side of a matchbox, guitar strings, lightbulbs, new bike inner tube. The reason I can imagine how they would feel, despite never having actually licked them, is that in our early years we're just exploring the world and building a mental model. We stop licking everything quite early when we figure out the class of things that's generally food, but by that point we've learned how to correlate the sense of feelings we get from our tongue with the sense of feelings we get from our fingers, because we also touch all those items a lot with our fingers. With enough examples, we become pretty good at pattern matching across senses, so e.g. I can look at an object, from the shadows see that it's bumpy, and have a pretty good idea what it'd feel like if I rubbed it with my fingertips or even licked it, or if it's glass, plastic, metal, fabric, I'd know it'd produce different feelings ranging from differences in friction, thermal conductivity, etc.
That's quite a lot of text, but the TLDR is that we don't need to lick everything to have a pretty good idea of how it'd feel on the tongue, just enough to have a general idea of the properties of different classes of materials. Given that most babies stop licking/chewing everything before they've reached nursery age, it's clear that for objects we encounter in later life it's not the licking per-se that matters for this "skill", but whether we've learned to associate the senses.
I guess taste is a bit different, but my default would just be to assume that most objects are tasteless unless they also have an odour.
Are you sure you never licked those materials as a child?
I'm not sure when my earliest memories date from any more — some of what I thought were memories turned out to be dreams of things that never happened, others have mutated with each re-recollection — but one thing I can be sure of is that I don't remember any of the "stick random things in mouth" stage of my life.
When I look around my room, I find there are indeed things I cannot imagine what it would be like to lick them, but they're all made of materials I didn't have access to as a kid: soft touch rubber.
But yeah, materials like the rubber in my inner tube... I'm pretty sure my parents wouldn't have allowed such stuff near me as a baby, likewise I wouldn't have been allowed near boxes of matches etc. I also can't imagine I'd ever have decided as an older child that I should try licking a bike tube or the striking surface of a matchbox. And so, I'm about as confident as I can be that I'd never have licked an inner tube in my life, but I can make a good guess from feeling it with my fingers what it'd likely feel like on my tongue.
There's very little where I'd go as far as to say "I cannot imagine what it'd be like", except maybe for things that would involve a chemical reaction, and where I might have some idea from extrapolation with foods - e.g. fizzing, an exothermic reaction, etc., but wouldn't necessarily be able to guess from looking or feeling with my fingers what the result might be. Most of the interesting ones are turned into food anyway, e.g. sherbert dip or sour sweets.
I definitely have had some surprises in later life - I remember first having ox-tongue when I was in my 20s and finding the texture quite uncomfortable, and since high single-digit ages, I've never been able to correlate the texture of liver with something that's edible.
I guess another example is with unfamiliar "exotic" fruits - there are some that would surprise everyone with their taste, but you can guess most of the texture characteristics of a fruit just by looking at it and cutting it into pieces, and you might be able to have a guess at taste from its smell.
And I actually disagree with you. My son went through a period where he put nearly everything in his mouth, bugs, bottle caps, spices, food, phones, credit cards, toys, rocks. Pretty sure we all did that at some point.
I’m learning piano at the moment, and it is taking me a lot of playing to build up those generalisations you’re talking about. I’ve only been at it for 2 years at this point and I still feel like a beginner.
How much programming do you need to do to build an intuitive sense of all the programs? I’ve been programming for 30 years and I’d say I started to have a usable intuition around 10 years in.
I’m not sure what “a lot” means to you, but a decade of practice seems like a lot to me. It’s a lot more effort than most people are willing to invest in their hobbies and, in many cases, their careers.
My intuition is that creativity is a more of a feeling one has, rather than the result of some teaching method or cultural background. It seems very closely related to one's interests and also the novelty effect. Just think about the first time you experienced something, like a great song or your first love. The mind is just bubbling with thoughts. How can that feeling be experienced again with the same object like it was the first time? It can't. It's never the same as the first time. Even if we can mentally forget, the subconscious somehow remembers it's had that experience, so it isn't fresh anymore.
So, yes, you need to make connections between existing things to come up with something new, but once the fascination with a thing dissipates and it becomes familiar, any further creativity in that area quickly dies off. Our interest just moves on.
Perhaps the really creative people are just the ones who have this ability to see familiar things with ever fresh eyes?
There's being taught and then there's exploring and practice. It's the exploring and practice that is often missing today, IMO because we all want everything to happen so quickly.
In my sport of choice, jiujitsu, there's been a shift happening in teaching. Traditionally the teacher would show a move or two then have the class drill the move. The shift now is more conceptual where the teacher might say the goal is get chest to chest and then have the students operate at 20% figuring it out on their own. While there are some pretty vocal camps on both sides, I think having both methods is the best to learn from. Being taught a solution to a problem a student discovered on their own during discovery is when learning really takes hold IMO.
Finally, the best way to really learn that I have found is to teach something.
Over time, the regular drilling makes recognition of context a great deal faster, and the conceptual pieces make improv at that point start to look creative or magical, but it's not - it's just all that drilling, and familiarity, and interconnected understanding in gestalt that enables "creativity".
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22show+me+wax+on+wax+off%22&iax=v...
No it's not; this is the point of apprenticeship. It's just not compatible with the educational institutions people actually pay for.
> I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.
This is not contradictory. If your idea of teaching is just lecturing at people and occasionally verifying specific knowledge, obviously they're not going to learn very much. Your job as a teacher is to facilitate a growth curve of increasingly more difficult and unwieldy problems to solve.
Apprenticeship is hard, there is a reason people don't accept just any apprentice, if it was easy people wouldn't be so picky who they want to teach.
Well, they're now only offered through unions, too. I suspect there's a great demand for such opportunities.
I hear you; but teaching deep expertise is really hard. We can use your example of a child learning their first language. They will really understand it. But people are famously, hilariously terrible at teaching their native tongue. We know how to conjugate, and how to use verbs and adverbs and all the rest. But it’s all intuitive - we have no symbolic understanding of it. If that’s the case, we can’t explain it in words.
Here’s a weird fact: if you look around the room you’re in now, I bet you know what it would feel like on your tongue to lick everything you see. We probably learned that in the “put everything in your mouth” baby phase.
You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself.
I believe a lot of real learning is actually like that. When I taught programming, I think I was a frustrating teacher. My students would ask things like “what’s the best way to structure this program?” And I would say “I don’t know. Let’s brainstorm a few ways then you should pick at least one and try writing it like that. Figure it out in code.” I think you become great at programming by licking all the programs you can find. Same with music and art and languages (go have conversations with native speakers).
There is only so much the best teacher can teach. Sometimes you just have to walk around licking things.