Refried words and thresholds

Thanks to some insightful feedback from last week’s column, we’re going to re-fry some of that fare and dig into it again. There are some little ideas here and a big one, too. We can list the little ones on the menu as “Communicating with Tourists” or “Thinking about Words.” The big idea is: “Thresholds—They’re Everywhere!”

The house specialty last week, in case you missed it, was some advice given to me by an American guy who succeeded in learning Mandarin Chinese. He said that once he could wield a vocabulary of 3,000 words, he could finally enter the virtuous cycle where he spoke well enough to actually have a basic conversation that, in turn, allowed him to improve his Mandarin skills.

OK; so much for our flashback. It comes as a lot of people are grappling with this sort of stuff, on Saipan as well as points beyond local horizons. So we’ll note a few related tidbits and then we’ll get all big-picture and strategic about stuff and contemplate the notion of thresholds.

One alert reader mentioned the use of smartphones coupled with Google Translate, and said that it can perform translations via human voice input and then synthesized voice output. I haven’t tried this, but it sounds cool. As far as I’m concerned, the more tools available for communicating, the better, especially when dealing with tourists who come from a variety of nations.

Meanwhile, getting back to this vocabulary business, two other folks have pointed out that merely memorizing vocabulary is not an effective way to approach a language. Well, I sure agree with that, since it’s not a technique that I’d use in any language, including my native tongue. For me, and most people I know, acquiring useful words bit by bit, and folding them into our daily lives, makes for more effective linguistic assimilation than wholesale rote does. I have, however, known a few people with incredible powers of memorization who could memorize long lists of vocabulary.

So, pragmatist that I am, I just shrug and say, “Whatever works.”

But let’s not swing at a straw-man here. The Chinese-speaking American who shared his 3,000 word observation never said, or even implied, that he built up his base vocabulary by memorizing word lists. What he said was that when his vocabulary hit that fateful point, things got better for him.

Where that point is drawn isn’t really the big issue. The big issue is that the point exists in the first place.

We’re talking about a threshold at which a given amount of input yields greater results (output) than it used to. Depending on the context, there are different words that are aimed at this general notion, such as “inflection point” or “tipping point.”

To heed the context that we started with, the learning realm, people often talk about the “learning curve,” and contemplate the point at which a little bit more studying yields amplified results. By contrast, they also contemplate a “plateau” in the learning curve, where additional amounts of studying seem to yield little, if any, results. If you study something long enough, you’ll probably encounter both realms eventually.

But studying is an easy case to ponder, since we’re usually thinking about just one input, such as time reading a textbook, or the number words learned, or something else simple like that. Other contexts get far more tangled, such as a factory that has multiple inputs to consider in order to maximize its profits. This is a textbook drill in microeconomics, especially if the factory has such a large share of the market that the more units it produces, the lower the market drives the price for them. Intuition doesn’t work here, and, furthermore, few relationships, if any, are linear.

One of the challenging things about modern life is that we can’t really see the relationships between our inputs (effort, money, time, etc.) and the outputs (success, money, happiness, etc.). For example, if you double the amount of time you work this week, will you get double the reward? That’s a ridiculously simple question, so overly simplistic it’s not even applicable to most of our lives, but you could still write an entire book about the answer.

In most fields I’m aware of, the defining characteristic of an expert is someone who understands how input and output are related, and, furthermore, how outside events can, or might, change those relationships. If you enjoy thinking big thoughts about this stuff, I’ll mention, as I often do, Nassim Nicholas Taleb who wrote, among other books, Antifragile.

Well, we’ve hit pretty big-picture stuff here, but that’s what makes it all so fun. Whether we’re studying a language, running a business, making investments, buying insurance, designing an engine, or planning an exercise routine, the relationship between what we put into it, and what we get out of it, is never simple.