Studying English

Borges ones wrote a poem "On beginning of a studying Ancient English" and when they asked him why he had chosen such a strange topic for poetry he answered that studying of English is such a moving emotional experience for him as watching a sunrise for example. The beginning of a studying English that was in a 5th grade wasn't particularly moving (I don't think that there's any element of our educational system that apt to be compared with the sunrise) but now, when I at long last came to the average level of understanding the language I knew what he had meant. With my current level of English I need to check a dictionary no more than two times per page while reading simple fiction (and with a dictionary built in an ebook it almost don't make a stumble) so now I can at first time experience works written in English in such flow manner as I experience Russian ones.

And except that now I begin to experience first fragments of English language thinking, dreams in English etc - the birth of English mind\language which despite of its scantiness is in some ways more effective then my Russian one.

Now you can easily tell that I'm very in all that Sapir-Whorf's "language you use changes the way you think" thing. I truly believe it is. Once I've learned toki-pona (that's pocket - just 130 words - artificial language created by Canadian linguist Sonya Ellen Kissa) to check is it true. Toki-pona is very easy, you can learn it completely in a week. Now I've forgotten it 'cause I have nobody to talk too. But when I've learned it I used to try to think with it for sometime and I felt that the way I thought have being changing. And the funniest thing is that some of that changes were retained even after I forgot toki-pona completely.

So what's the difference? Russian is very specific in that sense that we have a slightly different word for everything (in "he did", "she did" and "they did" we have 3 different words for "did"). Because of that first: it's probably very hard to learn Russian if it's not your native language, and second: grammar of sentence is pretty loose so if you found right forms of words, you can put them in almost any order and sentence would be grammatically correct (ok, there are a lot of people here who make incorrect sentences, but you probably need a special talent to do that). Russian has only 3 tenses (not 16 as in English) and no changes in sequence of tenses. We don't have modal verbs (came in, came at, come by and come down - completely different words) so size of personal vocabulary is probably more crucial then in English. That's why something sounds a bit too flowery in English would probably sound just good in Russian. And opposite: it's hard to pass with Russian such feeling of "beauty of simplicity" that English language (as I think) so good at. In Russian it would probably sound a bit simple-minded.

Couple of months ago I found a game that asks you to model neuron network of a ladybug brain (http://www.biologic.com.au/bugbrain/) and I spent some time with this game. In one mission I got to create a brain that allow a bug to stop when branch is over, turn when there's other branch, stand still while the bird is near and couple of other things. It took me about 8-9 neurons to build such brain. Then I came online to look the solution and found out that guy needed only 2 neurons for this task. That was because he very carefully calculated thresholds of every input and I used only 1 and 0.5 values. And that "simplicity because of precision" is what (as I feel) distinguishes English from Russian.

One of the problems with the way I write is that I use language intuition that was developed in Russian surrounding to write in English. That causes my sentences to be too long and wordy. Other is settled constructions. With your native language you don't need to put an effort to build a sentence of some kind, you just know how to do it right. But when you apply that "knowledge" to other language it always ends up with calquing constructions from your native language onto other. (For example at first I've written "speak in English" 'cause that's how we say it in Russian but I've spotted that mistake and corrected it (and that makes me wonder how much of such mistakes I haven't spotted). And for deciding is it correct to write "into other language" or "onto other language" I've got to flip a coin (here I wrote "drop a coin" at first:) )