making mistakes is bad or good?

A comment on Steve's blog says:

The essence of learning is making mistakes, that's HOW you learn to do it right!

I have to say, I don't agree with this. We learn to do it right by doing it right, not by doing it wrong. When you do something wrong, it means you haven't learned how to do it right yet.

Is it impossible for someone to do something right without doing it wrong first? No, I don't think so. Getting it wrong is not a prerequisite for getting it right.

no English, none of the time, never!

Have you heard of "No English, None of the Time, Never!" before? Maybe we can shorten it to NENTN! I think I don't even have to explain what this means. 99% of readers probably understand what it's all about. For that one percent who are totally clueless, here's an explanation:

reading like a native

I know many people have the notion that you'll never be as good as a native speaker in a foreign language. A few of us have the audacity to aspire to native-equivalent performance in our second languages and even fewer strive for native-sounding pronunciation. Even if we are delusional, I think for those that really want to be extremely good in another language, there is no reason that we can't expect to be able to read like a native.

For languages with alphabetic scripts or even phonetic scripts, reading as well as a native may not sound like something that would be questionable. All you need to do is put in the time and even if you don't feel like looking up unknown words, eventually you'll get a pretty good idea of what most of the words mean.

But for Chinese and Japanese (any others?), reading is quite a challenge even at the advanced stages of learning. I haven't much experience with reading Chinese, but I do for Japanese. So let me just talk about reading Japanese.

example sentences

One feature of modern dictionaries is the "example sentence." If you go to dictionary.com, you can find example sentences with the definition of a word. For example, here's an example sentence from the entry for "hamburger."

• That's a sad fact for hamburger lovers, but it's true.

Unfortunately, all of the example sentences for hamburger, and most other entries, are useless. My guess is, though, they didn't waste any time writing these sentences. They most likely use some code to pull them from a large corpus.

What's the problem with this and most other example sentences you get from dictionaries? These sentences are not really good examples of how to use the word. The sentences also don't give you any hint or idea as to what the word means. That means you can take the word in the sentence that's supposed to be the most important word and replace it with about a hundred other words.  For instance, "hamburger" in the above sentence could be replaced with any of the following: pizza, language, ocean, animal, young, paid, forgotten, new, old, lost.  The list goes on and on.

There's nothing about that sentence that tells you this must be talking about a hamburger. Basically, if hamburger were an unknown word to you in English, but you knew what a hamburger is, you would not be able to make any connections from what you know about hamburgers to the word in this sentence.

The best example sentences would be ones where you could fill in the blank.  In the example sentence above, if I left it blank, nobody, not even a native speaker would know what the original word was. But with an ideal example sentence, the blank could only be filled in by one word. And that word would be obvious to any native speaker from looking at the rest of the sentence.

 So the next time you think, "I need to see an example sentence," don't even bother.