@hikari yeah we've tried duolingo and the conclusion is that (a) it sucks and (b) the gamification shit doesn't work on me

@hikari this might be a bit of a surprising statement given our background, but we don't really agree with this. textbooks are very useful and we think they should stick around as something people can reference, but we don't feel like they are necessarily a good way of learning. the "introduction to that thing -- but only for people who already know it" meme captures the essence of what we see as the problem (even though we own our fair share of that type of textbook)

@hikari it feels like what you want from traditional education is something like "a structured curriculum, including appropriate amounts of direct instruction"?

the instructors we've found most effective have had a particularly impressive ability to build curricula and lectures that don't actually contain too much "textbook" type material but instead fundamentally seem to focus on *reshaping worldviews and patterns of thinking*

@hikari e.g. there is a particular style of "fancy-university academia-brained usually-bottom-up abstraction building" approach to EE/CS especially but also other disciplines that we've noticed many of the "globally top-ranking" schools have, and which we are *really* drawn to. but this is... not something that comes directly from or via textbooks? it's just a particular _vibe_?

@hikari this worldview-reshaping vibe comes not only from worked examples in lectures but also a *particular* style of building guided homework, labs, and projects (which, incidentally, thus drags in a lot of out-of-scope-for-this-discussion problems and criticisms regarding TAs and labor relations)

@hikari the thing that really frustrates us, that we don't get and don't know what to do about, is that basically all of our own attempts to teach other people things using this vibe have not only failed but often seem to get explicitly rebuffed

we have no idea why or whether it is even something that we ourselves are doing wrong

@hikari we unfortunately didn't get a "fair" exposure to second-language learning in school (we did Mandarin and stumbled hard into the realization that normal curricula are completely unsuitable for heritage speakers), but what we've seen of (American) first-language English grammar instruction is *completely worthless*

@hikari for reasons that we also don't understand, compulsory education English teachers seem vaguely allergic to grammar, and *especially* allergic to "more academic" analysis of things such as tense–aspect–mood (imo the hardest part of English grammar)

we ended up getting taught this by our father who presumably learned it from some (possibly-non-US) english-as-a-*second*-language teaching material

@hikari whenever we need to triple-check something that we aren't sure about even as a native speaker, nowadays we tend to reach for _linguistics_ reference material and not "English grammar" reference material that we were (barely) shown back during compulsory schooling

@hikari wrt music, we actually did learn a bunch of music theory by rote memorization. it ended up being completely useless and we've forgotten most of it. it also just... never made any sense?

@hikari

... because nobody successfully performed the _worldview shift_ to explain that "this is *one* framework for applying constraints to and studying the infinite variations that is sound/music. it is useful *because* many creative endeavors involve consuming, analyzing, borrowing from, and remixing *existing* culture in a manner which is *in conflict* with the ideology of 'individual creative expression' which is being concurrently propagandized"

@hikari how do i pick a book for picking up a language

serious question btw

@whitequark oh, that's a great question, and i'm honestly not sure i can immediately answer it. is there a particular language you're interested in learning?

@hikari it used to be german, mainly because i like how it sounds

but these days i feel like it might just not be warranted with the very few useful hours a day i have due to fibro

@whitequark oh, interesting. i feel like i'd struggle to really recommend good resources for self-directed study, but i personally have a great affection for that language and would love to answer questions about it, if you ever have them

@hikari idk i mean i could just use german to talk to you or something. probably more useful than resources per se

@hikari honestly: I love buying books, there have been periods lately books were the ONLY media I would pay for

I shy away from textbooks because that name implies to me
- bound in a space inefficient way
- instead of fucking telling you what you need to know tells you 60%-80% and leaves the last bit as a sort of Socratic riddle as "exercises"
- writing is dense yet ungainly

The exception is collegiate history textbooks, which for some reason seem to have none of these issues including binding

@hikari I feel like every time I've bought a (technical/science) book I've mostly regretted it. The cheap books are too surface level or have poor formatting/no visual aids, textbooks are allergic to providing exercise answers in context if they're used anywhere near a school.

@hikari I'm curious to see if there will be more attempts to bring textbooks into a new medium to help address this; there have been a few attempts in the maths / graphics worlds (e.g. Interactive Linear Algebra and the Graphics Codex), but authoring seems too difficult as a whole, and it's not clear what form that would take for other fields

@philpax feels like there's a gap here. we actually had these magical tools for creating interactive content: "adobe flash", "adobe director" and so on. but they're all functionally dead if not actually literally so.