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Comment by buzer | Hacker News Reader

This ignores the fact that you can often figure out the meaning of the line from context even if you don't know the meaning of each word.

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Human languages are massively redundant specifically to enable this kind of "fill the gaps" learning process.

Observe an unknown word used a few times in different contexts, and you'll get a very good bead on what it means.

It's the "natural" way of learning a language. No one gets every word explained to them in detail - most words you know in your own first language are the ones you picked up on the go.

I think this "structural redundancy" might be a big part of what enables LLMs to learn human languages "from nothing".

I think it is more that the common words in the language are the scaffolding (like hedging with "I think...", "like" for setting up an example) and the subject of the scaffold is normally unique and highly context specific.

Looking at the first Frieren example:

"Live without [fear]", "Live without [bread]", "Live without [sunlight]", "Live without [honour]". The common words are more than enough to set up a generic sentence for lack of something but then what someone lacks can be literally any object, concept or verb. There are a lot more than 500 of those in the world.

One nuance not mentioned in the blog is that this particular "without" is expressed with the archaic negative verb conjugation -zu (ず). It lives on in set phrases and literary use, but it's not usable without a verb to negate (you can't say "pan-zu ikiru" for "live without bread") and it's going to sound pretty weird if you try to use it for quotidian things like "live without eating bread" (pan tabezu ikiru).

And in the case of Japanese, with words consisting of multiple Kanji you can even get more context of a word from the word without knowing the word. Down to, to a lesser extent, radicals too...

Maybe words are the wrong thing to delineate by, I mean even if you haven’t heard the word ‘circumnavigate’ you can probably deduce its meaning especially with context.

People who can figure out words from radicals probably have >500 word vocabularies to begin with. I’d say if you started learning on some natural progression, you would start learning how to figure things out from radicals once you knew somewhere around 300 kanji (which would mean you have a vocabulary of 1,500 words, ish).

Before that point, you are probably going to have too much trouble generalizing.

It's pointed out as a shortcoming at the bottom:

>What could make this wrong: >1. "Understood" means you know every word. It ignores grammar, kanji readings, speaking speed and context.

Isn't that the exact opposite? That sounds like reasons why "understood" may include false positives ("you understood all words but not a necessary grammar construction or couldn't follow at the given speaking speed"). It mentions "context" but the context in which context is mentioned suggests it's meant as yet another hurdle, not as something that could help.

Grammar is very important. You can understand all the words and not know if the super robots power the spaceship or the spaceship powers the super robots. And I remember some translators getting that particular point wrong because the anime's lore made the super robots work in strange ways.

I'm sure that's intentional, so the article wouldn't be stupid. You can often figure out the meaning if you don't know the language at all, but who cares?

Other than language learners. If you want to learn someone's language, read their comic books. They have pictures.

You can figure it out from context if don't know one or two words in a paragraph. If you are missing a word from most lines of dialogue then you are probably going to struggle.

Granted DBZ is not exactly Shakespeare, but I first watched the Buu saga in japanese w/o subs. And I was generally able to follow along, especially as it went along.

or alternatively, leverages that to structure your intuitive learning process.

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