{"id":446,"date":"2015-06-25T06:47:50","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T06:47:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/?p=446"},"modified":"2020-05-28T15:52:15","modified_gmt":"2020-05-28T15:52:15","slug":"knowledge-does-not-equal-understanding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/?p=446","title":{"rendered":"Knowledge Does Not Equal Understanding"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A very good friend of mine posted&nbsp;a very interesting video one day:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Backwards Brain Bicycle - Smarter Every Day 133\" width=\"1060\" height=\"596\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/MFzDaBzBlL0?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t have the time to watch it (although I urge you to), the video is about how a slight change in the design of a bicycle will confuse you so much that you won&#8217;t be able to ride a bike anymore. And in order to &#8216;relearn&#8217; how to do it, you somehow have to forget to ride a regular bike. Destin proves this is possible but it takes a very long time. He managed to learn to ride the &#8216;new&#8217; bike in about nine months, but doing so, he forgot how to ride a regular bike. What&#8217;s interesting is that a child is able to do this a lot quicker (apparently, it took his son about 3 months). The conclusion of this exercise&nbsp;is that knowing does not equal understanding.&nbsp;Learning to learn a bike is an &#8216;intuitive&#8217; process, meaning that your brain does the job for you and you don&#8217;t really know&nbsp;what it actually does.<\/p>\n<p>What struck me about this short video is that language acquisition works in the same way. The acquisition of one&#8217;s mother tongue, that is. Just think about it. If somebody asks you about a certain grammar rule in your native language,&nbsp;do you know the answer instantly? You would probably have to think a bit. You would try to infer the rule from examples. And that is because you&nbsp;speak the language intuitively, the whole acquisition process that dates back to your early childhood was purely intuitive. At a basic level, you don&#8217;t even need to study grammar in school in order to speak your mother tongue. And if you hear a new word, you instantly know what to do with it (how to integrate it in a sentence, how to form the plural etc.). This is another case of &#8216;knowing without necessarily understanding&#8217;. You don&#8217;t know how your brain manages your native language.<\/p>\n<p>This explains why it is so difficult to learn a foreign language after you have already acquired your mother tongue. The intellectual mechanisms involved are completely different. When you study a foreign language at a later age (but even as early as 8-9 years of age), you employ your analytical skills and not your intuitive skills. You constantly compare the words, structures and rules of the new language to those of your own.&nbsp;This means that&nbsp;speaking will involve less spontaneity and more &#8216;awareness&#8217;. You will not be able to actually &#8216;feel&#8217; that particular language and you will always be aware that &nbsp;it is not actually yours. Furthermore,&nbsp;there will always be a certain degree of inertia which will prevent you from speaking it at a native level (think of accents, syntax, fluency). Sure, there are gifted people who manage to&nbsp;reach a near-native or even native level, but the majority will always struggle to a greater or lesser extent.<\/p>\n<p>Clearly, the mental processes employed in learning to ride a bike are much less complex than those of learning a language. This is probably why, if you try hard enough (apparently very hard), you can instruct your brain to re-learn to ride a modified bike and thus forget to ride the regular bike. With languages it&nbsp;is much more difficult &#8211; if not impossible. There would probably need to be a traumatic event (God forbid) in order to wipe out one&#8217;s&nbsp;native language from one&#8217;s&nbsp;brain.&nbsp;But probably if you could&nbsp;erase the knowledge of your original mother tongue, you would be able to acquire a&nbsp;foreign language intuitively and thus speak it as your own.<\/p>\n<div style=\"padding-bottom:20px; padding-top:10px;\" class=\"hupso-share-buttons\"><!-- Hupso Share Buttons - https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/ --><a class=\"hupso_toolbar\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/\"><img src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\"\/><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var hupso_services_t=new Array(\"Twitter\",\"Facebook\",\"Google Plus\",\"Pinterest\",\"Linkedin\",\"StumbleUpon\",\"Digg\",\"Reddit\",\"Bebo\",\"Delicious\");var hupso_background_t=\"#EAF4FF\";var hupso_border_t=\"#66CCFF\";var hupso_toolbar_size_t=\"medium\";var hupso_image_folder_url = \"\";var hupso_url_t=\"\";var hupso_title_t=\"Knowledge%20Does%20Not%20Equal%20Understanding\";<\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/js\/share_toolbar.js\"><\/script><!-- Hupso Share Buttons --><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A very good friend of mine posted&nbsp;a very interesting video one day: If you don&#8217;t have the time to watch it (although I urge you to), the video is about how a slight change in the design of a bicycle will confuse you so&#8230;<\/p>\n<div style=\"padding-bottom:20px; padding-top:10px;\" class=\"hupso-share-buttons\"><!-- Hupso Share Buttons - https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/ --><a class=\"hupso_toolbar\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/\"><img src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\"\/><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var hupso_services_t=new Array(\"Twitter\",\"Facebook\",\"Google Plus\",\"Pinterest\",\"Linkedin\",\"StumbleUpon\",\"Digg\",\"Reddit\",\"Bebo\",\"Delicious\");var hupso_background_t=\"#EAF4FF\";var hupso_border_t=\"#66CCFF\";var hupso_toolbar_size_t=\"medium\";var hupso_image_folder_url = \"\";var hupso_url_t=\"\";var hupso_title_t=\"Knowledge%20Does%20Not%20Equal%20Understanding\";<\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/js\/share_toolbar.js\"><\/script><!-- Hupso Share Buttons --><\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9790,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[123],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Canva-Person-In-White-T-shirt-Standing-Beside-Books-Inside-A-Library.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9791,"href":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions\/9791"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tolnaitranslations.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}