akrish

No this isn’t about learning a programming language. This is about learning spoken languages…

My family hails from South India, and for both my parents and both sets of grandparents Tamil is the native language. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve been able to understand Tamil, but have been very inept at speaking (meaning pretty much that I can’t say a full sentence but can answer questions with a couple of words on occasion). This weekend my brother and I were struggling to speak Tamil to our mom, dad, aunt and uncle, and my friend Vivek who is pretty fluent was just breezing along. We all started thinking about why it’s so hard to speak when both of us can understand so easily.

One of the main reasons that we discovered was that verb conjugations are really challenging in Tamil. Both of us are fluent in spanish (after learning it for several years in school) and understand a lot about verb tenses and conjugations but we are still unable to understand the tamil conjugations. Part of it may be that when learning spanish, we are taught all the conjugations and them seem to be similar for pretty much all the verbs, whereas the way that we learn tamil is just from hearing bits and pieces every now and then, so we never have a chance to fully learn all of the conjugations. At the same time, from what I hear it seems that there are so many special case verbs that it wouldn’t really matter if I knew all the conjugations anyway.

Another reason was that Tamil is such an old language that there are so many different dialects and my mom, dad, Vivek, and my aunt all had different ways of saying the exact same thing. Somehow they all were able to understand each other and I was able to understand all of them as well, but this completely confused my brother and I when it came to trying to speak.

Also, similar to Spanish, there are different ways of saying things depending on who you’re addressing. For example, depending on who I’m talking to, the command sit down can be okachi, okazhu, or okazhungo if the person is younger than me, my peer, or my elder respectively. (Note: the “zh” is like a really strange sound that I’ve heard only in tamil. It doesn’t have a good translation to the English alphabet but most Tamil written in english does employ that to represent the character. It’s kind of a mix between and ‘l’ and and ‘r’ sound that both my and my brother find kind of hard to say. Read this for a bit more information). And using the first two constructs is very disrespectful if you’re talking to an elder, so you have to be careful.

As an example. We were trying to say something like “when I was young, I spoke tamil well.” I think my first take was “this (item) is a boy, he understands tamil.” I used 3rd person instead of first, used the wrong pronoun and of course the wrong verb tenses all over the place. I guess that’s not too bad because probably a lot of my family would understand what I’m trying to say (mostly because they can tell that I can’t speak well so they’ll pay more attention and think a little harder about finding some meaning). Eventually we were taught how to say the sentence, but my dad had a different way of conjugation “was” then Vivek did, so we pretty much stayed thoroughly confused.

As an interesting programming parallel. Our difficulty in learning Tamil can be compared to the difficulty someone has one first trying to write programs in a new language. Despite having read all the tutorials and seen a lot of code in the language, one still struggles to write programs until a firm grasp of writing the language has been acquired. Whenever I’m learning a new programming language, I always have to glance back at tutorials, look at reference books, and read function documentation for the first couple of programs that I write, even though I’m able to read and understand code in that language. When I’m writing code, I have to pay more attention to all the quirks of the language that I can just neglect without losing the meaning while I’m reading. Similarly with Tamil, I can understand very well because I ignore the quirks (verb conjugations, articles and pronouns, dialect-ual differences, etc.) but when I try to speak, I do have to get those things right, and I don’t know them well until I’ve spoken a lot.

For all you lazy people out there: Check this out.

Researchers in San Diego have synthesized a compound that affects the metabolic pathways in muscle tissue to simulate exercise. What’s cooler for me is that they’ve come up with another drug that dramatically improves endurance when performing exercise.

Looks like the producers of Wall-E didn’t think that science would solve the obesity problems of the future

I’ve always been a big fan of puzzles and have enjoyed puzzle solving and recently (at least as far as I can tell) puzzles have become a huge thing in the engineering community. Since I’ve come to college, I’ve been given puzzles to solve by my friends, professors, teaching assistants, co-workers and all sorts of other people and it’s truly awesome. When I was a candidate for hkn there were several occasions where the members would just give us candidates puzzles to solve and those were some of the most memorable times of my candidate semester.

There’s also a whole deal about companies hosting puzzle competitions for college students. My housemates and I went down to Google one Saturday for Google Games, which pitted the top Cal students against the top Stanford students in a friendly but competition atmosphere. And the bulk of the competition revolved around puzzle solving. And as an intern, we had an event that involved us getting into groups and wandering around downtown Palo Alto solving puzzles. Both of these were really fun and these are the kind of events that make me want to work for a company.

So why do we like puzzles so much? I think at least one reason is that they challenge our intellect and as engineers (or maybe as students), we have to prove that we are really smart. Also there’s nothing better than solving a puzzle without any help and affirming your own intelligence. But puzzles can also be very social in nature. One night this summer, Prashant’s parents shared a puzzle with around 10 of us (not all engineers mind you) and they kept us all occupied for the night (mostly because none of us could figure out what later turned out to be simple puzzle). It was a pretty fun way to spend an evening with a bunch of my friends.

But puzzles can be really frustrating. There’s nothing worse that being the last person to figure out a puzzle (and trust me, it’s happened to me way too many times). Yet, I think ultimately the pros outweigh this potential frustration, especially if you can solve a lot of these puzzles.

Since puzzles also teach us how to think differently, I’ll leave you all with some of the harder ones that I’ve heard.

1. Actually first of all. check out my brothers website. Him and one of his friends have made a bunch of puzzles that are pretty fun.
2. This one my math GSI told us. So you have two nails nailed into a wall such that you’re trying to hang a picture frame on them. The standard way to hang a picture frame is to take a string, and go over both of the nails and then tie the ends to the corners of the frame. In this configuration, if I remove one of the nails, the picture will still hang from the other one. Find a way to hang the picture such that if both nails are in the wall the picture stays on the wall, but if either nail is removed the picture falls. It’s kind of confusing to explain with just words. If people are interested maybe I’ll put up a picture. Also there’s like a very mathematical solution to this one
3. I’ve heard this one a couple of times and it’s pretty insane. So I’m trying to communicate a message to a friend of mine by sending him an 8×8 bit matrix. We share a protocol before hand, that you’re supposed to figure out. I have a randomized 8×8 bit matrix and must flip one bit before sending it to my friend. How many unique messages can I encode (that he can understand) and what is the protocol?
   As an example: lets change the problem so that I have a zero-ed 8×8 bit matrix. Then I can send 64 unique messages and my protocol would be if the bit at [x][y] is on then take the (8*x + y)th message. Basically each element of the bit matrix corresponds to one message and I’d turn on the bit that corresponds to the message I want him to receive.

That’s all for now. If I think of some more that are good then I might make a page of puzzles. Hope those keep you all busy for awhile.