What?
I wasn’t sure what to call it, I meant like his trigonometry explanation:
I remembered lmf saying you wanted him to do it like one of the tutorials (which is why I said tutorial):
I guess articles would’ve been better to use.
I said:
- You’re going to explain trigonometry to a student who has all the prerequisites but knows nothing about it. What do you begin with?
I didn’t ask him to write an essay, tutorial or article.
The context was he asked how to identify some of his errors. I was offering to check his understanding for errors. The explanation was meant for communication of his existing knowledge, not practice/learning.
Please don’t repeat what other people say about me and present it as my own speech or actions. If you’re going to claim I said or did something, find a quote of me.
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Typically: do some math and think a lot about what you’re doing. And find and fix your errors.
If you find the lack of step by step guidance difficult (there aren’t great textbooks explaining it all), don’t expect to to come up with advanced innovations, which also require thinking without step by step guidance.
What about proofs? Are they helpful for understanding or are they mostly just about convincing yourself something is true?
You analyze them.
Relating this to grammar: What is the benefit of doing grammar tree practice?
- To have the skill ready for when you need explicit analysis?
- To make a grammar tree in your head, using conscious attention, when something is slightly confusing?
- To write better sentences?
- To help you understand conceptually grammar (parts of speech and the structure of sentences)?
- Or to improve your intuition while reading? The idea being that you subconsciously make trees as you read.
It could be all of the above and more.
You could think of arithmetic and grammar both as tools that you can pull out to use for problems.
I think there’s a difference between arithmetic and grammar in how they build up later knowledge. Arithmetic as a concept is used in algebra and calculus. But the way we use grammar to form philosophy sentences is more like using arithmetic as a tool, instead of as a concept, in game programming for example.
Maybe there’s a way in linguistics that grammar is used as a concept like arithmetic is for algebra.
Does the arithmetic ‘as a tool vs as a concept’ thing make sense?
I was thinking that this category difference could make the approach to learning grammar and arithmetic different. In that for arithmetic you would want to master the concept but not necessarily to make difficult calculations in your head automatically whereas for grammar trees you want to practice them so much that it significantly impacts your reading habits.
In learning arithmetic for algebra you want to get a great understanding of it conceptually. For grammar we want to get a conceptual understanding of parts of speech such that we can use those in grammar trees. And we want to use grammar trees to improve our reading.
I’ve been thinking the goal of grammar trees is to improve my regular reading, not just have it as a tool I can sometimes use consciously.