The Contrasting Effect & Phonetic Base
the contrasting effect: creating connections between opposing forms of data. Understanding contrasting pairs sharpens perception by creating more robust structural data and more importantly: relational data. This means understanding A in relation to B, in relation to C, etc. Which means: being exposed to a, b, and c and rather than learning them alone, learning them next to each other. That metadata of difference and ability to make analogies between 2 things makes one's perception more sharp than if they simply went on to understand one data set. Theres a case to be made that the “metadata” between words and letters in a language IS what the meaning truly is, but because we don’t have the same context boner we do for meaning, phonetics is seen to be as an isolated thing most often. People go on and just say to listen to one person or one speaker as a language parent, but I don’t think will be as effective. To explain why here are some examples of contrasting features of types of speakers and why it should always be better to do 2-3 contrasting examples instead of 1 isolated one: ◦ Inputting Tokyo and Osaka dialects at the same time creates a clear distinction and boundry in your head that makes you understand the boundaries and category of each of their accents beteter. Having oppositional context like this makes the category or information on tokyo dialect stronger because it's NOT osaka, it has quirks that are amplified when opposed, but also when looking at tokyo dialect those osaka quirks are amplified as well. When you are learning about something else, its metadata of difference between the two sets actually acts as contextual data for the other. But in language, that contextual data is actually just data. What a word means is dependent on all the other words around it. The meaning of words is not a literal, fixed substance in the universe but a growing, constantly shaping creature in lots of people’s brains. ▪ Even on the level of our brains: our memory is organic and never actually keeps things static like a computer does, every time we remember something its a rebirth of its concept. Everytime we play with concepts from our memory we are playing around with it and adding new stuff or taking old stuff off, its also in the context of when we brought up that memory: which is part of that word/memory. So don’t expect to get a fully fixed meaning for something, even a noun can be bastardized into oblivion. Saying I’m not a bloody transexual doesn’t actually mean bloody anymore, remember that babes. And niether does transsexual, the noun is literally an opinion of the person you ask, thats how a language is: its a big group with the same linguistic opinions on communication. But its only smart to listen to the group opinion (everyone’s opinion) and not just one person. Especially in context of cultural meanings, many things that exist can be oppositional to something, and often only make sense when that thing they are opposing is revealed. Its like r/atheism being vehemently against religion only makes sense when you realize they were traumatized and forced to suffer in various ways throughout their childhood from religion. • PHYSICAL EASY EXAMPLE: Imagine if you were painting your whole house black. Every lick of paint is pitch black: no variation, simply just all black. when looking at that paint and trying to understand what it REALLY looks like, you can see that it is THAT. Idk it's dark I guess? but if you swipe a big strip of white paint on there, the contrast becomes very apparent. the white almost gives more definition to what black is. Now what if you swipe a big stripe of purple on there, now white and black both obviously don’t have the quality that purple has. it's different, it's like actual color not just gradation. Now add yellow next to purple, oh okay so it's not on the same axis as black and white but it's on this spectrum that's different from the color of purple. ◦ Now imagine trying to understand all of these colors separately, painting your entire house with these colors one by one. you would see what they are in a vacuum, but their meaning is so little compared to seeing it in context of other things, especially things that are very different to it. Building a solid phonetic base in a foreign language (japanese edition) for the beginning stages, one is going to do high variability PHONETIC training where you have all different types of speech, listen and try to stretch out your ears to what is being said without caring about what it means. Mechanistically: you are lobotimizing your “fossilized” version of the language that predicts things before they really hear them. Its the heavy reading brain phenomena of knowing what someone says before they say it (without hearing them). And if you are a foreigner, the way you know that word from reading is probably not faithful to the accent of a native speaker who spent 2-5 years of their lives chilling around listening to japanese ALL DAY with it being a part of their survival. They knew NOTHING, and then their entire reality was actualized through japanese sounds, they are like an LLM trained only on japanese, no bias available. So whats the point of being so dramatic about this? Well, our brains have lots of gunk already, or concepts from our native culture that warp what we see hear and feel in japanese. Its not bad necessarily, but if you want to feel the way a native speaker does, hear what they hear, and say and express the same way they do: then getting a similar foundation is essentialだと思う. Babies are overflowing with emotions, not really having access to an analytic mind to torture themselves with yet, and a lot of time staring at stuff, hearing things, feeling it out, testing the waters, doing stuff that is objectively stupid, figuring out stuff the hard way: you name it. They aren’t here to get down to business, but thats why theyre so damn good. They don’t know what business is. They’re epic. They’re winning, they are experiencing life in its most purest form. Time, words, places, etc. isn’t “real” they don’t have any concept of a concept, its just pure fajsfklas;ghnwrvglw/qgo4uige4gn/uofekfnjhskla;fadjaskfas fhahahhaha meaowjeijfelkfej. And when they get to experience language in its juicy red meat COMPOUND form, where there is no isolation or analytical anal pounding masochism to it: they absorb it like boss. They have no where to be. They have all places to be. Places? What is that? They’re sat in front of the ipad like nothing else exists. Monks wish they could reach this level of pure conscious experience and enlightenment. Its something so crucial to our being, like we only come back to a similar state before we die, we finally come back to our actual senses and forget all the anal nonsense and get back to just feeling and being in this existence as it is without any complications. But whats ironic is that we always are FEELING, its always ON. What we don’t realize is that constant analysis and logic brain is usually just stress, fear, and negative strained emotions rather than relaxed and balanaced. our feelings are what led us the whole time, its not a logic thing at all. Our logic trees were built from the will an emotional motivation, every motivation and thing we have is from fear or goodness, we as beings do not flow through life like a logical equation without emotion. We are always feeling something, always. we often want these assinine things such as textbooks or grammar books because we are scared we won’t understand. We torture ourselves to become the best out of fear and not geniune holistic serenity or coolness or fun. Fear is the avoidance of bad, rather than the connected feeling of warmth, joy, oneness, ecstacy. So that was a bit deep, but to get back to the prompt: our brain’s prediction of what will happen is a logical system that was set up, and it was set up a long time ago. Its fossilized, what we are doing is returning to the pure percieving state that we had when we first conceptualized the sound and or meaning. Its important to drop some of the analytic torture for this because the act of feeling it out requires one to use their SENSES in a good gooey and fun way, and not the logical hard way of fear, discipline, seriousness, and uptightness that goes along with constantly trying to think about those senses. Its easy only if the analytic mind can accept that it isn’t needed at the moment, it can be fine just not having explanations, rationalizations, pattern recognition or whatever. The feeling it out is like connecting in a warm way to the other, and for shadowing it can be the music or the song, syncing up to and into it and feeling it inside you the way it feels inside itself. Feeling empathy for the thing you are touching and not gutting it of its juicy feeling and love, not mechanistically giving no thought or care about it. Having depth in its moment rather than imagining more of different variations of it, and not de-valuing its beauty and existence that is interconnnected with your senses. In fact its best that you don’t hold any meanings to the word cause that will activate the logic tree schizm, which will prevent your perception from being fully receptive of all the sounds and feels. If you do “know” what is being said, try and stop that by repeating the audio file again again again again. Do not worry, you can do this in your native language as well, this is simply just how we stop our brain from predicting and filling in the gaps. We need to be able to think and see the world like a baby, where one has no concept of fossilized reality and nothing about what is in front of them has a solid form. It is simply,,, I can’t explain it actually. And for phonetic or what a language sounds like, that just means hearing the language in its purest form without your analytical mind trying to take over and do its best. Think of this training exercise not as an exercise you get good at or can fail at even: you are singing along to the song. The lyrics of songs don’t really matter as much as how they sound and what they feel like to you. In the language, this is step 0 to what the language is to native speakers. They have no other choice but to think in pure noises that they will later learn is “japanese,” but they have a perfect model that almost no foriegner reaches. So when they hear a foreign accent, its going against THEIR predictive model of the language. Not only that, but its something they aren’t used to, so its going to stick out a lot. Ok im getting away from the main point of this guide: systematically training your model of japanese to be just like a native speakers. Overturning all of the foreign sounding language tokens in your head so that you can naturally develop a mostly japanese sounding accent, an accent thats really robust and hard to sound foreign anymore. A robust model that doesn’t predict foreign sounding bullshit and makes even YOU the pure souled japanese person/user/lover have a sore thumb reaction to whenever non-native speakers say something. It should be as clear as day; it should be like hearing a chinese or indian accent in english: IT AINT AMERICAN BRUH IMA JUST SAY DAT. Yknow what im saying my brutha?? Okay but in order to HVPT, we need the good data of people speaking, which is where we go to youtube. We go to youtube and find people talking. Not just anyone, EVERYONE. The goal of high variability phonetic training is to have contrasting or lots of different types of speech in the same language be correctly percieved by the person (you, beautiful reader). This has been shown to be extermely effective at fixing foreign accents, listening ability, and speaking ability. - but the way I differ from this model is that I don’t think the pass/fail model of this is going to be the most helpful. I do think it will be helpful for something like kotu, as that shows you both versions of the pitch being said: aka it SHOWS you how you failed and lets you FEEL what your failure is rather than just telling you to go home and sit in the corner. pass/fail models USUALLY are bad because they only give you how you are right or wrong in words, not in practice. When you use kotu it shows you both the left and right way of going down the road. It doesn’t simply expect you to go down the right side, and then say “you aren’t going down the rightside” when you go left. Kotu actually walks you down the left side and lets you explore and understand implicitly, intuitively that THIS IS NOT LEFT. Its literally saying THIS is not left. Rather than TELLING YOU that you aren’t RIGHT, its just showing you what left is, and then very briefly letting you do it again and by that point its fucking obvious that side ain’t right isn’t it? Another anology I have for this is the indexical understanding model that is maybe used in fancy academic linguistic stuff idak bruh I just chatgpt that shit but heres my epic BLACK house explanation of it. : the contrasting effect: creating connections between opposing forms of data. Understanding contrasting pairs sharpens perception by creating more robust structural data and more importantly: relational data. This means understanding A in relation to B, in relation to C, etc. Which means: being exposed to a, b, and c and rather than learning them alone, learning them next to each other. That metadata of difference and ability to make analogies between 2 things makes one's perception more sharp than if they simply went on to understand one data set. Theres a case to be made that the “metadata” between words and letters in a language IS what the meaning truly is, but because we don’t have the same context boner we do for meaning, phonetics is seen to be as an isolated thing most often. People go on and just say to listen to one person or one speaker as a language parent, but I don’t think will be as effective. To explain why here are some examples of contrasting features of types of speakers and why it should always be better to do 2-3 contrasting examples instead of 1 isolated one: ◦ Inputting Tokyo and Osaka dialects at the same time creates a clear distinction and boundry in your head that makes you understand the boundaries and category of each of their accents beteter. Having oppositional context like this makes the category or information on tokyo dialect stronger because it's NOT osaka, it has quirks that are amplified when opposed, but also when looking at tokyo dialect those osaka quirks are amplified as well. When you are learning about something else, its metadata of difference between the two sets actually acts as contextual data for the other. But in language, that contextual data is actually just data. What a word means is dependent on all the other words around it. The meaning of words is not a literal, fixed substance in the universe but a growing, constantly shaping creature in lots of people’s brains. ▪ Even on the level of our brains: our memory is organic and never actually keeps things static like a computer does, every time we remember something its a rebirth of its concept. Everytime we play with concepts from our memory we are playing around with it and adding new stuff or taking old stuff off, its also in the context of when we brought up that memory: which is part of that word/memory. So don’t expect to get a fully fixed meaning for something, even a noun can be bastardized into oblivion. Saying I’m not a bloody transexual doesn’t actually mean bloody anymore, remember that babes. And niether does transsexual, the noun is literally an opinion of the person you ask, thats how a language is: its a big group with the same linguistic opinions on communication. But its only smart to listen to the group opinion (everyone’s opinion) and not just one person. Especially in context of cultural meanings, many things that exist can be oppositional to something, and often only make sense when that thing they are opposing is revealed. Its like r/atheism being vehemently against religion only makes sense when you realize they were traumatized and forced to suffer in various ways throughout their childhood from religion. • PHYSICAL EASY EXAMPLE: Imagine if you were painting your whole house black. Every lick of paint is pitch black: no variation, simply just all black. when looking at that paint and trying to understand what it REALLY looks like, you can see that it is THAT. Idk it's dark I guess? but if you swipe a big strip of white paint on there, the contrast becomes very apparent. the white almost gives more definition to what black is. Now what if you swipe a big stripe of purple on there, now white and black both obviously don’t have the quality that purple has. it's different, it's like actual color not just gradation. Now add yellow next to purple, oh okay so it's not on the same axis as black and white but it's on this spectrum that's different from the color of purple. ◦ Now imagine trying to understand all of these colors separately, painting your entire house with these colors one by one. you would see what they are in a vacuum, but their meaning is so little compared to seeing it in context of other things, especially things that are very different to it.