Rule of Linguistic in Learning a New Expertise
Learning a new expertise is actually a linguistic process. No matter what you are going to need to do in order to learn said expertise, no field of knowledge is too far away from linguistic.
One might wonder what is the relation between linguistics and harder science like mathematics, physics and engineering. In most people brain, linguistics seems to be what considered as soft skill while harder science are a little bit harder. Some even advocate that the part of brain is involved to learn linguistics skill is different with the one used for learning mathematics. In reality, such a clear line between them is simply non-existent.
In the very basic, learning a new expertise is simply learning new vocabularies and the meaning of those vocabularies. You are going to need these vocabularies because you have to be able to speak with fellow experts from the field you are currently learning. In essence, learning a new expertise is no different from learning the vocabularies required to make sentences comprehensible by people already an expert in that field.
When I learn programming, I have to start by learning what is selection, repetition and variable. As I become more and more adept at making program, I start to need a more structured way to organize my date and I learn what is array, vectors, matrices and struct. Other time, I have to learn various programming techniques and their name. I need to know the names of those techniques or I won’t be able to communicate with other programmers about what I am going to do and what they have to do.
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I take double major for my years in university so beside computer programming, I also learn mathematics. Mathematics have their own set of vocabularies to learn. In fact mathematics is something comparable to linguistics itself. A good mathematician can follow equations after equations just like someone follow sentences after sentences when we read our newspaper. Unfortunately, I am a little bit unsocial at that moment, so I end up with words I invented by myself to explain concepts I never read in any book before. Later I found out that even if there are common words for those concepts at least in English, sometimes it is easier to exchange equations. As long as two mathematicians are familiar with the symbols, they can communicate with each other even if they can’t speak each other languages. Mathematics is a language in its own right.
However, this is not entirely true for Physics. Physics is a chaotic jumble of concepts, relationships and interactions. There are a lot of new terms to learn when you move from Classical to either Relativity or Quantum Physics. In Newtonian Physics we deal with mass, time, velocity and acceleration. When we move to relativity, these terms are further divided into rest-mass, ADM-mass, Bondi-mass, Komar-mass, proper-time, proper-velocity, rapidity, proper-acceleration and coordinate-acceleration. All of these new vocabularies have meanings that need some time to understand.
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As you know both programming and physics, you enter an entirely new modern scientific field. It is called Computational Physics. As the name suggest, it is related to the use of modern computation system for explaining physical phenomena. Every computational physicists know that physics without computational physics is very far from the explaining the truth. Here we also have to learn more vocabularies, which numbers depend on the complexity of phenomena we are going to compute, the complexity of computational system we are going to make and the technical issues.
The list of vocabularies a science geek have to learn is endless. As they learned a new concept, they are going to be introduced into several more new concepts. Each of those concepts have a name of their own. Sometimes these could potentially become a great linguistic problem, especially if two cultures speaking different languages have different pace of scientific research. Translating highly technical paper between those two languages could simply become impossible, that new words are often simply incorporated rather than translated.
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