I’ve often thought that the immersion method of learning a language was setting yourself up for failure – it isn’t like knowing the fundamentals of grammar and pronunciation in English helps you in any way when you find yourself in Karnataka trying to communicate in Sanskrit. There are rather complex algorithms that attempt to derive meaning from an unknown language, but apart from body language, pointing, and gesturing … that’s not something I can manage in real-time as someone speaks to me.

*Programming* languages, on the other hand, I am finding are rather easily learnt by immersion. I know several programming languages quite well – C/C++, F77/F90, perl, and php. I know a dozen or so other languages well enough to get by.

Some of our home automation scripts are written in CoffeeScript (which is evidently a way to write JavaScript without *actually* knowing JavaScript) – and I would never be able to write the program. But to come into the middle of the conversation (i.e. to take someone else’s non-functional code and try to fix it), I can glean enough of the language to debug and fix code. And there’s always Google for any syntax I cannot guess.

I wonder if someone who is fluent in multiple disparate languages (knowing half a dozen Romance languages doesn’t really give you a good base of knowledge – I mean someone who speaks Italian, Hindi, Cantonese, Swahili, and some Levantine dialect of Arabic) is able to do something similar — they know enough words to pretty much guess what words mean & enough different language structures to guess words in their context.