Check out our speakers for The Language Event in Penang on 16-17 December 2023:
Learning C# vs. Learning Human Languages: Is the process really THAT similar?
Jared Gimbel
Many polyglots have heard “language is like math” or “language is like programming” too many times to count, but when a seasoned polyglot tries to learn their first computer language…what should they expect?
Come along on an adventure in which Gimbel describes his C# journey, which he started after five years of teaching foreign languages, compared with his adventures with languages like Yiddish, Hebrew, Swedish, Slovak, Spanish and Hungarian. What sort of conventional wisdom is best suited for both fields, and what rules are best applied only in the realm of computers or human languages? What is comfortable about the world of computer languages that learning human languages can never live up to, and vice versa? Can either one of them be truly said to be harder?
Along the way Gimbel will describe his sticking points he encountered while programming his first game, which he started working on with virtually no knowledge of any coding language. How similar are those issue to those he encountered not only with his own languages, but his own language students? How are teaching C# and teaching a language similar and different from one another? And how can one use even basic knowledge of how computer languages function to boost their polyglot dreams?