Cryptography And Language Learning Aptitude
I’ve written about the quickest way to success before. It basically amounts to this:
Take what works in one area and apply it to another area.
If you’re involved in online business circles, no doubt you’ll have come across this idea in the form of calling everything “High Intensity Interval Training For Bloggers!” or whatever.
At one point, if you slapped “HIIT” in front of anything, you’d probably sell more copies. It was the 2010’s equivalent of “Secrets from the USSR.”
But I’m not going to talk about the boring lifehacker crowd and the fact that they’ll put a buzzword in front of anything.
Let’s talk about a real “in the wild” example of what I’m talking about.
In this article, I talked about how I’m waiting for a cranky old spy trainer (not joking) to give me his manifesto on language learning.
I’m still waiting on that, but it gives me a chance to talk about knowledge arbitrage.
Language Learning Aptitude
If you work for the diplomatic service, army or want to be a spy in a foreign land, then you have to undertake some testing to see if you’re up for the task.
Well, if you’re British you don’t. You just come from a rich family, go to Oxbridge and then they give you a job even if you’re a total moron.
But for most countries, you have to show some aptitude for the task.
In the US, the diplomatic service has a language learning aptitude test called the DLAB. This is the Defense Language Aptitude Battery test, and is designed to rank you based on how well your brain adapts to learning new languages.
Information about it is hard to come across, but it basically works like this:
- There are four categories of languages, with 1 being the easiest and 4 the most difficult
- Depending on your score, you’ll get put into a relevant program (unless you can’t score high enough for any, in which case the James Bond dream isn’t for you)
- To determine this, you take a test
The categories are based on similarity to English and the complexity of the stuff that’s unfamiliar.
So Chinese and Japanese are among category four languages because they’re alien and the alien parts are all complex for a native English speaker to understand.
Russian is in category three, because it’s alien and complicated, but the alien bits aren’t quite as alien as the aforementioned languages. For example, it has an alphabet. While it’s a different alphabet to the one you’re used to, it still works like your alphabet – unlike the histogram Oriental languages.
The test itself is based on an artificial language so you can’t cheat. You’ll get logic based questions like:
“AgCat” means “Blue Sky.”
“BerSon” means “Green River.”
How do you say, “Blue River?”
Why am I telling you this?
This Is A Test Of Aptitude If You Don’t Know My Super-Secret Knowledge.
If you have no idea about grammar, then you’re going to score low on a language aptitude test. That makes sense.
Even if you have an idea of grammar, these sorts of questions will be tough – unless you learn about the super-easy skillset I’m about to give you.
You see, the questions in the DLAB, or MLAB, or any other artificial language test are tough to a linguist or language learner.
But they’re simple to a cryptographer.
If you have ever bought a simple book on puzzles, then you’ll immediately recognise my (admittedly stupid and easy) example above.
It’s a simple substitution exercise.
And most language aptitude tests are actually just basic puzzles and ciphers that are easily decipherable if you’ve played a few games or read a few books.
It’s not so much an artificial language as it is basic problem solving.
Taking This Further
So, the basic secret of passing a language aptitude test is to cheat by doing puzzle books until you get the gist of the questions.
(Interestingly enough, you can do this with IQ tests too. They’re all based on either one of about two or three systems designed to test IQ and there are only a few types of questions.)
That’s how to “cheat” the test without cheating.
But if you’re like me, you’ll read this and think, “What’s the point of that? I want to be good at something… not look like one of those lifehacker dorks who can speak one sentence in twenty languages for an IG video!”
So the next step – and the step where it gets interesting – is to work out why it works?
In our example: Why does learning basic decoding help you pass a language aptitude test?
Well… it tests that you can do things differently to your native language and instinct.
But that’s a bland reason.
Essentially though, language learning is (and let’s get some “I’m no expert” warnings up in here):
- The ability to decode encrypted information
- The ability to decode context using outside cues
That’s it so far as cryptography and language learning are concerned, but it’s pretty extensive.
When you land in a new country, you are hit with context. Street signs that are bright red but you don’t know what they mean. Food labels you can’t read. People warbling on without you having a clue what they’re saying.
The whole, “Just learn the language by immersion, bro!” approach fails. You can’t decode the message by passively intercepting it.
And in a classroom, you’re all of the former. You’re getting the keys to the code, but no context.
You need both, and if you can get a routine that includes both, you’ll skip ahead of your competition.
Final Thoughts
I’ve just gotten into the flow of this article, but it’s getting long.
Essentially though, I know I talk about brain stuff a lot and it all gets a bit abstract. So I thought of the example above today as a real example of taking common, easily accessible knowledge in one field and putting it to use in another.
Very few people ordered to study for a language aptitude test would ever think to look to a puzzle book for answers, but if they did, they’d improve their performance.
And then, if you take the second level and work out why the new knowledge gives an unfair advantage, you can go in a million directions.
Few talk about this or even think about this, but now you can.