Studying languages
When John was 22, he was confronted with foreign languages for a first time in a concrete environment. In that he started to play a language game in which he tries to carry on a conversation with native speaker to induce the perception that John is a fluent speaker of the language, while that in fact John almost doesn't know anything about the language.
Language game model
The Meta-model can serve as a tool to play language games: Once you know what are the verbs and nouns in a language, the meta-model offers you a tool to play with the language without having a lot of actual understanding of what persons are saying. (Another hint from the editor: for those familiar to Artificial intelligence, in the 60s a computer program called Eliza was developed. This program simulated a Rogerian Therapist (only asking questions reflecting upon what the person was saying) and actually managed a lot of "patients" into being tricked that there was a "real therapist out there.)
When you want to get a quick first insight in a language, you can go for a first fluency. An example John described, involves learning the 6 forms of the verb "to go" in the language, the modal operators and the 20 most frequently occurring verbs in their infinitive form. This creates very quickly an illusion of fluency in a language.
You use the verb to go to indicate the future tense you want to put your sentence in, and add the significant verb. E.g. I am going to eat (in English) = "Je vais manger (in French) = Ik ga eten (in Dutch). If you combine the above sentences with some personal state management (enabling you to work under uncertainty and enabling you to learn by provoking corrections on your language use), the results are very quick.
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