Vaughn Smith: prediction

Transcript context

…By singing, by listening to songs? Or how do you do it? Translating lyrics, listening? Listening. I started when I was back at Wilson High School. I met Сергей Кузнецов [Sergei Kuznetsov], and he loved music, and he gave me these tapes. This is the early ’90s, where everybody used cassette tapes. He gave me these cassette tapes with bands like Kino, Krematorij, Nautilus Pompilius — Russian bands. From there, I would listen, and already, some of the words I could recognize. Little words here and there, but then I started putting it together. If I listened to the songs, if I knew about 50 percent of the vocabulary of a sentence, I could figure out the rest of it. I could guess some of the words or at least bracket down the possible meanings of certain words and later find out, oh, okay, it was this or it was that. It meant this. Certainly, a lot of other music that I’d get from Czech and Slovak — I’d decipher it the same way. How do you think about your own memory? Do you feel you have a good memory for all things, or just languages, or the variance of your memory is high? What‘s your own model of that?…

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