I keep hearing this but sometimes I am not 100% sure if they are _much_ better so asking honestly: Is there any reputable quantitative analysis of this in the context of language learning?
For example: I have spent the last two years in japan (I am in my 30s) and just got back to my home country. Went to a language school in the mornings there, immersed myself in the language a little but did not go all out on studying at home except for some Anki and the homework we got. I would spend 1 or 2 evenings per week talking to japanese people in my apartment building for practice. I just took the N2 exam before I left and just failed by 1 point, without any extra studying specifically for it. I could have conversations with people in my apartment complex, make phone calls to get stuff done and get the gist of most news I heard if they were not hyper-specific and I can read easy novels. If I open the NHK news website I am still lost on a bunch of stuff and have to look up a lot. But again, that was 2 years and I was neither particularly good nor bad compared to the other fellow students and I did not go all out full immersion - lots of my interactions were still with foreigners in the afternoon. Anyway, I for sure know more kanji than a 2nd grade elementary school student. I also can say more than a two year old kid. I know of course children learn to navigate a language without explicit study in their first years of life but the point still stands. If time spent studying was equal, how much of a difference remains?
My strong suspicion is that children just have no responsibilities and are socially allowed to not be able to talk while everyone will speak at their level with a great deal of patience.
speaking to a child at their level is the best way to keep them from speaking well. I never did it with my son and it didn't hold him back one bit. Everyone remarks his incredible vocabulary and language skills for his age. IMHO holding back with kids is an anti-pattern.
My aunt used baby talk with my cousin so much she accidentally invented a new language with him, and he ended up needing a bit of speech therapy to get back to a "standard" level of English for his age.
Perhaps coincidentally, he is now fluent in more languages than anyone else I personally know, and leveraged that into a consulting career.
Yes. Also, they don't need much vocabulary, no grammar concerns, no reading/writing.
We much overestimate how well kids learn, and how "easy" is for them.
Many kids have language difficulties, and they usually know, and they don't feel too great about it.
I think you're right on this one. Children have an immense amount of practice time, support and social pressure to learn a language.
The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones. I know many good speakers of English who cannot distinguish L/R sounds. I basically cannot hear pitch accent differences in Japanese despite having spoken it for over a decade.
> The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones.
It isn't actually different. It appears to be different, because people conceptualize the problem backwards, as learning to distinguish two sounds that, in the beginning, sound the same.
But what actually happens is that babies are born distinguishing all linguistically relevant sounds, and learn not to distinguish the sounds that their language considers equivalent. This ability is retained by adults.
That can be very difficult. Fundamentally, you need to keep trying to tell samples of the two sounds apart until, eventually, you figure it out. You will need a trustworthy source for the sounds.
It will probably help if you practice producing the sounds too, but that's not enough.
A friend of mine put in a lot of effort to learn English by listening to the radio. And her English is very good.
But like most Mandarin speakers, she can't tell the difference between "th" (as in "thick") and "s" ("sick"). I was able to teach her how to produce "th"; that was easy.
Since she learned by listening instead of reading (which is the correct way to do it if you want to interact with people rather than books), she has no mental model of which "s" sounds in English are real "s" sounds and which ones are secretly "th". So if you talk to her now, it will be essentially random whether any of those sounds is produced correctly or as its evil mirror version. You'll hear a lot of stuff like "thingle".
It's not obvious to me that this is an improvement over her original practice of using "s" in all cases.
I looked into this once and couldn't find anything -- after all, vanishingly few people practice total, 100% immersion in their new language, where you must either speak or not get what you want.
Naive question: Are the current (from what I have heard not very effective) export restrictions of HPC GPUs to china truly productive in the long run if the goal is to retain an edge? As in, to me it seems that it just fuels an expansion of domestic capabilities and in the car and solar sector my impression is that china had already proven that it can absolutely perform on par or even better in many different metrics compared to western countries, given time and pressure. So while these chips are not on par with current or even last gen GPUs, I would not be surprised if china would catch up and even have a much higher incentive to do so, now that other countries try to control their access to key technologies.
I am not saying whether retaining an edge is good or bad or that I have a different answer if one thought it was good. Just curious what you guys think.
I would not be surprised if most of us are running Chinese silicon a decade or two from now, unless China invades Taiwan, and I also think recent events have certainly spurned CCP tech strategy and accelerated this timeline.
There's a few hurdles for China to overcome first, most notably catching up on high-end manufacturing processes, but it's naive to assume that won't happen eventually.
For consumer and prosumer gear that they can get it done is already obvious, cf. people generally having no problem with buying DJI, BambuLabs or Anker.
China will 100% invade Taiwan. This is why both parties in the US are spending so much to get domestic chip production running.
I would be astonished if the backroom deal wasn't "If you take Taiwan now, we'll have to stop you, if you wait until we're self sufficient, we won't interfere."
The demographic situation in Taiwan is collapsing. Taiwan is basically fully dependent on trade with China and so on. The Chinese are masters of long term strategy and patience and would rather use deception than a sword if possible.
Stop looking at China through a Western lens. No one knows what China will do, so this statement is false. Considering their history and culture, they will first use all other tactics to take over the island. They said they want to do it by 2049, and they could succeed without firing a single bullet, as the commenter below noted.
> I would be astonished if the backroom deal wasn't "If you take Taiwan now, we'll have to stop you, if you wait until we're self sufficient, we won't interfere."
None of the cutting edge nodes are, or will be, produced in the US by TSMC. They are all produced in Asia, and the fabs in US will be X years behind.
> None of the cutting edge nodes are, or will be, produced in the US by TSMC. They are all produced in Asia, and the fabs in US will be X years behind.
I don't doubt you, and I think you'll be right for some time.
I also think it's foolish to count out Intel. They're down, but so was AMD. More pointedly, this is not Intel's first time playing "This works or we go under"
Stop looking at China through a Western lens. No one knows what China will do, so this statement is false.
No, it is not. Do you know why?
It's an opinion, clearly. Clearly, as few claim to be prescient. Dismissing my opinion, because I am not psychic and prescient is a very, very strange thing to say and do. You may say "that won't happen, your opinion will turn out to be wrong", but you cannot say my opinion as a statement is false, unless you are claiming I am lying about my own opinion?
And really, it is exceptionally silly to say "No one knows what $x will do", because of course not it's the future. We're all employing prediction trees, when we offer opinions on future events. Saying "no one knows the future" is just plain silly in this case. What are you even trying to assert? That we should all just never use our life experiences, knowledge, to attempt to provide some idea of what may come? Absolutely absurd! All of what I've just said is also understood as part of normal discussions of the future, so please try to keep this in mind.
Because trying to invalidate opinion by saying "you can't tell the future" makes no sense
And beyond that, after you discount my opinion because you claim people cannot tell the future (eg, no one knows what China will do), you immediately provide your own rendition of "what China will do".
What?!
So presumably, what you really mean in your first paragraph is that only you may predict the future outcome of events? I suggest, and I mean this honestly, that you drop this weird tactic from future debates. You cannot invalidate opinion in this way.
Moving on, it is strange to claim I am using a "Western lens". Are you trying to claim that China is somehow a land of pure people, free of all aggression and expansionist drive? And which will engage in no warlike actions? Which will not use force when it suits them? Such a rendition of any grouping of people is truly bizarre, and it is the only possible way your statement may be read. It is also very strange for you to throw this in.
You seem to be using trigger words, and pre-packaged conceptualized methods in an attempt to invalidate things people assert or say. Throwing 'Western lens" around is an attempt at impinging my worldview, it is logical fallacy, an ad hominem attack.
Please drop these sorts of tactics. If you want to realistically refute something I am saying, just refute the specific thing. Don't use ad hominem attacks. Don't refute a method (opinions of future actions), then employ them yourself.
Back to the meat of it. Surprisingly, for China, you and I seem to agree here, for you claim that China will try to use other tactics. Not will, but try as in "first use all other tactics". No kidding, ya think? Everyone tries other tactics first. Look at how many years Russia spent trying to subvert the Ukraine, before invading.
So you're not disagreeing with me. Not one bit. Because when I say China will invade Taiwan, I know all of this. Pretty much everyone you talk to knows that China has spent decades trying to subvert and take over Taiwan via sneaky, tricky subversion of Taiwan's political system. This isn't news to anyone, they've been trying for decades and endlessly failed. They've already tried those other tactics. Forever. They've failed. Over and over again.
And no, they aren't closer than ever before. Not much has changed in this regard.
So my assertion is that all of that will fail, as it has failed for decades. And that, as I said:
"China will 100% invade Taiwan."
Back to TSMC. There is more to the world than TSMC. There are other FABs coming online. There will be more money spent. And that's the whole crux of my comment.
Because the US does not want a war with China, any more than China with the US. Yet the US absolutely, positively, will not give control of Taiwan to China ever, under any circumstances, as long as the very prosperity of the US depends upon it.
Not going to happen. Not via political means. Not via a direct attack. Not via invasion. Never, never, never.
China will never ever be allowed control of Taiwan, until the US no longer needs it.
And so yes, there is an understanding between the US and China. You and I and everyone very much should want there to be an understanding. We should all want the US to have all the fabs it needs.
Because the alternative is a lot of death and destruction.
The closest parallel is, if a country cannot feed itself, and its stomach is filled by the bread of another land? And you invade that land? You will immediately be at war.
Instantly
This is entirely the same. So you should very much hope I am correct.
I think it will be effective. This stuff is hard. There used to be many competitors capable of the best process technology: TI, GlobalFoundries, Intel, IBM, Samsung, TSMC.
Canon, Nikon, ASML all used to have competitive lithography machines.
Now it’s just TSMC and Samsung at the edge, and only ASML supplies the latest lithography machines.
China will probably catch up quickly but the pace will be nonlinear and illusory. They will hit diminishing returns just like everyone else has.
They’ve probably stolen every bit of semiconductor IP they can through economic coercion or espionage.
All they can do now is out-innovate everyone else and that will take a long time. But who knows, their pace of advancement since Mao died has been impressive.
One interesting detail is that the Chinese have been improving their photography lens production and quality in rapid pace and cheap price.
The legendary Zeiss is producing the lithography lenses for ASML, so it looks like China is pouring lots of effort to photography lenses to bootstrap their lithography lens capabilities.
I don’t know about the other parts needed for chip fabbing but I kinda expect then to encourage and subsidize other technological fields related to it as well.
China is racing full speed ahead to win in all these tech domains regardless of export controls.
They will surpass us on chips just like they surpassed us on EVs. The leading edge of chip design is very complex so it will just take more time than EVs. But it is inevitable.
Even if China could get their hands on all the NVIDIA GPUs they wanted they would still try to make their own as fast as possible.
Sure, designing modern integrated circuits isn't easy. However it still is way easier than what you need to manufacture them. Design of digital integrated circuits is commonly more understood with information being readily available.
In theory you could gain the knowledge to design an early 1990s CPU at the logic gate level by reading some books and doing a bit of research, on the other hand actually manufacturing such IC would take considerably more effort.
CPU design has come a long way since the 1990s. Superscalar designs, high speed memory interfaces, multi-level caches, out-of-order execution, machine level translation, JIT optimization, the list goes on. Just one feature of frontier high performance chip design is far more complex than an entire MPU from decades ago. And many of these techniques are IP protected. Which is of no concern to China. But here in the US it's a big reason why there hasn't been as much competition in this space, aside from the ISA cross-licensing agreements of course.
Design and manufacturing are both engineering problems. Throw enough people and money at the problem and it will get done eventually. What we're banking on in the West is by the time China catches up to where we are now we'll be on to the next thing. Always one step ahead. What I'm saying is, unless we refocus our society on STEM, those days are numbered.
1. Why will they master it? Because they dedicate their industrial strategy and hence resources to it like they did in the other technological domains and flood the market?
2. Is the only way out a strict decoupling from the Chinese market in these domains? Or would it be a strategy that involves protecting domestic industries with other levers?
1. Why is because making advanced chips is an engineering problem, not magic. It's about motivation, resources and time. China as all three.
2. If we don't want to rely on China for critical technology we need to focus on our own values and education, which will take generations to realize. But that's what China did, so it's not impossible. Industrial and financial policy are useless if you don't have the cultural and intellectual inclination towards self-sufficiency.
I understand that advanced chip making has been done, and is an engineering problem. By generations I assume you mean cohorts.
However, one must not forget the subsidy lever China is using to distort competitive advantage on a financial level. As long as we do not level the playing field in a strategic sense, we will loose on the market long term.
That's assuming they can keep pumping massive capital into every industry that it seeks to circumvent from bans and sanctions. But it appears they have very short runway these days. Just months after the initial tariffs/sanctions from US, Chinese government is enacting multiple tax raising schemes in September to try to stay alive. The first is the mandating that workers and employees cannot opt out of social security contributions. which is around 1500 yuan ($200) per month for one worker. for an average worker that makes 4000 ($600) yuan, it makes no sense. So many companies are deciding to layoff or close up in September. And workers are going back to countryside. The second is the landlord tax that is starting on September 15th. This is due to people not buying real estates anymore and renting instead.
The US has export restrictions on certain computing devices to certain regimes which included the Sony Playstation 2, a gaming console from the double noughts [0]. Apparently the military thought it could be used to create nasty weapons. Two decades later and nobody cares whether a PS2 is shipped to Iran. We still track FPGAs I guess, though I haven't checked what's on the ITAR/EAR list in a while.
Embargoes typically work until the embargoees(?) develop the technology to build or acquire what they need. If AI is only a strategic advantage because of hardware alone, then yes. But Deepseek kinda maybe killed that idea. China has never been the first mover. They optimize. But it looks like today, AI embargoes to China will get the US months at most.
I have to second this. I study Japanese myself and the entire way the Japanese communicate is reflected so deeply in the language. There is so so much nuance to pretty much every sentence they speak and there are certain grammar points that carry more meaning in three syllables than what can be expressed in English or German in a full sentence. And ok turn this way of communicating shapes their culture too I believe. If I were to translate a German conversation into Japanese, even if I did so idiomatically it would most likely come off as a rude exchange, because of all the unapologetic directness in the source language.
I’ve tried to learn Mandarin and failed because of lack of memory and practice. mostly i’m shocked at how ambiguous it appears to an english-trained mind - you have to fill in a lot of fine article/pronoun detail from custom and common understanding. which is why i think a lot of automatic translations are poor.
Now compared to Berlin I think Hamburg is still pretty conservative and I am not in a position to make apt comparisons to cities in the US but I do have to disagree with the statement that Hamburg is more conservative.
I was born and raised in Hamburg and lived there or in adjacent parts most of my life. I also visited Munich quite a few times due to a long distance relationship and I would disagree that Hamburg is more conservative. tThe people in Munich vote for conservative parties at a greater rate than the people in Hamburg and Munich never felt even remotely as multi-cultural as Hamburg. I distinctly remember walking around München for the first time and being surprised by people’s reactions to seeing a black guy walking down the street. Some people would literally stop walking and stare. Almost no Middle Eastern people either in comparison.
There is also a pretty strong divide between the north being much less religious. And one might argue that the people who are Christians are more often Protestant in the north which is arguably more progressive than the catholics in the south. If you look at Hamburg during may 1st, consider the Rote Flora building and the Schanzenviertel I think it’s quite clear that Hamburg has a pretty firmly established left-wing community. Granted if you go to Blankenese or the Neue Hafencity (areas for and of the wealthy) and talk to the people living there you might get a different picture. Anyways talking in averages I am not convinced your statement holds true today.
I think there is sort of a cultural rivalry where people from the north don’t want to get confused with the people from the south of Germany and vice versa. We make fun of their way they butcher the language and their festivities and traditional attire, and how they talk too much, and they make fun of us for being tight lipped humorless pricks.
N=1 datapoint here.
I studied physics in university and before I started I was not aware that physics is basically just math where the results sometimes relate to reality. The pure math courses I took were the most difficult and in the beginning I loathed them, because it felt so unattainable to get any intuition, let alone real proper comprehension for all the concepts they threw at us. For a long time I felt like I was just hanging on by threads and especially if I compared myself to those who had some innate interest in math or generally some really good intuition on the abstract concepts (or even prior knowledge) it was really demotivating. But I also felt like I had no choice but to continue and as time went on the I grew fond of it. And the feeling of being overwhelmed changed - that is to say I still was completely lost every time a new topic was breached and I could not understand even half of the proofs in class - but I did not feel so defeated about it. And I grew to like the feeling of actually completing the work sheets they gave us every week. The process of solving them was often excruciating but if you did the sense of accomplishment is real. I think for most people higher math is really difficult and that is part of why it is interesting. Another aspect I had to accept over time is that even though you can state a mathematical fact or conjecture in just a hand full of symbols or a plain sentence it does not mean that truly understand it, its implications or how you got there can be understood the same way that other prose can be. Sometimes you have to stare at, contemplate and scribble around one equation for days until you understand whats up.
If there was any advice I would give, then it's probably similar advice on how to stop procrastinating on anything that is difficult. Establish a routine first - find a spot that you will only use for studying this (like a spot in a library), start small, divide and conquer, accept that you will not understand most things easily, reward yourself for the small wins along the way, find an accountability partner or someone to study with if that's your thing, make a regular schedule with regular times where this is what you do - consistency is key, even if its just for 5 minutes, stack it onto other habits, see yourself as a scholar of math - it is what you do, lean into the discomfort, as enduring that is a valuable skill in itself.
Yup, maintained an e-commerce site where the products were coming from a third party api and the products often had 200+ properties and we often needed certain combinations of them to be present to display them. We created schemas for all of them and also had to transform the data quite a bit and used union types extensively, so when displaying a product list with hundreds of these products, Zod would take some time(400+ ms) for parsing through that. Valibot took about 50ms. And the editor performance was also noticeably worse with Zod, taking up to three seconds for code completion suggestions to pop up or type inference to complete - but truth be told valibot was not significantly better here at the time.
I agree though, that filling your website with tracking crap is a stupid idea as well.
I am currently living in Tokyo and for the most part smoking is prohibited except for designated smoking areas. And while compared to Germany way less people seem to smoke and mostly follow the rules I see about one or two people during my commute every day who will vape or smoke either while walking or standing on the corner of a non-busy street. So not everyone cares but luckily most people do and I wish it was like this everywhere!
Honest question/thought experiment: if we only elected people who are qualified for their job (assume we can measure competence at least in some dimensions like we do for a myriad of other professions before we allow people to work in them) and if the election process was set up in a way where when casting your ballot you have to take a multiple choice quiz which tests for basic knowledge on what you will vote for and the country you’re in (as in “what is the household budget roughly, is this candidate in favour or against x, did the crime rate increase or decrease nominally” take these as rough examples of what I mean), to ensure that the people who vote for something have some clue what they are voting for and the broader context it’s embedded in (we require a license to drive a car, this would be akin to have a having a license to vote) would that remedy the situation a little? The idea would be that informed people would vote for informed people. Could you imagine this being a net benefit or not? I would assume it would make democracies significantly better than they are now. Imagine going to a doctors office to find out your doctor is a Plummer and he was voted into this job and that the people working for him and handling your prescription is a random assortment of people he seems to like.
I'm sure there are benefits and that might it help overall if implemented here and now in our current America with our current levels of public access to civics and career education (MAYBE.) However, this change would be the exact opposite or a total repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which good people died for. At a meta level, I trust those who died for voting rights to care more and know more about the correct answer to your question than I do, and I guess I would recommend to look back at historic speeches from MLK and other leaders to understand their full reasoning about why literacy tests were either irredeemable or undesirable, and their reasons for thinking so.
If we assume that both you and MLK were right, but that different policies better suit different conditions, then your proposal could maximize meritocratic effectiveness in an already-very-fair society, whereas MLK's way (the Voting Rights Act) provides a better minimum standard of human rights (similar to 1st and 2nd Amendment protections for people).
Thanks for pointing me to that. One thing that stands out about that argument though is that voting is already discriminatory, right? Permanent residents and minors are not allowed to vote (the latter because we take age as a proxy of competency, no?), despite facing the consequences of elections just as anyone else does. I do understand that a risk for misuse absolutely exists, but at the same time it looks like populism, social media abuse, smear campaigns, science denial and plain old corruption in sheep's clothing are rampant enough that we can agree that many many votes are cast by misled people, who would have made another choice if they really understood what they voted for. I guess it would boil down to the difficult question of which harm is greater.
I've had this thought before and my tentative conclusion is "no". It boils down to the purpose of democracy which is NOT to produce the best government but to make people feel ok about having a government at all.
The Ancient Greek experiments with democracy seem to culminate in a system that “gives you the government you deserve”. But those citizens also faced dire consequences for causing any harm to society—-that’s an important characteristic we’ve lost.
"this would be akin to have a having a license to vote) would that remedy the situation a little? The idea would be that informed people would vote for informed people. Could you imagine this being a net benefit or not?"
The idea has been around for a bit and I call it interesting, but also with huge potential of misuse.
Change the test slightly, so your target audience will yield better results, giving you a better result.
Either way, as long as climate change and darwinism are controversial topics, I see it hard to implement in a meaningful way.
While I can see this preventing many of the current issues, I can't help but wonder who will serve the interests of the people that are not allowed to vote.
Would it be a better system if the not-allowed group is totally dependent on the people that are allowed to vote?
I see. In a sense we are already doing that. Minors can not vote (and if I am correct the reasoning is that they don't have the competency to cast a proper vote) and even foreign permanent residents can't either, even though the outcome of the elections totally influences their lives. In a sense these not-allowed groups are already totally dependent on the people that are allowed to vote.
I guess my argument boils down to: We already discriminate. My thoughts are that the way we do it is not optimal.
Agreed and I would add to the list the ungodly amount of hours they work. I know per hour they might not be as productive (or simply held back by antiquated processes within their companies) but they seem to make up for it in part by working so much overtime.
My master thesis was on using machine learning techniques to synthesise quantum circuits. Since any operation on a QC can be represented as a unitary matrix my research topic was that, using ML, given a set of gates, how many and in what arrangement of them you could generate or at least approximate this matrix. Another aspect was, given a unitary matrix, could a neural network predict a number of gates needed to simulate that matrix as a QC and thereby give us a measure of complexity. It was a lot of fun to test different algorithms from genetic algorithms to neural network architectures. Back then NNs were a lot smaller and I trained them mostly on one GPU and since the matrices get exponentially bigger with the amount of qbits in the circuit it was only possible for me to investigate small circuits with less than a dozen qubits but it was still nice to see that in principle this worked quite well.
> given a unitary matrix, could a neural network predict a number of gates needed to simulate that matrix as a QC and thereby give us a measure of complexity
That's really interesting. I'm curious—did you explore whether the predictivity of the neural network was influenced by any hidden subgroup structure in the unitary matrix? Seems like the matrix symmetries could play a significant role in determining the gate complexity.
I didn’t include this in my thesis but from what I remember looking at hundreds if not thousands of matrices and their QC solutions some symmetries would immediately make it so that way less gates would be needed but it could also be deceptive and completely depended on which gate set you have available. If you take the matrix for the quantum furier transform for example with a gate set of phase gates and a hadamard gate then for the 100% solution you n hadamard gates and n! phase gates for an n qubit circuit even though the matrix is highly symmetrical. If your gate set was Clifford + toffli you would be able to do it with n*log(n). And then depending on how close you wanna approximate it you could get away with even less. But I have not gone into further analysis on which symmetries would have which effect on which gate set and whether it would influence predictivity. But it would be fun to investigate for sure!
How did it do compared to the baseline of the solvoy kitaev algorithm (and the more advanced algorithms that experts have come up with since)?
How (if at all) can the ML approach come up with a circuit when the unitary is too big to explicitly represent it as all the terms in the matrix but the general form of it is known? Eg it is known what the quantum fourier transform on N qubits is defined to be, and consequently any particular element within its matrix is easy to calculate, but you don't need (and shouldn't try) to write it out as a 2^n x 2^n matrix to figure out its implementation.
I have not investigated this as much as I should have but if I remember correctly there were cases where the NN approach was yielding smaller solutions. Would be a great follow up to the thesis.
The way this was turned into an optimization problem was to assume a NN to input an identity matrix and then have a custom layer in there to generate S(2) unitaries (exponential form) for which the phase parameters are then the learned parameters in the NN. Similarly for global XX gates. Then from this the final unitary can be computed and compared against the desired unitary and a loss function can be derived. I remember it was a little fiddly to implement these custom layers in tensorflow since many of the functions didn’t work for imaginary numbers. But yeah in short a circuit structure was assumed (alternating between a global XX and single qubit operations) for which the phases of their generating matrices were the learned parameters of the network. Then multiple topologies (how many steps in the QC) could be validated. I think the coolest result was that NNs consistently outperformed other optimisation strategies to learn those parameters.
Interesting. I agree a follow up result would be fascinating.
w.r.t. imaginary numbers and tensor flow, as you may have come across at some point, you can always map a quantum circuit over to one that only uses real valued amplitudes at the cost of just a single ancila qubit. Just replace i with |1> on the ancila and all multiplications by a phase with a controlled rotation on the ancila. In other words, the phase is a qubit the universe gives you for free.
At which university? I literally know a guy who did exactly the same thing for his master thesis. I'm wondering if the world is so small or this specific topic is so common.
For example: I have spent the last two years in japan (I am in my 30s) and just got back to my home country. Went to a language school in the mornings there, immersed myself in the language a little but did not go all out on studying at home except for some Anki and the homework we got. I would spend 1 or 2 evenings per week talking to japanese people in my apartment building for practice. I just took the N2 exam before I left and just failed by 1 point, without any extra studying specifically for it. I could have conversations with people in my apartment complex, make phone calls to get stuff done and get the gist of most news I heard if they were not hyper-specific and I can read easy novels. If I open the NHK news website I am still lost on a bunch of stuff and have to look up a lot. But again, that was 2 years and I was neither particularly good nor bad compared to the other fellow students and I did not go all out full immersion - lots of my interactions were still with foreigners in the afternoon. Anyway, I for sure know more kanji than a 2nd grade elementary school student. I also can say more than a two year old kid. I know of course children learn to navigate a language without explicit study in their first years of life but the point still stands. If time spent studying was equal, how much of a difference remains?
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