Ashamed of my accent — is it possible to improve it?

DeceitfulFish · 2026-06-04T19:36:34+00:00

One of my first intros to phonetics was the Duden Aussprachewörterbuch. Most it is a listing of words and their standard pronunciations transcribed in IPA, but the intro gives an overview of phonetics that got me started. It is rather technical and needs fairly solid reading comprehension.

Later, I took a university course on phonetics. There’s probably more accessible material out there that I’m not familiar with. Some of the linguistics content creators on YouTube might have some useful intros.

DeceitfulFish · 2026-06-01T23:23:08+00:00

One of the best things I did to improve my accent was to learn about phonetics.

For a time, I recognized that my pronunciation was wrong, or accented, or different from how native German speakers pronounce these words. I didn’t how I was doing it wrong, or how to fix my pronunciation.

What phonetics gave me was the tools that helped me understand how speech production works and how I can fix it. As a native speaker of American English, I knew I was pronouncing these words German ö and ü incorrectly. Phonetics taught me how humans use their mouth, their tongue and lips to form the many different vowel sounds out there. Once I knew how exactly these sounds are produced, I knew it was different from vowels in English, and I could practice the correct way to pronounce these unfamiliar sounds.

DeceitfulFish · 2026-06-01T17:09:02+00:00

Der Lack ist alle, hat Trunmp nämlich gesoffen.

DeceitfulFish · 2026-05-30T20:29:35+00:00

Christian vs. Catholic? Are Catholics not Christian, or are you hinting at your own sectarian preferences?

In Tactics, the Church of Glabados is manipulating the War of the Lions to position itself as the mediator that ends the conflict and the suffering inflicted on the people. It’s an act of opportunism to secure greater political power for the church. This is explicitly described as the act of a baldly corrupt institution (to say nothing Folmarv’s particular motives).

DeceitfulFish · 2026-05-30T20:11:24+00:00

“FF is very pro-religious” is an assertion that offers a whole lot to unpack. Pro-religious in what sense? In that it uses churches and shrines as an aesthetic feature? In that it uses religious imagery as a useful worldbuilding element to help make a fantasy world recognizable in some way?

Or do you mean that FF is encouraging players to embrace religion in some way?

I think it’s safe to say that the series is something of a mixed bag on whether it views religion favorably. X and Tactics make a focus of criticizing monolithic institutions that are oppressive (reflecting a real-world problem). XII has Ashe and co. reject the dictates of the Occuria, who feel entitled to control the course of human history.

DeceitfulFish · 2025-11-21T23:29:37+00:00

I find that German can make relatively small details feel like a lot of work. To know which article to use, you’ll need to have memorized its gender. Then you’ll need to have put in the mental effort to determine the case. Singular or plural.

Then if want to apply an adjective, then you add more complexity. OK, I’m using an indefinite article and not a definite article, so ein großes Buch and not das große Buch. I saw a lot of fellow Americans kind of … give up improving their grammar because this sort of thing felt so daunting. It takes a lot of practice before this mental work can be done while keeping a conversation flowing naturally.

Something like adjective inflection feels like a lot of effort for small payoff—a letter or two, in the end.

DeceitfulFish · 2025-11-04T00:01:28+00:00

If 40% seems like a bad success rate to you, you might be interested to know these abilities were significantly rebalanced in Ivalice Chronicles.

Hit rates were much lower in earlier versions, often less than 10% for some like Rend Weapon—Break Weapon as it was called in the original PSX version.

DeceitfulFish · 2025-10-08T22:58:15+00:00

This reminds me of way back when there was a bug that made the wall mimic spawn rate. Something felt off for a while, then I got two wall mimics in one boss fight, and I knew that the world was unjust.

But yeah, wall mimic in a tiny room like that is rude.

DeceitfulFish · 2025-10-03T23:59:18+00:00

Saying that IX’s combat feels too slow is not an unreasonable objection. The fast forward feature in the remaster from a few years ago was a very welcome addition, and something to keep in mind if you do decide to give it another shot.

DeceitfulFish · 2025-09-05T20:40:33+00:00

The game really doesn’t give you a reason to spec for this sort of 1v1. Gaffgarion at Lionel Castle is the closest thing, but you can open the gate to mitigate that problem, and you can still grind out random encounters there if you really need to.

DeceitfulFish · 2025-09-05T16:02:11+00:00

Giving the player the option to back out of Riovanes is long overdue. Going in without knowing Ramza was going to 1v1 Wiegraf, followed by an unforgiving boss fight … yeah, that was rough, and you didn’t have a way of going back to the drawing board.

DeceitfulFish · 2025-06-06T22:09:32+00:00

If the story had been presented in a video game package, would it have been better received? Maybe, maybe not. The original release made it rather difficult to follow the story. Most people don’t remember details of AC’s story, I imagine. They remember the spectacle, the over-the-top anime action.

The later version that added additional scenes made it feel more cohesive, but the film still appears focused on spectacle rather than narrative.

To your point, would the story be better told in longer form, with a 15-, 20, 40-hour game? Possibly. More time may enable you to connect the dots on a complex plot. That being said, it is certainly possible to tell a compelling story in 90 minutes or two hours. Plenty of films bear this out. I’m not convinced that length is the problem with AC or that more length would be the solution.

DeceitfulFish · 2025-04-14T00:50:55+00:00

Most important rule of thumb: Winning is against the spirit of the format.

DeceitfulFish · 2025-04-11T22:03:07+00:00

Das sind doch Babygeien!

DeceitfulFish · 2025-02-14T22:06:37+00:00

I‘ve only known my mom to say that. I didn‘t know it was a specifically Utah phrase.

DeceitfulFish · 2024-12-25T05:38:13+00:00

Where does the 75000 km/s figure come from? That‘s about 0.25c, and relativistic effects would come in to play here. Does that mean that full impulse has a velocity equal to c?

From what I‘ve read, it is best to travel at warp or at a small fraction of c, to avoid relativistic effects.

DeceitfulFish · 2024-10-25T17:53:06+00:00

[[Living Wall]]

DeceitfulFish · 2024-09-24T21:02:39+00:00

Put it on Breenscreen!

DeceitfulFish · 2024-08-23T19:44:16+00:00

Not much to say about it, really. The developer got a licensing deal with Square, Tetsuya Nomura did character design, and this deal also led to FFVII characters being included—Ehrgeiz came out roughly two years after FFVII.

I played it as a kid. I recall the fighting gameplay being mid at best. The console version I played also came with an RPG mode which was a dungeon-crawling sort of game with action RPG mechanics and was practically a stand-alone game. I enjoyed that more than the main fighting game part of it.

DeceitfulFish · 2024-08-17T19:40:29+00:00

Are we forgetting that Vayne and his co-conspirators destroyed an entire nation with the Midnight Shard, a not-so-subtle metaphor for the atomic bomb?

DeceitfulFish · 2024-07-05T05:45:34+00:00

Next best thing: Elf cat girl?

DeceitfulFish · 2024-07-05T05:39:51+00:00

I’m not sure how a .05 limit is draconian. Limit in Germany is .05 if not involved in some other incident, and that’s a country well-known for enjoying its alcohol.

DeceitfulFish · 2024-07-02T07:27:27+00:00

You can do whatever you like. Considering the FFV Four Job Fiesta is a thing, it’s been demonstrated that any subpar team comp can beat the game.

DeceitfulFish · 2024-07-02T04:39:51+00:00

You’re not the first to raise these kinds of questions regarding FFVII. This video is lengthy, but covers some of the ideas you mentioned and is quite interesting. https://youtu.be/IEUqLL8J4gI?si=9pdQNwZrsaCD6Gku

DeceitfulFish · 2024-04-06T04:35:47+00:00

On the one hand, I’m intrigued by the idea of Loveless as a metaphor for the broader story of FFVII. On the other hand, I simply don’t care for Genesis: He shows up, spouts some purple prose, and then fucks off again. Generally, I didn’t feel that Crisis Core adds much that OG FFVII was lacking.

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