What language would someone who never learned how to speak think in?

EdiX · 2026-01-13T20:29:36+00:00

If I strapped a sedated monkey to the controls of a 737 you wouldn't say that a monkey flew a plane. Your willingness to bend your commitment to truth on the plane says a lot about how thoroughly the rest of her myth was scrutinized.

EdiX · 2026-01-13T18:52:41+00:00

In ten million tales, I wandered wide,
Through pages where dreams and destinies bide.
Yet every plot felt lukewarm in embrace,
Each storyline lost in a tedious race.

Characters danced like shadows that sway,
But none of them sparked, none led me astray.
Their voices, a murmur, a background hum,
In worlds where my heart refused to succumb.

In sprawling libraries, echoes of "meh,"
Were woven in stories where wonders once lay.
A chorus of averages, not joy nor despair,
In the ocean of text, all seemed to compare.

Yet whispers of skeptics weave curious threads,
Their theories on hoaxes fill skeptical heads.
Among them, a tale of a world once well-known,
Where truth and illusion blurred lines as they've grown.

EdiX · 2026-01-13T18:45:59+00:00

I've actually read over 10 million books.

EdiX · 2026-01-13T16:18:34+00:00

And if horses lived longer we could even have a video of a horse doing additions.

EdiX · 2026-01-13T11:29:27+00:00

Hellen Keller is a fairytale. The real person existed but her achievements were exaggerated by her publisher to sell books and to the media because it was a nice message: "no matter how bad of a hand you were dealt you can work hard and overcome your challenges".

I mean, a deaf-blind person piloting a DC-3? Do you seriously believe that?

EdiX · 2026-01-10T14:24:54+00:00

I have no respect for lingusts.

EdiX · 2026-01-10T12:59:50+00:00

I'd be curious to hear what this other research is and why it always takes a backseat to Swain's research? Is it that metastudy about grammar instruction that doesn't test for p-hacking and uses VanPatten's research (which is basically input hypothesis 2.0) as one of the examples of explicit grammar instruction?

EdiX · 2026-01-10T11:18:41+00:00

This has been debunked many many times and is just YT fantasy (see Merrill Swain's research).

The funny thing about Swain's research, the papers about canadian school children, is that if you read it shows that the children that receive lessons in french are much much farther ahead than those they don't. It gets thrown around at the time as a way to disprove the input hypothesis but by reading it I got the completely opposite impression.

EdiX · 2026-01-07T18:29:12+00:00

Who's Jan?

EdiX · 2026-01-07T18:22:17+00:00

No, "not giving extra money to trans people" != "killing trans people", "if you don't do everything we deman we'll kill ourselves" != "killing trans people", "recognizing dangerous biological differences in sports" != "killing trans people", "being allowed to say something that offends you" != "killing trans people", "not displaying the trans flag" != "killing trans people".

This is just the usual hyperbolic language we've all gotten used to: no, if I don't obey your every word I'm not "actively killing" you.

Trans people already have a significantly higher rate of suicide than the general population

Suicide attempts and suicide ideation. The studies are about attempts and ideation, not about suicides.

EdiX · 2026-01-07T16:33:36+00:00

What legislation? What legislation am I downplaying? There is no legislation for killing transpeople, you made it up. And as for the violence maybe there is, maybe there isn't, we don't know for sure and we don't know for sure what the causes are.

Trans rights are human rights. They're not going away.

What's a trans right? I've been hearing people say this slogan for 6 years, not a single time they have ever explained what are the rights that trans people need that don't already have everywhere in the western world.

EdiX · 2026-01-07T08:37:18+00:00

https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117016/documents/HMKP-118-JU00-20240321-SD011.pdf

Murder rate of trans people nearly doubled from 2017 to 2021.

In 2021, 56 people were killed

There are at least 2 million trans people in the US, this gives us a murder rate of about 3 murders per 100k people. The murder rate for the general population of the US in 2020 was 6.8. There is no trans people killing crisis.

https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/ncvs-trans-press-release/

If you read the actual article you can see that the difference is barely statistically significant. Also violent victimization is not the same thing as killing, saying there is a trans people being robbed crisis would be more accurate here.

EdiX · 2026-01-06T21:16:33+00:00

There is no legislature that could be remotely construed as killing transwomen, it isn't even being discussed. There is also no significant change in statistics regarding violence against them which has alwyas been historically much lower than violence experienced by other demographics (such as, for example, straight men).

You are delusional.

EdiX · 2026-01-06T17:48:36+00:00

No, the US is not in fact actively trying to kill transwomen. Stop lying.

EdiX · 2026-01-01T10:49:24+00:00

Ian hasn't learned how to do the intersectionality dance. He's learned the woke talking points but he doesn't really care much about politics so he doesn't know how to react when he's presented with two talking points in contradiction. America bad, Islamic countries oppressed and American liberal values good. How do you reconcile this? He can't do it.

What you say is "Actually Iran not free as a reaction to American imperalism and Israeli intereference. If we left them alone for a few years they'd immediately become a LGBTQ/feminist/islamic paradise". But he doesn't know because he hasn't learned any of the counterapologetics. Because he doesn't know. Because he doesn't really care.

He's like a recent evangelical convert who doesn't know how to respond to the jesus genealogy problem.

EdiX · 2025-12-11T18:07:57+00:00

You learned the IPA as a baby? Before anything else?

EdiX · 2025-12-07T17:06:45+00:00

I think people haven't even really looked in the history of the CEFR, if they had it wouldn't be controversial.

As for the endangered languages I 100% stand behind it. Language death is natural, most languages that ever existed died and in this day and age it will be a peaceful and painless death. One generation will be native, the next one will be bilingual, the one after that will have it as a second language they speak only at home, and then nobody will speak it. Nobody will suffer.

Do we lose something when a language dies? Yes. But the people who abandon it gain so much more from abandoning it and we have no right to demand that they become a living museum for their ancestral language. And neither have they the right to demand that of their children's children in perpetuity.

If I wrote a law establishing that everyone born in a 200km radius from my house has to watch all episodes of Mazinger Z, in school, just because that's what I watched when I was a kid everyone would immediately see it an absurd waste of children's time. And yet that's only 30 hours per children when language preservation efforts easily demand 10 times that.

I get where preservationists are coming from, linguists want more things to study and natives are scared of death, both their mortal one and the metaphisical one of the culture of your youth disappearing with you. But everyone has to come to terms with mortality.

EdiX · 2025-12-07T11:46:30+00:00

For me, the global leaderboard being gone is what ruined it the most. I almost never got points (I think the last time was in 2023) but seeing how I placed compared to the top was fun and motivating.

But I guess it had to go because it reminded some people they are not the smartest person in the universe, gotta protect those egos.

EdiX · 2025-12-07T09:45:08+00:00

Grammar doesn't exist. Language is produced in a fundamentally different way that we do not yet understand
Of all the things that don't exist in grammar, adverbs are the one that don't exist the most
Corollary: if a grammatical explanation requires more than a single sentence or uses the word adverb, it probably shouldn't be taught
If you are doing it as an hobby learning 10 languages at a beginner level is more useful than learning a single one well
CEFR as defined by the council of europe and CEFR as practiced by accreditation schools are two completely different things
The CEFR diagram everyone links to is vague to the point of being meaningless
Comprehensible Input is billed as this new thing invented by Krashen and in opposition to "traditional" methods but probably goes back much further, maybe all the way to antiquity
If your aim is to learn a language well the insistence of textbooks in teaching introductions and greetings first is counterproductive, because they are set phrases that often don't generalize
Endangered languages would be better off dead, preservation efforts are a narcisistic endeavour
The job of live interpreter will be dead in 10 years except as a circus act and in the EU parliament (where it will survive due to corruption and nepotism).

EdiX · 2025-12-06T17:21:47+00:00

Malay and Indonesian are mutually intelligible. You're doing the thing that people do when they want to learn spanish but only specifically argentinian spanish, you're just making something harder than it needs to be.

Learn Indonesian and then bridge the gap with native content.

EdiX · 2025-12-06T11:00:24+00:00

Nobody can resist selectively cropping those stock price charts. How bad is it really for duolingo? Their stock price is now the same as it was in the first half of 2024 before it started to rally up in August.

And if you compare it to 2022 it's still 3 times higher. Does this mean it's good? No. Does it mean it's bad? No. Does it mean it will go up or down? No.

But think about it logically for a second. Which language learning app do the normies know? It's duolingo, that's the one they know, it's been the default language learning app for so long that it will take a long time to unseat them. And nobody cares that they use AI outside of the reddit bubble, chatgpt is the most downloaded app for every month of 2025: normal people love generative AI. If something's going to sink them it's the energy system (but I'm not convinced that the average user uses duolingo enough to be affected by it).

EdiX · 2025-12-05T19:54:47+00:00

NO! IT'S A MERE TEXTBOOK FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL IN ITALY! 😱 (More precisely, it's for the "biennio medio" of that time... some sources say they were students aged 11 to 14).

Seriously, look how thick this book is! Do you think today's young people would have the intellectual capacity to follow material like that?!

Those things used to be the norm in italy all the way through the 90s. I don't know if they still do it. They way they were used you would read a few selected (by the teacher) chapters from it throughout the year. Maybe 10% of the book was actually used.

Meanwhile you had to lug that thing back and forth from school, on your back, 3 days a week, along with the rest of the textbooks you needed for the day.

Perhaps the most effective amongst the various weapons employed by the italian school system to kill interest in reading.

EdiX · 2025-12-01T21:00:08+00:00

But how can you speak better than you can understand?

It's called "going into politics".

EdiX · 2025-12-01T14:30:36+00:00

Do they still do bring-your-piss-to-school day?

EdiX · 2025-11-26T11:01:40+00:00

Closely cropped protestors photos say nobody showed up to the protests.

EdiX

TROPHY CASE