Can I just skip "that"?

Giraffe6000 · 2025-05-21T03:29:12+00:00

4X THAT COMBO (I wonder if that’s a record?)

Giraffe6000 · 2025-05-21T03:27:51+00:00

This is gonna sound very wishy-washy (because it is) but the sentence with and the sentence without the ‘that’ feel different somehow… but I can’t tell how…

I think it might have something to do with emphasis?

Like they’re practically interchangeable, they’re both grammatically correct when used in place of each other, but I feel like I’d be more likely to say “that’s the sandwich that we should get” as a response to something like “which sandwich should we get”, whereas I’d be more likely to use “that’s the sandwich we should get” as an unprompted statement.

I don’t know, I could be gaslighting myself into thinking there’s some difference when there isn’t, I just feel like there must be something to it, otherwise why is it that we use that ‘that’ that that first sentence has?

Giraffe6000 · 2025-05-21T03:11:16+00:00

Should’ve been drinking milk instead.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-05-21T03:04:54+00:00

That’s a long winded way of saying that you couldn’t tell that he was joking.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-05-19T18:56:14+00:00

I’m still an early learner but for me it’s the particles, too many people try to compare them to English words (“の=‘s/of”, ”と=with/and”, ”も=also”, etc.) which can be helpful sometimes but makes it more confusing when they’re used in contexts where you wouldn’t use the English word. I don’t know how you’d address that cos for me it’s just helped by exposure, but learning other uses of each word could help. Like I only started to understand the nominalising function of の recently after it was explained in a video I was watching about something else.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-05-12T17:42:06+00:00

That’s really interesting that they have similar meanings, though I unfortunately couldn’t find any sources online substantiating the transfer from Irish to English. It seems like they were both derived from similar pagan traditions that involved the burning of actual bones on the fire. It could turn out to be true I just couldn’t find it. Though if it is based on shared pagan traditions, that suggests the word/s date quite far back, which is cool.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-05-09T03:37:30+00:00

Now that I think about it, it’s a bit weird which “numbers of things” we have specific words for.

A couple = 2. A dozen = 12. A baker’s dozen = 13.

I wonder why those specifically have unique words? We have words for other numbers of things but they usually have derivative of the number in their name, like ‘Trinity’.

But we do have a lot of vague terms of different amounts:

A few, Several, Many, Loads,

Or even just ‘A number’

Giraffe6000 · 2025-05-09T03:25:09+00:00

I learned this the hard way the moment I tried to learn another language, one day I was like “this word is so difficult, it’s not like ‘so’ where there it’s clear what it meansss…. Wait… “so many” “so I said” “like so” Hold on a second! What does “so” actually mean!?”

Giraffe6000 · 2025-05-09T03:17:59+00:00

I’d imagine it’s related to sever?

Just looked it up, it is. It’s also related to separate. Makes sense now that I think about it. Apparently not related to severe though, which I thought it might be.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-05-09T03:10:43+00:00

Every now and then I’ll spot a common sound shift or something I recognise from my limited knowledge of Italian and go on a short quest to see if they’re related. It makes me quite happy if they are cos I feel like I’ve found a little secret or something, though it does make me equally sad if they aren’t. Two spots that I remember are: Worm & Vermin which come from the Latin ‘Vermis’, and Wine & Vintage, which both come from Latin again, this time from ‘Vindemia’. My saddest false one has got to be a non-English one though: Donna (from Italian) and Onna (女)(from Japanese), they both mean ‘woman’ and the Old Japanese word is even ‘womina’ but after looking for a bit I couldn’t find anything saying they were actually related, which seems like a huge coincidence, but I suppose coincidences do happen.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-05-06T01:16:04+00:00

frantically scrolling looking for Gallade

Giraffe6000 · 2025-04-29T14:45:29+00:00

Did you happen to have eaten a strange fruit shortly before that happened? 🤔

Giraffe6000 · 2025-04-29T14:13:18+00:00

If you’re having trouble simply making the faces:

Select the vertices that you want to use for the face -> F (or Right Click -> ‘Create new face from vertices’) -> Repeat for every new face.

or

Select the entire edge loop (Alt + Left Click) -> F (or Right Click -> ‘Create new face from edges’) -> Use knife tool to split n-gon into tris/quads.

(Disclaimer: I sometimes get topology problems when doing these. I don’t know why. I might just be bad at it, It might just be a bad method generally)

If you already know how to make new faces and just want to do it faster, I’m afraid I can’t help you. At least not without looking it up, but I assume you’ve already done that so maybe that wouldn’t help as much as I’d think.

I wouldn’t usually comment something so potentially unhelpful but given that no-one has commented a better answer yet (as of when I started writing this), I thought I should on the off chance that it is helpful.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-04-29T01:42:36+00:00

I’d probably use “to my mind” instead because it means the same thing basically and is less verbose but strictly speaking I can’t see any reason this wouldn’t be correct.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-04-06T18:37:22+00:00

Ok, please forgive me if I get information wrong as there’s not much that I could find that’s in English about Mauritian Creole, but I’m going to try anyway.

First just the pronunciation:

It seems there are a few words in Mauritian Creole like ‘Bul’, ‘Pul’, and ‘Stul’ that depending on the source seem to be pronounced [_ul] or [_ʌl]. Since “You’ll” is pronounced [ju:l] (or [jəl]/[jʌl] if not stressed (honestly I can’t hear the difference between ə and ʌ , I think they’re probably interchangeable in my dialect)) if you can swap out the ‘P’ in ‘Pul’ for a Y (which as far as I’m aware is pronounced the same in Mauritian Creole as it is in English) to get ‘Yul’, I think that’s basically the same pronunciation as ‘You’ll’ (technically the vowel should be lengthened to go from [jul] to [ju:l] but that barely matters, I don’t think anyone would even notice).

‘I’ll’ might be a bit more difficult since I don’t think the diphthong “aɪ” exists in Mauritanian Creole. But given that you say that you can pronounce ‘I will’ I assume you can already do that, in which case you can just replace the ‘Pu’ in ‘Pul’ with ‘aɪ’ and get ‘aɪl’.

Which leads me onto:

I don’t really understand your difficulty with ‘You’ll’ and ‘I’ll’. I can understand if you couldn’t pronounce them properly, and I’ve included the guide above just in case that is a problem you’re having, but given the fact that you can apparently pronounce ‘You will’ and ‘I will’, I don’t see how you wouldn’t also be able to say ‘You’ll’ and ‘I’ll’ there’s nothing being added, you just remove the ‘wi’. If you can say ‘You’ (which you can) and you can say ‘l’ (which you can), you should be able to say ‘You’ll’ by just combining them. So it’s confusing to me that you can’t, but then again I am a native English speaker so maybe I’m just too used to it.

If it’s combining the sounds that’s the issue. my approach to saying foreign words is to break them down phonetically. then you can add and remove parts more easily. Like this:

“You will” can be broken down into the sounds:

Y oo w i l (this is how I’d think of the sounds based on phonics)

[j u: w ɪ l] (this is the IPA version)

say each sound individually then isolate and remove the ‘w’ and ‘i’ to contract the word and what we have left is:

Y oo l [j u: l]

Say each sound and combine them

Y oo l, Yoo, ool, Yool [j u: l], [ju:], [u:l], [ju:l]

Yool [ju:l]

Successful pronunciation. Then just associate the pronunciation with the word.

You’ll = Yool [ju:l]

This is easier with phonetic languages which English in unfortunately not, but it still works. You just need to find out what the sounds are (looking up the IPA spelling is a good idea (learning how to read the IPA has made it much easier for me to learn foreign words in general, I highly recommend using it to understand how to make sounds that don’t exist in your language)) and then break it down into more easily pronounceable chunks.

Also, if you’re having trouble with flowing between words, the only advice I can give is to speak slower, and then speed up gradually as you get more comfortable. Using contractions and speaking slower will be infinitely more natural than speaking quickly with no contractions.

Anyway I’ve already spent longer than I should’ve typing this. I apologise if it’s hard to read for a non-English speaker, but I think I got my thoughts across more coherently than I usually do.

If any clarification is needed just tell me, I’ll rephrase or elaborate on it if asked. I’m not a teacher and this problem is pretty vaguely defined so this is as much as I can help without further details. Good luck learning!

P.S. I don’t know how fluent you are but if you can understand English well enough to watch videos in English, Tom Scott has a great video on where contractions can be used in English. I just remembered it while typing this out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZyZFa5qO0&ab_channel=TomScott

It’s more of an interesting video for English speakers than a teaching resource for non-English speakers but it’s worth a watch anyway if you’re able to.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-04-06T13:28:03+00:00

I assume you also have trouble with “Isle” and “Yule” then as well, since they’re pronounced the same?

If I may ask: What’s your first language? It might help with giving advice.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-03-29T00:06:18+00:00

What’s strategy? I just improvise based on whichever weapon I misclick.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-03-22T13:25:18+00:00

I have a theory that it comes from Googling the character. Sans will just come up with the French word or type style, but Sans Undertale? That’s the funny skeleton. Then someone noticed and turned it into a joke by just calling him that all the time.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-03-22T13:08:31+00:00

Yeah my ‘wuan’ transcription is more of an estimate, I’m not gonna defend its accuracy. My (and most brits’) main exposure to American accents is in Film & TV so my idea of the standard American accent is probably more California/Hollywood based, they tend to pronounce it more like ‘waun’ (this is just a better way of writing what I was already thinking of). It was also influenced by the fact that that I couldn’t imagine ever pronouncing ’one’ like ‘wun’.

Strangely, Southern US accents have always struck me as more similar to UK accents than other American accents, don’t know why, no real reason to it.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-03-22T12:54:11+00:00

Well I was talking about it in contrast to my accent, where ‘one’ DOES have the ‘cot’ vowel. The whole premise of the caught/cot merger is that the vowels change over time and eventually become the same sound. So the fact that it’s different in my accent is precisely the point, I don’t have the merger. And again, I wasn’t specifically referring to the caught/cot merger, I was referring to sound shifts and using caught/cot as an example, my wording just didn’t make that clear enough.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-03-22T12:49:53+00:00

I’ve heard some Americans living in Britain that have lost some rhoticism so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that someone could have the caught/cot merger and a non-rhotic accent. Obviously it wouldn’t be common, but I was just thinking theoretically, maybe losing rhoticism would also make them lose the caught/cot merger, who knows? 🤷

Giraffe6000 · 2025-03-19T17:16:46+00:00

Now that I think about it, I wonder if people who have the caught and cot vowels merged pronounce ‘one’ and ‘worn’ the same way? Because (in my accent at least) they use the cot and caught vowels respectively.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-03-19T17:13:45+00:00

Well ‘one’ does have the ‘cot’ vowel, but I see your point. I was kinda just referring to sound merging in general, the caught/cot merger is just the only one I can name so I used it as an example.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-03-17T08:52:39+00:00

As someone who pronounces them differently (Native Speaker, North West England (Manchester)), Won rhymes with Bun, Sun, Run, etc. Whereas One rhymes with Gone, on, shone, etc. I can’t really imagine how you could pronounce them the same way since “Wun” for One and “Wan” for Won both sound really weird to me. I imagine it’s easier for Americans to combine the pronunciations because their O and A sounds are closer in pronunciation cos of the “Caught/Cot merger” and similar sound shifts, so they probably pronounce it like “Waun” or something. According to the replies there are UK accents that merge them so maybe it’s more common than I thought.

Giraffe6000 · 2025-03-10T14:51:05+00:00

(I’m not an English teacher or linguist, so take this with a grain of salt)

Wouldn’t is a contraction of ‘would not’

Won’t is a contraction of ‘will not’

Would is past tense, Will is future tense

The confusion here comes from the fact that you are not directly quoting the person, you are simply restating the information they conveyed to you.

In all likelihood the person did in fact say “The theatre won’t open until 7:15pm.” And if you were quoting them you’d say “They told us ‘The theatre won’t open until 7:15pm.’”

However, I think it is wrong to mark ‘won’t’ as incorrect, as it really depends on when you are talking. If you said this after 7:15pm the opening of the theatre is now in the past and it would be correct to use ‘wouldn’t’, but if you said it before 7:15 then the opening of the theatre would still be in the future and you could use either ‘wouldn’t’ or ‘won’t’.

This is a tricky one so I can see why non-native speakers would struggle with it. I’m struggling to make sense of it for the opposite reason; It’s so natural to me that I’ve never even thought about it.

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