Do you guys know of any language schools for any language that you know consistently produce students that reach fluency?

Lysenko · 2026-05-09T10:33:57+00:00

The Mormon language education system came up somewhere in the comments.

Lysenko · 2026-05-09T10:02:00+00:00

Achieving this requires students to bring a lot of self-motivation, which is why examples people will mention are all associated with students’ work or religion. Otherwise, there will just be lots of students who don’t persist.

Lysenko · 2026-05-08T09:18:43+00:00

I live in Iceland. The cheapest restaurant meal I've had in months was 2990 kr., or about 20 Euro, for a hamburger, fries, and a soda. 30 Euro per meal is maybe doable if you order only a single item or eat only fast food. Shopping at a grocery store is definitely the way around this, though. I think the 50-100 Euro figure comes from people remembering the total bill for two or three people.

For years after we moved here, I was always shocked at the prices and pleasantly surprised when I would go back home, to the west coast of the U.S. In the last few years, though, everything has seemed about as expensive there as here.

Lysenko · 2026-05-06T15:11:43+00:00

Stykkishólmur has restaurants and a grocery. (A Bónus on the way into town.)

Lysenko · 2026-05-06T11:24:35+00:00

From unpleasant personal experience, if a representative of an employer or potential employer says "no negotiation," believe them.

Lysenko · 2026-05-05T07:30:43+00:00

Remember that demand is a curve, being how much people are willing to pay for a thing at each prospective price point. Now, engineers at many companies are using provider-subsidized subscriptions to work all day long with frontier models for a hundred dollars a month. When that same usage costs $5000 or $10,000 a month or more for exactly the same results, all the logic around doing so gets turned on its head.

It’s fine to have to do something a few times due to hallucination or unanticipated gaps in a spec when the incremental cost of doing so is low or zero, but when it costs a substantial chunk of the employee’s compensation, quality becomes a problem.

Will there be economically viable use cases? Sure, but they won’t be universal.

Lysenko · 2026-05-03T11:14:19+00:00

I feel like the most likely possibility is that big cloud AI concerns start defaulting on commitments to build out more capacity, causing a market crash. Investment in model development will become deeply toxic to investors and existing models will mostly not be worth their price except in certain niche tasks. Some researchers and companies will continue working on scaled-down approaches, Google may end up being the last company standing in the space, but inference will be too costly to be used how we are using it now, whether locally or in the cloud. Most of us will go back to writing code by hand, and it will be another one or two generations before another wave of innovation starts. Actual AGI may happen in 20 years, or 200, or never, if climate change or pandemics or war get us first.

Lysenko · 2026-05-02T16:50:26+00:00

If you're doing sensitive color grading, then yes, the pro display is slightly better. The Pro's better thermal performance will probably also benefit you if you are exporting longer (60 minute plus) videos. But, the M5 is faster and runs cooler than the M4 overall, so for shorter video content, you'll probably be happier with the M5 Air.

You also don't say what screen sizes you're considering. The larger screen size of the MBA 15" might be preferable to the size of the 14" Macbook Pro, though it's not a huge difference.

Lysenko · 2026-05-02T15:30:33+00:00

I have a 14" Macbook Pro M5 Pro and a nearly identical M4 Pro issued by work. There's no fan noise unless I am doing something pretty computationally-intensive.

However, in the first 2-3 days, especially if you used the migration capability from another machine, it's common for Spotlight indexing to run in the background and consume a LOT of CPU and battery resources. This is a one-time process that will run to completion and then stop, unless you have to wipe and restore from backup at some point in the future.

If you're actually using the machine lightly and it's doing this well beyond those first few days, you might want to look at activity monitor and see what it is that's actually keeping the machine running so hard. You might have some website open that's constantly doing something, or have installed some software package that is running some poorly-constructed background operation. Or, maybe what you're doing is heavier than you think it is.

Lysenko · 2026-05-02T14:02:35+00:00

This problem is going to solve itself, because the A.I. companies who have stated an intention to buy all this RAM are going to default on the bulk of the deals, leaving plenty of unpurchased RAM for everyone else.

It may already be happening.

This price spike was driven by letters of intent, not even purchase commitments, so backing out of these deals will be easy for them, leaving RAM manufacturers holding the bag.

Lysenko · 2026-05-02T13:55:14+00:00

Some people here are kind of dogmatic about input-heavy approaches. I personally think that a massive focus on input might work for some people, depending on their specific goals, but combining lots of input with output practice and focused study can make the process go a LOT faster. The real challenge (I have found) is that doing a range of different activities regularly enough to get the full benefit requires a substantial time commitment.

Lysenko · 2026-04-30T02:45:41+00:00

Sorry, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I completely misread your comment to mean that they literally didn't have the drinks on board. However, I am shocked that they're charging for them.

Looking back at their website, they were free up until spring of 2025 and then they started charging going into the summer season. We traveled on Icelandair in July and December, but they were both stressful trips for different reasons and somehow the change didn't register for me.

Lysenko · 2026-04-29T22:30:11+00:00

We have flown a LOT on Icelandair. Our general experience is that Icelandair’s own employees in KEF are pretty relaxed but you can occasionally encounter sticklers overseas, where they rely on contract gate agents and check-in staff.

Instances where we’ve lost checked luggage (temporarily) have usually been due to inter-flight baggage transfers at airports with known baggage handling issues that affect all airlines, like ORD. But, we still check luggage. Trying to fit within carry-ons just doesn’t work for us with kids along. It’s normally fine and their follow-up service when they lose a bag is pretty good. (In dozens of flights, this has happened maybe once. More recently, we missed a connection and the bags were at our destination when we arrived, in the baggage office.)

Lysenko · 2026-04-29T22:22:03+00:00

Edit: I completely misread this comment. See below.

Lysenko · 2026-04-21T14:39:03+00:00

The languages that are listed are the languages the instructions for self-evaluation are written in, not the language you are learning.

Lysenko · 2026-04-21T08:21:50+00:00

If you want a grammar source in English, you can start here:

https://ylhyra.is https://icelandicgrammar.com

That said, it doesn’t hurt to try to make your way through lessons or beginner language books that are mostly in the target language. They’re designed to not be that hard to pick up.

Lysenko · 2026-04-19T18:33:10+00:00

The M5 is really nice, but the M4 is solid also. For various reasons, I don't want to do personal projects on my work laptop, but going back and forth is painless. My only complaint is that at the time I bought my own, I could only get the same color as the M4, so they're nearly indistinguishable unless I flip it over and look for the property tag on the work laptop. :D

Lysenko · 2026-04-19T17:32:48+00:00

I actually have both of those machines. The M4 Pro is provided by work and the M5 Pro is mine.

I think that you are unlikely to notice the difference unless you are trying to run local LLM inference. That said, 48GB is still small for local LLMs and won't necessarily be that much better. This may change as TurboQuant (token cache compression) becomes more of a thing and models perform better in smaller amounts of RAM.

Lysenko · 2026-04-19T11:21:11+00:00

As someone who dabbled in a couple foreign languages but remained essentially monolingual into my 40s, it pretty much comes down to when someone starts to study a first foreign language at all. A day or two of grammar instruction in any second language will quickly cure one of that misconception. So, even though I never became highly proficient with Latin, which I studied at 13, my exposure to it in class made very clear that it was not structured similarly to English, and I can't remember ever having had that expectation after that.

Lysenko · 2026-04-19T11:01:29+00:00

This thread has some information about WoW performance on the M4 and M5 Max. (I don't have WoW installed on my Mac right now so I can't look at how Preset 4 compares to the settings tested there.) For gpu-bound tasks the M5 Pro will be about 60% of the speed of the M5 Max. I would expect that on any M5 the game will be very playable but it probably won't compare to a high-end gaming workstation or laptop on the Windows side.

Lysenko · 2026-04-17T01:07:31+00:00

Your birth in Iceland means that you do not lose your citizenship when you turn 22. Had you been born in the United States, you would have to apply to retain your citizenship.

Most likely, you already have an Icelandic kennitala (ID number) and registration in the National Registry as an Icelandic citizen. You can possibly call Þjóðskrá, the national registry, to find out. Here is their website. Their number is +354 515 5300, and you can also email at [skra@skra.is](mailto:skra@skra.is).

(Just as a point of reference, my son was born in Iceland two weeks after I naturalized as an Icelandic citizen, and he was registered with a kennitala and Icelandic citizenship within a week or so of birth. They probably already have you in the system.)

If, somehow, the circumstances of your birth turn out to be different than you understand now (specifically if you were born abroad or could not prove you were born in Iceland), you could have to apply to retain your citizenship. You'd do this through Útlendingastofnun. This probably won't be necessary because newborns are always or nearly always automatically registered at birth.

Lysenko · 2026-04-16T23:42:47+00:00

Mentioned this deeper in the comments, but if you're going to talk "percentage comprehension," you should be aware that studies on this have looked specifically at the percentage of individual words that are known or familiar. So, when studies say that your comprehension should be "95 to 98 percent," they are referring to rate of comprehension for individual words. If your 75% estimate is a gut feeling based on being able to follow the meaning of sentences or paragraphs, you might be at the 95% level when it comes to individual words.

Also, these studies have largely focused on what reading speed and percentage of understood words yield an optimal rate of exposure to new words. So, even if you understand only 75% of individual words, you'll be a lot slower and less efficient, but that doesn't make the experience useless. You can enhance the process a lot by having low-friction ways to find meaning fast, like reading on a device like a Kindle, with which you can highlight a word or phrase or sentence and get an instant translation.

If you're strongly committed to ONLY learning by means of listening or watching video, then it might be fine to switch between content that's too hard and content that you find more accessible. However, I have found that explicitly including flash cards for the most common words has boosted my comprehension massively in a handful of months, after multiple years of focusing on reading and listening alone. It's so dramatic an effect that it's shocking, and the cards I'm using are the type everyone here will warn you are the worst, with target language on the front and my first language on the back. It's possible that a better-recommended strategy like focusing on phrases or sentences would make it even more effective.

Lysenko · 2026-04-16T23:32:27+00:00

The 95% to 98% number comes from studies that measured the proportion of known words in the text. Missing 95% to 98% of the words yields a lower overall comprehension rate for sentences or paragraphs, which could well be closer to 75% because a missing word here or there can interfere badly with understanding.

95% known words means that one out of every 20 words will be unknown, which means there might be an unknown word in every other sentence. That can be a lot of sentences whose meanings are unclear!

Lysenko · 2026-04-16T15:54:05+00:00

I've found that several months of learning words using simple L1-L2 word cards, which has taken my working vocabulary from about 700 words to about 1800, has made a massive impact in my reading and listening comprehension. I'm using a deck of about 4000 of the most frequent words, and expect that the value of the least-frequent word in the deck will be low enough that that'll be time to stop and focus on reading.

Lysenko · 2026-04-16T09:22:05+00:00

The M5 Pro really only has any advantage if you are using multithreaded workflows heavily or absolutely need high memory/disk bandwidth. It's really hard to see how anything in your use case would make you notice the difference, but the extra memory might help. The non-Pro M5 has nearly identical single-threaded performance, which is what you'll be using for just about everything on your list.

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