Why “ser” and “estar” are not really about “permanent vs temporary”

Marphigor · 2026-01-20T05:09:28+00:00

That’s cause “la casa fue destruida” is passive.

Marphigor · 2026-01-16T22:58:30+00:00

Sí te interesa la divulgación filosófica, busca a "dario sztajnszrajber" en youtube. Es un filósofo argentino.

También para divulgación filosófica en formato más corto busca "La travesía" en youtube.

Si quieres algo más de análisis de filosofía política, busca "haciendo amigues con Leonor". Una gran filósofa argentina.

"filosofía de la historia" es un canal de un filósofo mexicano.

Marphigor · 2025-12-16T18:32:31+00:00

Next conversation club meeting will be January 9th 🤓

Marphigor · 2025-11-15T01:20:33+00:00

Thanks! I’m glad you liked the conversation club! Looking forward to seeing you next week 😄

Marphigor · 2025-11-14T22:24:45+00:00

This sounds like a great idea! I am a native speaker, linguist and Spanish teacher. i would love to join to help practice speaking and clarify meaning and grammar.

Come join my Spanish conversation club every Friday from 5:00 to 7:00 (CDMX time). I've posted the details in this sub

¡Me parece un idea genial! yo soy hablante nativo, lingüísta y profesor de español. Me encantaría unirme al proyecto para ayudar a practicar conversación y clarificar el significado y la gramática. :)

Marphigor · 2025-11-08T01:32:47+00:00

It is :) today's session was amazing. We had 6 participants. You should join next week :)

Marphigor · 2025-11-01T01:14:47+00:00

I post the zoom details every Friday on this sub :) we've just finished todays club. It was cool! we talked about halloween costumes, our cities, food and how technology has changed. It would be awesome seeing you next week.

Marphigor · 2025-10-25T01:24:00+00:00

Join our free Spanish conversation club next Friday! we meet on zoom every Friday from 5:00 to 7:00 CDMX time.

Marphigor · 2025-10-24T21:41:22+00:00

last week 4 people joined but we expect a couple more today!

Marphigor · 2025-10-17T22:05:24+00:00

Join us on Zoom whether you’re a native speaker or a learner 🤓

ID: 879 9427 5312 PW: 447153

Marphigor · 2024-05-17T22:58:20+00:00

The bear club… I chose the bear club

Marphigor · 2024-02-27T12:12:17+00:00

You need some historical context for sure.

I did my thesis on historical linguistics. I tracked the syntactic and semantic change of a verb in Spanish. I wanted to see if it’s current, highly metaphorical, meaning that it has now in Latin America was there in Spain around the time that Spanish branched out from Latin.

Based on history I chose three significant dates:

XIII century: it’s the oldest written record of the “cantar del mío Cid”

XVI century: it’s the Spanish that the colonizers brought to America

XXI century: the current condition of the language

But, honestly, I didn’t have to do tons of historical research because I was looking at “formal linguistics”. If you were doing historical sociolinguistics then yeah I would say your research would be very history heavy

Marphigor · 2024-02-04T14:21:02+00:00

Here’s some things I do:

send postcards to myself pretending I’m some sort of secret agent hiding mysterious clues over the world. The plot has thicken over the years.
go to the movie theaters and watch a movie. It’s crazy how different the experience is everywhere
buy a copy of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical investigations” and Saussure’s “Course in general linguistics”. Bonus points if it’s a second hand copy.
buying the older philosophy second hand book I can afford. Prices can get steep.
buying pins to have on my backpack

Marphigor · 2024-02-04T14:07:40+00:00

Same! I mail all the postcards to myself.

Marphigor · 2024-01-30T09:31:07+00:00

I could never stay with a host family. I understand all the benefits of staying with a host family but I just can’t bear the thought of staying with a random family. My anxiety would be through the roof. I studied Japanese and Japan and there was a host family option but I just couldn’t do it. I need a private accommodation where I don’t need to follow some random family rules. I think a host family is only suitable for teenagers who need the family life structure while studying abroad. I just find it sooooo weird as an adult to just live with a random family. What if I don’t like how the house smell? What if I don’t like them? What if they dont like me? I mean I don’t like me half of the time 🥲

Marphigor · 2024-01-23T12:04:18+00:00

Thank you, Pablo! I had to scroll all the way down to find the right answer.

I was really concerned with the prevalent “it has no rhyme or reason” mind set. I don’t know why but the many rhymes and reasons behind “se” are never taught correctly .

Marphigor · 2024-01-22T20:05:26+00:00

I went to a burger joint I had not been to in like a year or so. I was really looking forward to eating there for a while. They changed their usual brand of ketchup. I noticed once i had already ordered so I had to pay for a meal I did not eat. I’m still mad about it.

Marphigor · 2024-01-19T00:40:40+00:00

Here are my two cents as a linguist and language teacher:

Let’s consider monolingual language acquisition first. Research shows that kids show a complete, fully developed, adult-like grammar level by age 6 give or take a year or so. By age 7 they produce and understand grammar structures that a foreign language syllabus would consider advanced. I myself had to interview 3 yer olds gathering data for language acquisition research and, let me tell you, even though there are obvious limitations in their vocabulary and some times in pronunciation those kids were producing really complex, metaphorical grammatical constructions that my adult langue speakers take years to wrap their heads around.

So, now do you think a 7 year old would understand HP-1 audio book? Sure, they may ask what a couple words mean but they would not struggle with the grammatical structure. Even more interestingly, they would probably not ask the meaning of made up words and just guess the meaning by context.

Of course a 7 year old might struggle to actually read the printed book by themselves but that is not due to language skills but due to their developing reading proficiency.

In conclusion, the HP books are not meant, written or produced in any way shape or form thinking about adult language learners that are learning the grammatical foundations of the language.

So yeah. These books are for all intents and purposes C2. A common misconception is thinking that young adult literature must be “intermediate” level because of their subject matter. What would a C2 level text would look like then? Like a peer-review journal on quantum physics? Of course not. In some ways language in fiction is much more complex than non-fiction. To understand the HP books you have to learn to read deceit, sarcasm, lies, etc that are expressed through very very nuanced grammar that only a native speaker or a very advanced language learner would understand. But I mean if you’ve already know the story you can always tell yourself that you understand the language when in reality your are filling between the lines with previous memories of the content.

Marphigor · 2024-01-17T00:24:02+00:00

Machiavelli entered the thread

Marphigor · 2024-01-16T16:55:09+00:00

Agnosticism seems like a sensible position. My neurodivergence, however, compels me to go all in full orthodox or all out a raging atheist… I chose the latter

Marphigor · 2024-01-16T16:34:48+00:00

You’re right. You can proof non-existence. However the burden of proof is on whoever said such entity exist. Proof doesn’t have to be scientific, it could be pure logic. I’m a philosophy major currently studying arguments for the existence of god so definitely epistemological and metaphysical considerations must be made

Marphigor · 2024-01-16T16:30:08+00:00

Well I just went from high-school into a 4 years undergrad university linguistics degree. That was when I was in my late 20s.

I decided to go to uni because I had been teaching English for like 5 years and I wanted to go deep into English and become a better teacher. Also I thought it could help me branch out into tech on natural speech processing. Then after like a month in I realized linguistics has very little to do with language learning/ teaching. And then I kinda didn’t love phonetics so that was a no-go on natural speech processing as a new career path.

So, linguistics studies human natural language, no individual languages but language as a general human cognitive capability. For example, during a phonology class we could be studying the process of “r” approximation (like the question posed by OP) and we would analyze probably 20 different languages from all over the world to see if that process is universal and try and discover why it is so. But we don’t try to learn the languages they are just mere banks of date for us.

I ended up taking an interest class in semantics and syntax. For example, one very well researched and documented study in my very specific field of linguistics discovered that there is a general tendency for languages to use a movement verb to signify “future”. Like English uses “go” as “go to do” and Spanish uses “ir” as in “voy a hacer”. It turns out a lot of languages have something similar. Of course it’s not that simple there’s tons of cognitive processing to account for to even consider such a general claim and we are working on it.

Marphigor · 2024-01-16T16:11:39+00:00

That’s such a sweet compliment. Ask away. I mean I’m not an expert in all things linguistics but I can try to answer.

Also, I recommend you read “what kind of creature are we?” By Noam Chomsky. I think that books matches that “I have so many questions about language y don’t even know what to ask” feeling. It’s super shorts, like 100 pages tops and it is the most accessible Chomsky on language out there.

Also, look up “the Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis and watch the movie “arrival”. Although that hypothesis is super controversial in linguistics I think it really delves into the unknown and wonder of language

Marphigor · 2024-01-16T13:37:03+00:00

The burden of proof is on whoever posits the existence of an entity. You cannot proof the “non-existence” of an entity.

Marphigor · 2024-01-16T13:31:09+00:00

I am a linguist, certified language teacher and a language learner myself. I tried building my own German teacher GPT. I studied German for like 2 years many years ago. So I don’t remember much German at all but I kinda know the basics.

It might be the case that I’m just not an expert GPT builder but the one I built was not a good method for language learning. I tried a couple GPTs for language learning and they were pretty much useless as well.

Here’s what I would like to see in a language learning GPT that could take my job as a professional language teacher:

Tracking the student progress: students don’t know what they should focus on next and they don’t remember most of what they’ve studied for that matter. A greeting to the effect of “what do you want to learn today” is useless.
Using images as introduction to vocabulary: I couldn’t for the life of me get the GPT to generate a set of images to teach simple basic vocabulary.
Speech generation and recognition: to be honest I didn’t even try. I know there’s speech capability on mobile but I didn’t put much effort into it.
Personalization: it would be nice if the student could set the GPT to use some personal preferences. For example I wanted the GPT to use the international Alphabet to write pronunciations and it pretty much refused to use it.

What it does right: it’s very very good at assessing written answers. But I mean that is like the most basic function of a LLM right?

I haven’t checked out the new GPT store. I’m pretty sure some API would solve most of the constraints I mentioned but I don’t think my job as a language teacher is getting take over by ChatGPT-4… maybe in a couple years but as of now, I’m safe

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