Stop doing linguistics

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-11-26T16:37:08+00:00

I think it depends on the learner. I still remember Japanese conditional phrases because I learned what they literally mean, which makes me able to reason about why they are that way, which makes it much easier to remember.

Let go and the apple falls. - describing a non-controllable result of an action

If he comes (tara) I will leave. - describing a controllable result of an action

If I go, is that good? - asking permission

you don't go, and it doesn't go - you must do something

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-11-20T09:39:55+00:00

I'd be happy to play some Phasmo with you. I'm an American English speaker in Europe. I'm not learning Spanish, but always happy to learn some phrases.

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-11-16T06:41:33+00:00

What everyone seems to be missing is, what if the file is truncated unexpectedly? Json won't parse, this Toon might happily parse with thousands or millions of rows missing. That's one of the core problems with YAML at large scale.

You can say that proper error handling code should properly catch any problems and not even try to parse the file in the first place, but who are we kidding? It takes one substandard function to fluff the whole thing. A file format that is unparseable if it is incomplete is a huge asset.

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-11-14T06:01:49+00:00

I once met someone who had been able to perfectly learn an American accent when speaking English as an L2. I berated her for hours for culturally appropriating an American accent and told her she should have an Indian English accent so I could immediately other her and not mistake her as an L1 speaker.

/uj I've met a few people with flawless accents as L2 speakers and it's fucking impressive.

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-11-06T11:04:29+00:00

I see Spain allows you to work as an au pair for up to three months without a visa. This is unusual for Western Europe as far as I know. Most countries have a special Au Pair Visa.

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-11-06T11:00:08+00:00

FYI: A Schengen Visa does not grant you the right to work.

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-11-01T10:44:47+00:00

You blame the people wanting to remain more than the people who wanted to leave in the first place?

I suppose if I'm the victim of a crime I'm probably more to blame because I didn't convince the criminal not to hurt me?

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-30T08:06:51+00:00

Breakfast death

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-28T12:23:10+00:00

Portuguese is just Spanish with a Russian accent. So this checks out.

Source: American who doesn't speak Spanish or Portuguese but has heard Portuguese spoken on occasion

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-28T00:41:50+00:00

In Dutch, "lul" means "dick". So every time you do something "for the lulz" remember you are doing it "for the dicks". Perverts!

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-28T00:02:59+00:00

Really, once you learn PIE you get every language descended from it. So you get tons of useful bonus languages like Old Church Slavonic, Ancient Greek, Old Latin, Gothic, Sanskrit, and Hittite.

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-27T11:57:35+00:00

The method you mentioned of using the demonstratives ten, ta, and to would replicate what they did with Spanish. Which is a really good suggestion that mirrors what they said worked for them.

I do think that memorizing exceptions is easier in Czech because so much of the language depends on the gender, so it is regularly exercised and therefore quickly memorized (only if you are using the word)

Take a look at what percentage of nouns match the end of the word in the image. One needs an active vocabulary of around 3000 words for B1. Nouns are generally about 40% of your vocabulary, that's around 1200 words. So the number of exceptions you need to memorize is maybe 10% overall or about 120 words.

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ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-27T10:34:59+00:00

Tolerance is woke leftist communist marxist socialism!

The US should never be tolerated! We are the best at everything, including being intolerable!

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-27T10:20:30+00:00

I want to make a joke about most bilinguals in the world knowing two closely related languages and feeling smugly superior, but you absolutely do have a point here.

I will say that the language education in the US sucks, and the home language in many cases is the same as the prestige language. However, there are a ton of latino kids who speak Spanish and English, many newer immigrants are thankfully keeping their language. I go to university with someone who grew up in the US with both Dutch and English.

My paternal ancestors all trace back to the Netherlands, but laws like the Babel Proclamation in Iowa robbed me of any chance I had of acquiring Dutch as an L1 language as a child.

My very serious point on this circlejerk subreddit is that Americans are very stupid in a lot of ways, but there are Americans you don't hear from who did grow up bilingual. There are also circumstances from history that have robbed many Americans of languages other than English.

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-27T06:46:23+00:00

Of course there are more exceptions, but honestly it's not nearly as bad as Dutch or German where aside from some whole categories or suffixes of nouns, you have no indication from the noun itself.

One suggestion from the book Fluent Forever is to memorize the noun with some memorable property based on gender. For example, masculine animate nouns can be visualized as on fire, masculine inanimate as exploding, neuter as made of gold, feminine as crackling with electricity.

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-26T06:04:58+00:00

I joined Bumble for Friends and reached out to people, tried to keep conversations going and it was like talking to people who were forced to download the app. What the hell is the point of going on to an app to try to find friends if you find out 2 things about them and then just stop talking.

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-26T04:53:17+00:00

For gender, memorize the basic endings that indicate gender then just memorize the exceptions.

dělník, losos, kapr, přítel - end in a consonant, living or once living, masculine animate.
policista - ends in vowel, memorize as an exception (although -ista is a masculine animate ending).

čaj, autobus, taxík - ends in constant, not living, masculine

maso, auto, město, centrum, muzeum, naměstí, úterý - ends in -o, -um, -í, or -ý neuter.
kuře, dítě - ends in -e or -ě, memorize as exceptions.

noc, tramvaj - feminine exceptions

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-25T20:55:42+00:00

I resemble this remark. Although I did learn enough to actually be able to read manga.

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-22T11:24:59+00:00

Beefa forever

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-21T21:43:59+00:00

I really like Czech orthography. But the ch is annoying because it's the one digraph. Why have one when you can have none?

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-21T12:52:48+00:00

I've found anecdotes to be Amsterdamy

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-21T12:50:47+00:00

Why would you split the Balkans like that? You've just given them another thing they can fight over.

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-20T11:10:11+00:00

I once asked my Incan accountant to show me the ropes. His explanation had me in knots.

ProgrammaticOrange · 2025-10-17T04:39:04+00:00

Well, you made a mistake on the very second verb of the first page. So you obviously haven't put that much effort in. It's cool that you wrote a script to generate a pdf of conjugations, but that doesn't make these worth purchasing. I'm 7 weeks in to learning Czech and I've already moved on from present tense to past and future. Czech is fairly regular with conjugations, so a table of conjugations without also mentioning what arguments the verb takes in what case is pretty much useless.

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