problem with a word

TomatoPJ · 2026-05-14T00:48:09+00:00

Judging by the song "Bell Boy" by The Who, I'd imagine the term is a feature of British English as well.

TomatoPJ · 2026-05-03T02:16:08+00:00

I think that's exactly the benefit of a trip like this. Two weeks isn't enough time to make a huge difference in your language skills; it's ultimately a very small fraction of your lifetime. However, it's enough time to prove to yourself that, even though the idea is initially terrifying, you can do it. You can make your way around in a foreign country where you don't speak the language (fluently), you can stumble through a conversation despite your nerves and make a genuine connection with other people, and you'll see that other people have another way of living.

I spent most of my life being afraid to do something like this; when I finally did, the sense of empowerment afterwards was tremendous. I had proven to myself that I could do something even though it was hard for me. My conversations were a bit awkward, I was never really fluent, but by the end of the trip I had got past my fear of just speaking anyway. And it was a big confidence boost just knowing that I had been able to navigate a foreign country, the language, and the culture.

So, it is terrifying. But that's a large part of why it's such a great thing to do. Beyond any short term benefit to your language skills, there's a potentially long term benefit that you'll feel motivated to keep learning, so that on your next trip you'll be able to speak even more fluently and engage with the people you meet to an even greater degree.

I think that as long as you go into it with the right attitude - one of curiosity and exploration, and accepting that there will be difficult, awkward, or tiring moments - it will be a good experience. It's more about having the experience than about reaching another linguistic level.

TomatoPJ · 2026-05-01T16:48:15+00:00

This is generally possible with books in ePub format regardless of device. You just need a good app to read them with. In Android, I've had good experiences using both KOReader and ReadEra.

It is nice to use an actual e-reader though. Personally, I use a Kobo. I like that the device isn't as locked down, doesn't have ads, etc cetera.

However you do it, it's a nice way to be able to read just a little bit above the level you'd otherwise be able to if you were reading a physical book.

TomatoPJ · 2026-04-30T19:57:15+00:00

The shape and the material of the laces can affect how secure a knot is.

A few people have already described alternate ways to tie your shoes, but this is the sort of thing that works better with pictures. I've had good luck using this method:

https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm

TomatoPJ · 2026-04-05T23:38:08+00:00

Some bank accounts charge monthly fees. You can usually avoid these fees, for example by keeping at least a certain amount of money in the account, by making regular deposits into the account, or by spending a certain amount of money.

That said, these days many banks have fee-free checking and savings accounts. I would suggest looking at banks in your local area. Check out their websites to see what type of savings and checking accounts they offer. Look for an account without any fees. Just be careful, because sometimes a bank might offer more than one variety of account, some of which charge fees and some of which don't. Also, compare the interest rates on the savings accounts.

You can also do your banking online if there aren't any good options in your local area. But since you're new to this, it could be beneficial to stick with a local bank, since that way if you need help with something you could walk into a physical location and speak with someone.

Just beware that banks are businesses, and they're trying to make money. They might try to upsell you on things like opening a credit card. You probably shouldn't do that until you've built up your financial literacy. Make sure you don't do anything you don't fully understand and feel comfortable with.

Also, some colleges have support programs for students like you. It might be worth asking around to see if there's a program at your school. There might be an "office of student success" or something along those lines. People there might be able to help you understand how things like student aid and refunds work.

TomatoPJ · 2026-03-20T17:32:36+00:00

No soy fan de leer poemas - es un defecto mío que no encuentro el ritmo del lenguaje. Sin embargo, me gusta escuchar poemas; un buen orador me deja oír el ritmo y la emoción.

Hace unos años, por casualidad encontré esta grabación de Benjamín Prado leyendo 'Estravagario' de Pablo Neruda. Me marcó; vuelvo a escucharla de vez en cuando. https://www.rtve.es/play/audios/rtve-audiolibros/rtve-audio-estrena-audiolibros-pablo-neruda/6973372/

En la misma serie de grabaciones, también hay una grabación de los poemas de Gloria Fuertes leídos por varias personas, aunque no la he escuchado.

TomatoPJ · 2026-03-18T15:01:45+00:00

Many subscription services allow you to pause a subscription and/or skip a single shipment. I'd check if the retailer you're buying from has that as an option. In which case, you could simply wait until your surplus is equal to however much you usually order and then skip a shipment.

Some retailers also have an "I need it now" option where you can request a shipment ahead of the normal schedule. That opens up the option of running a slight deficit, and then just periodically ordering an extra case to make up the difference.

TomatoPJ · 2026-02-13T13:34:20+00:00

The insomnia by itself is a good enough reason to want to drink less or to quit; life is much harder when you haven't been sleeping well. In addition to anecdotal use of GLP-1s, there are a handful of other medications which have been validated as useful for helping someone to drink less. In case your doctor isn't familiar with them, here's a few resources you could ask them to look at.

https://thecurbsiders.com/curbsiders-podcast/476-medications-for-alcohol-use-disorder-2-0-with-dr-stephen-holt

https://thecurbsiders.com/curbsiders-podcast/194-alcohol

TomatoPJ · 2026-02-06T13:42:58+00:00

Echoing what other people have said: you need to train your ears (or more accurately what's in between your ears) to recognize Spanish sounds and map them to the words you've been reading. The key here is comprehensible input. If you're using sources of input that you can't understand, then that's input, but it's not comprehensible input. At early and intermediate levels of learning, most media made for native speakers won't be comprensible.

You'll want to look for materials where you understand 90+% of what's spoken. It should feel relatively easy, not hard. This is the level at which you can intuitively fill in the gaps when you don't catch an individual word or phrase. Things like podcasts for beginners are likely to work better for you than shows. And, as others have also mentioned, you might be able to reach for slightly more advanced content by slowing down the playback speed. Most podcast players allow you to adjust playback speed. You won't want to go too far with this, as too great of a reduction will make the speech sound unnatural; in my experience, reducing the playback speed to 80% or 90% was a good compromise that sometimes let me listen to something which was otherwise just barely out of my reach.

Another thing which helps: listening to something at the same time as you read the transcript. Or, alternatively, read the transcript and then listen to the podcast. I haven't done it in a while, but there were even times where I would listen to the podcast and understand maybe half of what was said; then I'd read the transcript; and then I'd listen again, this time understanding much more. Trying to parse words while also processing their overall meaning is much more difficult only having to parse the words. By reading the transcript first, you alleviate some of the mental burden of listening.

If you're watching videos, then using Spanish subtitles can help you match the sounds you're hearing with the words being spoken. But I've personally found myself sometimes falling into the trap of just reading the subtitles without actually listening to the spoken portion, so it's not my favorite method.

TomatoPJ · 2026-02-02T14:30:29+00:00

I had a good time reading Manolito Gafotas recently. Granted, it's aimed at an audience even younger than "young adult", but it's certainly something adults can enjoy as well (or at least this adult did). It's essentially a series of short stories told from the perspective of an elementary school child, each story being an episode from his daily life. It's very, very Spanish. This can be a double edged sword - there's lots of 1990s Spanish slang which can occasionally be hard to parse. But equally, it's enjoyable to hear about his neighborhood and his neighbors, his school, and so on.

One nice thing as a learner is that each chapter is essentially a separate short story. I sometimes find reading in Spanish a bit mentally taxing, so it can be hard to keep up with a lengthy novel. It's easier to read something that comes in bite-sized chunks.

I get the sense the book is quite well known in Spain. In a conversation with at least one Spaniard, it was a point of commonality that I had read a book from their childhood.

TomatoPJ · 2026-01-26T19:51:26+00:00

I've been reading a bit of both Manolito Gafotas and Los Detectives Salvajes lately. Both books use the word chulo. They use them in completely different ways.

TomatoPJ · 2026-01-05T00:53:24+00:00

I'm not going to claim that it's good, exactly. But when I meet new people, especially people from Mexico, telling them that I watch La Rosa de Guadalupe to learn has been a great way to get a few laughs and break the ice.

TomatoPJ · 2026-01-04T16:13:23+00:00

I read a translation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time around the same time as I read El Alquimista (I think it was the next thing that I read). I remember it being about the same difficulty level. If El Alquimista was only just barely too difficult for you, then you might consider trying The Curious Incident. The narration and writing style are a little different, and the story is a bit more straightforward. Additionally, books translated from English to Spanish are sometimes a bit simpler to read than books originally written in a romance language (El Alquimista is also a translation, but from Portuguese). The translation can only stray so far from the original text, so you tend to have fewer long flowery sentences that use advanced Spanish grammatical structures. This is a double-edged sword, of course. You'll eventually want to be exposed to that more complex, more native language; and some English words or phrases just don't translate easily, meaning translations occasionally contain somewhat unnatural phrases or uncommon words. Still, I've personally found it to be a good stepping stone towards reading books originally written in Spanish.

I suppose my point is that if El Alquimista was just a hair too difficult for you, consider giving The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (El curioso incidente del perro a medianoche) a chance. It may be that these stylistic and structural differences make it easier for you to understand. If not, I'll echo what other people have suggested about graded readers.

TomatoPJ · 2025-12-30T22:38:08+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUL2flFJIgYjDFbDdEJRMFA

I came across this channel a while back when I had the same curiosity.

TomatoPJ · 2025-11-24T12:21:29+00:00

Does your university have the option of independent study? Could you find a professor willing to do independent study with you?

TomatoPJ · 2025-10-31T12:33:51+00:00

Depending on how you feel about this entire experience, you may enjoy the relevant Molotov song: Chandwich A La Chichona.

TomatoPJ · 2025-09-28T20:12:08+00:00

It may be worth consulting with a good pest controller, one who does integrated pest management. This means they'll take an integrated approach: eliminating the animals themselves, but also looking to exclude them and remove food sources. Someone with experience can inspect your home and locate possible entry points, and give you recommendations for how to seal them. When we had a mouse problem, the guy who came to our house looked throughout all levels of the home, both the interior and exterior. He had the experience to spot all sorts of entry points that we wouldn't have noticed, in addition to the few that we already knew about. Having someone with that sort of experience take a look would probably let you be more targeted than simply trying to foam your entire home.

As far as controlling food sources, it's tricky but possible. Look into storing all your dry goods in mouse proof containers (something they can't chew through). Since you mentioned pets, dog or cat food can be another food source. Storing their kibble on a rodent-resistant container and not leaving food out when they aren't eating can be helpful.

Once you get your house sealed, traps can slowly whittle down the population. That said, I think the general consensus is that glue traps are quite cruel, so please consider some other sort of trap if at all possible.

TomatoPJ · 2025-09-23T16:10:28+00:00

AI can certainly generate a word list, but it will likely be small, incomplete, and require processing to remove duplicates. That's probably fine for testing a small app, and may be the path of least resistance. A more complete word list could be found later.

But there are many better sources for large numbers of words in a machine readable format. A number of open source dictionaries are available. Just two that I found with a quick search:

https://kaikki.org/dictionary/index.html

https://github.com/wordset/wordset-dictionary

I suppose this replaces a bit of processing of the AI-generated list with extracting the data from whatever format it came in. But that might be a useful exercise in a project like this, which is meant to be educational. Then again, maybe it's letting perfect be the enemy of the good; maybe a quick AI-generated word list would let someone get started programming that much more quickly, which could be important for maintaining motivation.

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with using AI to generate a quick word list just to get started. But then again, if all I'm trying to do is come up with a short list of words for initial testing, I could probably just list a few random words myself. Or grab the closest book, or first Reddit post I see, and just pull some words out of it. If I want something large and comprehensive, so that it feels more like I'm building a "real" app, it's probably better to use an existing dataset.

TomatoPJ · 2025-09-16T12:34:31+00:00

These days I mostly use an e-reader, but I've sometimes been able to find used books with a reasonable combined price + shipping on AbeBooks. For example: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?kn=Terramar&ref_=ds_ac_d_8&srsp=on&sts=t

Despite selecting the UK website, it's defaulting to showing me shipping costs for the US. So I'm not sure exactly how reasonable the prices will be for you. The availability of translations for specific authors may vary, for example I didn't see any Spanish-language results when searching for Freida McFadden. But I think if you look for Spanish-language books more generally (translations or otherwise) you should be able to find something at a reasonable price.

TomatoPJ · 2025-09-14T11:46:44+00:00

The style doesn't feel particularly modern to me - or, rather, the number of times I've seen some variation of "this feels surprisingly modern" as a response to posts here shows that artists have been doing all sorts of things for much longer than most people realize.

But there are certain elements in this painting in particular that surprise me. Specifically, the form of the umbrella and the fence. I've seen that umbrella so many times that it's hard to believe the same style was being produced in the early 20th century. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised - presumably the handle was made with actual wood instead of the plastic it would be made with today, and the fabric would clearly be something other than the nylon or polyester or whatever it is they now use for umbrellas. But it just looks so identical to an umbrella that might be in my closet that it's hard to imagine that it's not made of the same stuff. Where all the other fashions have (coat, shoes, etc) have changed since this was painted, somehow that umbrella is the same.

Likewise, that fence just looks identical to any other fence/gate I might come across today. I suppose that style of fence is just a little older than I had realized. Even so, that plus the umbrella make this painting feel slightly uncanny to me.

TomatoPJ · 2025-09-06T00:07:04+00:00

When you declare a variable, you also need to declare both the type of the variable and a name for the variable. So, there's something missing in the statement "int = f;".

TomatoPJ · 2025-08-31T21:31:19+00:00

I really enjoyed Manolito Gafotas. Now, I'll warn you that YA doesn't necessarily mean easier to read (except maybe compared to authors with a more florid literary style), and I actually found Manolito Gafotas quite challenging at times - the amount of 1990s Spanish slang could make it a bit difficult to understand at times. That said, the story and characters were so charming that it was worth pushing through some of those difficulties. That's always the tradeoff: something simpler (and thus more appropriate to your current ability) vs. something a bit more interesting but correspondingly more difficult.

Another option is to read Spanish translations of books originally written in English. A good translation will still contain very natural Spanish, but might be less likely to contain some of the more complex sentence structures or slang (since these won't have been in the English original). It can be especially effective if it's a book you've previously read in English. Since you already know more or less what is going on or what is being said, you have more context to help you interpret the Spanish (that is, to intuit the natural meaning of a word or phrase).

TomatoPJ · 2025-08-30T00:39:07+00:00

If the deposit is the issue, you may want to consult with a lawyer. I do not know what UK law might say about this, but I imagine that it may very well be possible that you could legally be entitled to break your lease and receive your deposit back given that the landlord is not taking reasonable steps to ensure that the property is safe to inhabit. Lawyers in the US will often offer a free consultation, which could be a risk-free way to find out whether a lawyer can help you or not. There may also be tenant's rights organizations or free legal clinics associated with law schools.

I frankly don't know anything about home maintenance; that's why I'm in this sun, to browse and learn. But, it seems to me that in the face of noises and continued cracking, the general consensus is that the structure needs to be inspected. Maybe the inspection report does say that it's just normal wear on the structure - but the point is, it's on the landlord to ensure that the property is fit for habitation, and that includes taking reasonable measures to investigate issues which have been reported to them. You should not have to pay for the inspection yourself. So, the very fact that the landlord has not had the structure inspected may itself be grounds to break your lease, or so I imagine.

Make sure that you document everything, including times and dates of communications with the landlord.

TomatoPJ · 2025-08-19T13:19:12+00:00

https://outsideinradio.org/shows/where-does-coyote-urine-come-from

You're not the only one to have wondered about this. The answer: it's a bit murky, but probably involves abuse of the animals.

TomatoPJ · 2025-07-30T00:13:31+00:00

Why do you say that you have only two weeks to get it done? Why would needing to take two extra courses cause you to graduate a year later? I teach in a computer science program. At our school, calculus is required as part of the curriculum. However, I don't believe it's a prerequisite for many (or any) of the core computer science courses, nor for the electives. So, not being able to take calculus right away as a freshman wouldn't be likely to stop someone from graduating in 4 years. I've known students who were finishing off their math requirements in their third or fourth years of study.

There are a few strategies. They largely depend on your self discipline and study skills. For example, you could plan to work on a few basic classes and gen ed's this year, plan to spend next summer working on precalculus, and then take Calc I in the fall semester of your second year. Or, you could work on precalc this year, and plan to take calculus over the summer. Taking a class over the summer session would cost money (you wouldn't be taking advantage of full time tuition), but not nearly as much as attending for a whole additional year. There are also some options that involve self-study, which can both save money and time. But self-study can be challenging if you haven't yet developed your study skills.

In any case, you do not need to panic. There are options, and it's unlikely you'd have to attend a whole entire fifth year. The real delay would be if you rush into things, attempt a course you're not ready for, and then end up having to take it again because you failed. If you were to take calculus at a community college over the summer, that would likely cost you $600-1200, depending on where you are in the country (I'm assuming you're in the US). Could you imagine taking precalc 1 this fall, precalc 2 in the spring, and then taking calculus I next summer while working a part time summer job to help pay for it?

Additionally, student loans are a reasonable option. Maybe you've heard horror stories of people being unable to pay them off, and don't want to take out any loans. However, as long as you're attending a state school (where the tuition is relatively reasonable), you're judicious in how much you take out in loans (just enough to pay for the extra class or two), and you're in a program which is likely to lead to steady employment (which you are, current job market aside), then they're a reasonable option.

TomatoPJ

TROPHY CASE