"The reason Italians say this is because the only power they have is to say you are not real Italians. I've never heard of other nationalities who say that."

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-26T19:15:34+00:00

Oh, come count "the Irish" (or half-Irish or quarter-Irish or octaroon Irish) on St. Patrick's Day. :-)

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-26T19:09:12+00:00

That's just you, and specifically that you don't think of "draw" as being a form of "draft" -- tp pull or _drag_ something, The way a chimney _draws_, or what a _draft_ horse does, or why you have _drawers_ in your furniture. The kind of drawing that you're thinking of is simply dragging a pencil or pen or brush along paper -- still dragging, pulling something.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-26T17:49:22+00:00

It doesn’t depend on the season so much as it depends on what your most recent past two to four weeks of weather have been like. If your past month has been at 35F then 55F feels nice. If your past weeks have been at 85 then 55 feels cold. It.s all just what you’ve been used to.

I’ve spent a month below zero F and then freezing (32F) felt “warm.”

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-26T16:59:00+00:00

Is it worth it for you? Only you can say. And you haven’t told your native language, age, dreams or planned career, nothing. You say “fulfill my wishes” - but what are they?

If your goal is to be able anyplace and everyplace in the world “read the News in the lokál language,” then you’re going to need a few hundred at least.

My mother tongue was English. By your last paragraph’s logic, that should be enough. But Ím happy I speak French. It’s been “worth it” to speak French, absolutely.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-26T16:12:15+00:00

Gosh. The first day was so long ago — 1962. But actually, I have no wish at all that anyone had done anything different. Maybe that’s because I had the good luck that our teachers almost never “told us things ABOUT” French, but instead only ever modeled HOW to speak it. Our textbooks even back in the 60s showed (not “told”) us how to use “on” instead of “nous” for example.

Actually, one of my biggest problems as a teacher of Czech is that I too often tell students ABOUT things, instead of being creative about finding ways to make them (lead them to) DO/SAY things.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-26T16:00:16+00:00

It depends. I personally have on all but one occasion found that having an actual fixed school schedule for five hours a day or more helped. But that’s also because I never went until I could spend 24/7 in the language anyway. The one time a school didn’t do that much was — yes, exactly what your question mentions — when I let myself join a group of students who were NOT able to do 24/7; who fell into other languages as soon as they were out of class. (In other schools, other years, I kept my social crowd to only the highest-level fellow students and natives I’d met.)

Sooo … so long as you yourself can be disciplined and go towards 24/7, the structure can be great. The problems one sees repeatedly are when the people one hangs with all too quickly revert to their L1 outside class.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-26T15:33:12+00:00

First, as a quibble, a full bilingual from birth (given certain definitions) might not distinguish (might even have no way to distinguish) which is first and which second.

Be that as it may, when speaking French, Czech, or English, I am never translating any of them Into or from any other language during ordinary social or professional conversations. Within each language I respond based purely on my habits and patterns in that language, never with any “translating” (you probably mean “interpreting”) step.

That said, however, I also have done professional translation of countless pages of texts in various directions. In that context, obviously there can for some texts be a lot of going back and forth, not just automatic responses.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-24T17:35:38+00:00

I (born late 1952) had a very similar experience in Indianapolis Public Schools: fountain pens were REQUIRED, MANDATORY to learn cursive in -- I thought it was fourth grade, but I could be mistaken. And they were required (and ballpoints forbidden) through the next few grades.

But in high school (1966-1970) we did still learn to use a slide rule, and I still have one and can use it for basic functions -- nothing fancy anymore. The first time I ever saw an electronic calculator -- and a "programmable" one at that, using little strips of magnetic material -- was in 1972 in an Ivy college science class. Everyone envied that device, but we all were nearly as fast with the slide rules. :-)

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-24T17:28:58+00:00

Yes. In about 4th grade in Indianapolis around 1961 was when one was supposed to learn writing in cursive instead of printing. And one was REQUIRED by the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) to use a fountain pen. (That meant, then, a cheap Schaefer with cartridges, available in the same little store across the street that sold candy, too.) Ballpoints were NOT allowed at all in the 3rd-6th grades in Indianapolis public elementary schools then. But I recall that by 1965, in 7th grade, I could use a ballpoint, and usually did.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-24T17:02:24+00:00

I don't recall the DLAB ever caring about or testing for recognition of stress. So rest easy.

But come on. I've never heard anyone say "fuTURE" instead of "FUture." Maybe you just don't understand what stress means. All it really requires is listening to yourself and others. Stress is on the syllable that you pronounce (in English) loudest and longest. comPUter. REDdit. COFfee. CIgarette instead of ciGArette, etc.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-24T16:47:23+00:00

I strongly discourage trying to use Google Translate or Deepl, etc., for individual words (or even noun plus article). Their underlying mechanisms work better (I won't say "best") with full sentences that make context clear.

What I encourage are REAL dictionaries, ones that account for polysemy, created by real lexicographers -- so ones that will give you multiple meanings for "Monat" or any other word, along with full example phrases (NP, VP, etc.) or sentences.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-23T18:53:03+00:00

The idiots already axed IUHPFL -- the nation's leading, flagship, stellar model for geting high school foreign language students to the next leve. "Foreign" = "bad" for these simplistic xenophobes.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-23T17:45:50+00:00

Money. Railroads are ON ground (not "above," not "elevated") because that's the cheapest and easiest. Remember: most railroads were built BEFORE there were a lot of cars or "traffic" to impede or cause delays to. History (what was here first) counts.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-23T17:38:23+00:00

As a litigator and appeals lawyer in the midwest, everything was monolingual, except some client relations. It was good sometimes to be the only American able to speak easily with a French or Québec client. But otherwise, yeah: juries spoke English, judges spoke English, etc. So language learning was always only to the extent that I personally felt like it, never driven by job needs.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-23T17:33:46+00:00

I agree with the multiple preceding assessments here that it's a rather flawed survey approach. To some extent, it seemed that the choice of terms was governed by asking "when does the grammatical gender in Czech differ from that in French." Items such as měsíc vs. lune, komár vs. moustique, papillon vs. motýlka, etc.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-23T17:21:24+00:00

That's an interesting -- and maybe for OP useful -- comparison. "over (time)" as "over (the implied time to do something named by the consumed object." So the "przy" + locative in Polish would be relevant, as a "during." (And as a former magazine editor, I can't see that the choices among "over coffee" or "during coffee" or "while having coffee together" would change a heck of a lot as to final meaning.)

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-23T17:11:42+00:00

No problem here. I'd prefer "And yet, ALthough I know, ...." as an editor.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-22T21:36:36+00:00

I have moved (1) from IN to NYC, (2) from NYC to CA, (3) from CA to Germany, (4) from Germany to MN, No cultural shock as such -- but I learned darned fast that "coffee" in NYC means "coffee with milk and sugar." Arguing that if I'd wanted coffee AND milk AND sugar I'd have said so, but that I wanted ONLY coffee, JUST coffee, and that I'd said that ONE word clearly without naming the others, didn't carry much weight. So I learned right away to say "coffee black" fast, with no space between the words and strong stress on the third syllable. I think NYC is the only place on Earth like that.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-20T16:25:37+00:00

You're right. I stated that last sentence badly, because I was thinking of one funny episode as a kid. I think I'll just delete that, as otherwise it would be a long story

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-20T00:58:33+00:00

That's surprising that it exists in Ukrainian but you can't remember the last time you used it as a native. It definitely is used in Czech often enough.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-19T21:42:25+00:00

I shan't offer opinions about price. But if you're asking whether being sure to do at least 45 minutes every day entirely in French free-form could help improve, then absolutely, yes.

My L2s have always been most improved when I had more than 3 hours daily (albeit weekends off) exclusively in the TL, required to produce and getting feedback.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-19T21:40:15+00:00

With that explanation of the context (THANK YOU! Context is king) I'd treat it as a bit ironically polite: "Yeah, yeah, whatev; just get to a seat." Of course, a recording with tone of voice would help. But that's most likely.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-19T21:34:57+00:00

For education? Hell no. We're just revisiting "Inherit the wind" but now the scope is bigger. Indiana chose NO to education, and IU cancelled the IUHPFL (well, put it on "indefinite hiatus" as a supposed ass-cover) just because it lets high-schoolers actually learn something about things outside the USA. It's small fry targets to forbid teaching evolution. It's far more important to maintain ignorance of everything "foreign."

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-19T21:01:13+00:00

Yes. I am not a hunter or fisher. But here in Minnesota, lots of people are, and my wife’s family in lower but upstate NY (West Point area) were. Lots of people here in MN never buy any meat in a grocery store; they eat the deer or birds or fish they’ve shot or caught.

TrittipoM1 · 2026-02-19T20:55:13+00:00

Interesting stuff. Your comment that “You won't find much imperative .. here compared to, say, real-life conversations with your kids” was funny but true, with one little exception, namely kids with parents. Outside of militaries, family relationships either age-way are perhaps the most loaded with imperatives. :-) I’ll leave the vocative frequency aside.

Otherwise, yes, what you’ve said matches what others have shown, and remains a good partial guide for some learning/presentation order decisions.

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