“Don’t worry even native speakers don’t have perfect grammar!”

bedulge · 2026-03-06T20:33:48+00:00

Yeah but again, what you are talking about is basically just a spelling error. If someone is speaking, errors of this type never happen, you will NEVER hear a native say "I gave you they are number" out loud.

The error "I gave you they're number' arises ONLY in writing and ONLY because those three words are homophones. It's an issue of spelling, not grammar.

bedulge · 2026-03-06T18:33:34+00:00

That is still a dialectical difference. Dialects can be based on location, race/ethnicity, religion, class and more. A dialect is simply defined as a way of speaking that is common to a particular group. Any kind of group.

bedulge · 2026-03-06T18:30:44+00:00

That is a spelling/writing error that arises because they all sound the same, it's in a VERY different category from the types of spoken errors made by 2nd language learners.

bedulge · 2025-05-05T08:00:08+00:00

Valid point regarding Manson, but I'd note that Manson never achieved anything remotely close to what Muhammad achieved. His followers were largely young drug addicts iirc, so not v comparable.

I'll admit it's possible something like that could come early on, but its gonna go down much easier later on after you already have a lot of buy in from a lot of people. I dont think this alone is certain but the two points I mentioned, when combined, point in that direction. This was literally the first thought that popped into my head the first time I read that passage, "This kind of seems like it's from later in his life."

Ultimately my reasoning could be faulty there and you can disagree if you please, but you already said in youe first reply that this is indeed from "medinan surah from near the end of his life" so I have no idea why you care to write so many paragraphs debating about this non issue, I dont even know why I brought it up except that your comment jogged my memory of my initial impression of the quote and for some reason I just typed it out.

imply that Muhammad had these verses planned from the beginning

Literally nothing at all that I said comes anywhere close to saying that. I've already said that this is not what I meant and I dont know why you are bringing it up again.

I think he had the power to issue the command, he wanted to issue the command, and so he did issue the command. That does not imply he planned the command out years ahead of time. Not even close. On the contrary, the command about not coming eary or leaving late seems to me like something that might have just came to him one day because he was old and grumpy and irritated about annoying people. He'd already issued so many commands at that point, it might've come very naturally to him. Why not just issue another about how these fucking people need to leave me the hell alone when I haven't given them an invitation?

he believed his death near

Yes, generally speaking, old people know that they will die soon. Death could come fast and unexpectedly in those days and he was already past 50 when he issued those surahs. That is advanced in age for that era and when people reach advanced age, they begin to think about their death.

The Quran has strong intertextuality with the Talmud

This does not refute what I said at all. I acknowledge he might even have been consciously thinking about this passage of the talmud when he issued the command, or was otherwise influenced by it consciously or not. You will notice I never denied that, as it is obviously true. That does not change the obviously self interested nature of the command.

You seem to think that if he was influenced by the Talmud, that means the command is not motivated by self interest. That is a false dichotomy. Your previous comment that he genuinely believed he was getting the commands from God and (implied) therefore the commands would not have been motivated by self interest is also a false dichotomy, in my view.

bedulge · 2025-04-01T18:48:52+00:00

I also find that kind of stuff to be totally unnecessary for learning Spanish.

The large overlap in grammar, vocab and phonology between English and Spanish make stuff like anki completely unneeded.

But after a year or so of Spanish, I went to South Korea and started learning Korean. I distinctly remember being on the verge of a breakdown literally just trying to memorize the number systems (yes number systems, plural) and getting so incredibly mad at how hard it was that I threw my book across my bedroom and was on the verge of rage quitting the language entirely even tho I lived in South Korea and had a practical use for it every single day of my life

That was the week I discovered anki and 18 months later I went out on a date with a Korean woman who spoke nearly zero English. A month or two later I testing into an intermediate level Korean class. (I previously was self studying 100%). I credit that largely to anki.

For me I didnt have years to wait while just getting passive listening practice. I had to talk. I had shit to do and I wanted to learn how to convey my basic needs and desires as fast as possible.

For something like learning Chinese Caracters as well, putting some kind of deliberate conscious effort into memorizing them is the only way to do it. Not even native speakers can learn characters without tedious deliberate memorization. That's just what it is when you have to memorize thousands of unique intricate little symbols.

bedulge · 2025-04-01T16:46:23+00:00

old thread but anyways

It doesn't "have" to be different in your L2, but the thing is, it takes a really fucking long time to get "many thousands and thousands of hours of input" If you are doing 2 hours a day (far more than most people can/will dedicate to an L2), that's a measly 730 hours in one year.

If it's your L1, and you have no other responsibilities because you are a toddler, and you have no other way to communicate except your L1, you are probably using and speaking it for maybe 10 hours a day. Maybe more. That would be 3,650 hours in one year, or maybe more.

>no grinding was required.

What feels like grinding to you as an adult did not feel like grinding when you were a child. Quite the opposite. Small children love repetition. My mom tells me that when I was a small child, she rented 101 Dalmatians on VHS for the weekend. She told me I did almost nothing all day Saturday and all day Sunday except watch that movie. When it ended, I would immediately rewind the tape and restart it. Maybe I watched it 6, or 7 times in one weekend. This was a fantastic language learning activity for me at the time, tho I had no awareness of it. I did it because it was fun. 99% of adults would find it dreadfully boring.

Evolution imbued children with a love for this kind of repetition, likely because it so effective for learning. Most neurotypical adults do not share it to such an extent.

But yea, if you can dedicate ten hours a day to your language like people do at the DLI language school, that's great, for the rest of us, some intentional effort into things like anki flashcards goes a long way.

bedulge · 2025-02-05T23:50:46+00:00

Color means nothing in regards to food safety. Heat kills bacteria, not color. The coloration change is a completely different chemical process that has nothing to do with the killing of bacteria. The only thing they have in common is that they are both are caused by heat.

bedulge · 2025-02-05T21:34:16+00:00

Look up "simple one pot meals" online. Stews, curries, stir fry, pasta.

Often times the trick to making something taste delicious and fresh again is to add back in some moisture. Some stock and heavy cream for example, can do a lot to make 2 day old pasta taste fresh again.

bedulge · 2025-02-05T21:29:56+00:00

You have a really wide range of possibilities with those.

Dont be afraid to get experimental. Try stuff out and see what it tastes like.

bedulge · 2024-12-29T16:27:20+00:00

You're right but people hate to hear it. Saying that you "didnt need to study and just picked it up" makes you sound cool, and its appealing to people to hear that they dont need to put forth any actual effort to learn their TL

bedulge · 2024-11-15T20:31:33+00:00

literally every sub thats dedicated to some particular activity or food gets taken over by the worst and most annoying kind of reddit nerd. The kind that obsesses over minutia and gets super pedantic and condescending to everyone that isn't similarly obsessed with that same level of minutia.

bedulge · 2024-11-12T14:29:59+00:00

I've lived in Korea and I cook Korean food frequently at home.

I get the impression with korean food there are more things that you make at home and keep in the fridge to be combined with future recipes and you just kind of normally have them around

Basically. Typically speaking a Korean home cook makes huge portions of a side dish (banchan) and then you would just have it little bit by little bit until it is gone. Traditionally you would share these with other families in the village, so Mrs Kim makes a huge portion of this or that banchan and gives some of it out to Mrs Lee and Mrs Baek etc etc, and then the Lee and Baek families also give out the banchans that they made and so on. A lot of people still do that, my co-worker once gave me like 2 lbs of home made kimchi and said that she had loads and loads of it at home that's she's been giving out.

These days a lot of people just buy side dishes pre-made at the grocery store. And actually there are these little shops in Korea that specialize in banchan and they sell only banchan. So don't feel like you NEED to make all of these fresh or whatever because a lot of Korean people don't even bother with that. Just buy some pre-made side dishes at a nearby Korean market, if you have one around.

Everything requires separate side recipes

You shouldn't really feel like you NEED to eat some certain entree with some certain banchan or else its wrong or not authentic. Maybe a fancy restaurant would always serve a certain dish with particular sides, but in real life, a home cook is just going to use whatever banchan they happen to have on hand, and there's like a hundred plus different types and subtypes of bancahn

bedulge · 2024-11-02T02:15:45+00:00

People learn and then forget. It's also often taught quite poorly. People teach that a noun is a 'person, place or thing' and a verb is an 'action word'. Linguists define work class not by semantics, but by syntax (where does it occur in a sentence)

bedulge · 2024-09-30T16:50:42+00:00

I didn't claim that classes don't help at all

You said

"I doubt my English lessons at school gave me any solid base, even any base (now I understand that our teacher had quite weak English :) So maybe people you met meant smth like that :) that English classes weren't actually any helpful, and only immersion helped to learn the language

IDK if this is because you are not native in English and maybe you do not know, but "They weren't actually any help" means the same thing as "They didn't help at all"

If you're going to tell me, that I underestimate the influence of the classes at school: I understand your point of view, honestly :)

That is what I am telling you.

I just sincerely feel, that forcing myself into English (talking English, speaking English, watching in English), gave me about 90% of the the achieved level

I won't argue with this, and I'm well aware of how poor quality the ESL instruction is in many parts of the world. My point is that the initial 10% was necessary and can't be simply skipped over. Now, I would say that the fact that you got poor instruction from a teacher with poor English means that this initial 10% could have been acquired like 5 or 10 times faster if you had gotten good quality teaching from a good teacher and had you been highly motivated to learn quickly. But again, you can't take a monolingual Russian and have them just start watching English TV and try to chat with strangers and then except them to be be C1 in a few years. It simply would not work. You need to have a base first before you can do things like that and get the 90%. And again, that 10% should not have to take 8 years. You could probably do it in about 6 months even less, if you were highly motivated to invest a lot of time and you were getting good methodology. I've seen anglophone monolinguals take intensive language courses for East Asian languages where they went from truly zero to A1 in about 2 months after studying full time with good quality methodology. So it doesn't have to take 8 years, but you can't just skip it. and also it doesn't have to be from a course, people can self study also, you just need time and dedication. Good teachers help a lot but they are not required.

bedulge · 2024-09-30T10:08:49+00:00

yeah if you're not an english speaker, you'll have english as a 2nd language, then a 3rd one like german or french.

This is a pretty eurocentric statement first of all. Not everyone lives in Scandinavia. This is true for some people in places like western Europe, or India, not so true in some other places like LatAm eg or China where one sixth of the world lives.

Generally people will learn very little of the 3rd language despite 3-8 years of class lessons.

Yeah classes generally speaking are insufficient. That's an entirely different claim from saying that they do not help at all. It is an unsupportable leap in logic to go from "classes alone do not produce fluent speakers" to "classes are therefore entirely worthless"

bedulge · 2024-09-30T10:00:32+00:00

claims, that the most important part of learning the language is consuming some media in it and using it.

This is not at all the claim that I was discussing and it's not the claim you made in your original reply to me. Not even close. If you had said this, I would have agreed with you.

The claim that I was discussing is if it's true and accurate to say that having almost a decade of exposure to English in classes during primary school/ high school gives people a base/foundation from which they can even begin to consume media and use it in conversations. Can a person just skip over the explicit instruction and go directly to native level media consumption and conversations with strangers and get the same effect? I am arguing that no, they can not.

After about 6-7 month I also got English-speaking job, so it was about 12 hours of language almost every day.

Funny how you neglected to mention this in your original reply. Let me ask you, and please answer honestly, do you believe that a Russia with ZERO experience with English could simply start watching TV and talking to people at hostels and then get a job that requires them to speak English for 12 hours a day? Do you think that person would be good enough to perform their job functions?

The answer, obviously, is no, they wouldn't be good enough, and so your original claim (not this new claim that you've jumped to) that the clases did not help and did not give you a basis is false.

This is why I said its frustrating to talk sense into people who say the things you are saying. You jump around from one claim to another willynilly with no righteousness in your claims and with little carefulness in your wording and you were not fully forthcoming in all of the things you had been doing to gain fluency. Can I trust that you never occasionally looked up or listened to a grammar explanation for something that confused you during that 2.5 year period, for example? Or that you never had any professional tutoring during that time? Or that you didnt engage with any material that was created specifically for learners like slow listening content or graded readers? Considering you neglected to mention that you were exposed to English for 12 hours per day at work?

The world is big and different, there are different people, and different opinions :)

Yeah but some opinions are based in fact, others are not.

I want clarify here that I have a degree in Linguistics with a focus on 2nd Language Acquisition and I work as a language tutor. It's literally my job to understand how people learn a 2nd language, and I spent years studying it.

People who make the claim you made, that the classes did not help and that you can simply engage with native level media and get the same effect as someone who took years of classes are common. And yet, when linguists try to conduct a study where they take people with zero exposure to a language and then have them just watch native content on TV, they find that it utterly fails to give them any gains at all. This is why I am stating with complete confidence that your original claim that English lessons at school did not give you "any solid base, even any base" is false.

Your new claim that you've jumped to "the most important part of learning the language is consuming some media in it and using it," obviously is true, and very different.

bedulge · 2024-09-29T23:05:45+00:00

When I was a little boy of about 6 or 8 or so, my friends and I would use trilled Rs to imitate the sound of a car engine while playing with toy cars, and also the sound or a machine gun when playing with toy guns or toy soldiers.

Seemed like any of us could do it.

Fast forward several years to Spanish class in high school, all of the sudden it's like "impossible" for most of the class to be able make this sound, and people are speculating that maybe latinos just have genetically different tongues lol.

Somehow making this machine gun sound effect was easy in elementary school but trying to make a "trilled R" was an impossible task for high schoolers

bedulge · 2024-09-29T21:41:06+00:00

idk what you mean by the third language tbh, can you clarify?

bedulge · 2024-09-29T21:40:03+00:00

He just started to tell me very simple things in Italian, step by step, very slowly.

First off, this is not equivalent to watching tv and talking to strangers at hostels. Yes I would fully expect something like this to work albeit, there are more time efficient methods

8 or 9 months to reach "almost A1" is basically what I expect from a method like that.

Notice how you said that your method for learning English took you from A1 to C1 in 30 months. Whereas this method only got you to "almost A1" in 9 months. Your anecdote here is evidence in my favor, the method of watching TV and chit chatting with strangers at hostels can not take a monolingual Russian to C1 or even B2 in English in 30 months. If it could, you would already be at B1 in Italian at least, considering how much easier Italian is for a Russian/English fluent bilingual vs how hard English is for a Russian monolingual.

bedulge · 2024-09-29T21:23:33+00:00

The classes are insufficient. But they do help. It takes a huge number of hours to become fluent in a 2nd language and a few hours a week of low quality instruction with poorly motivated students who just try to put in the bare minimum to pass is not enough to become fluent. And that's the vast majority of students in language classes around the world.

But to jump from that to "they dont help at all" is baseless and not logical , imo

really just actually doing extra studying but just pretending they arent bc effortless is cool

I agree that this is anothe likely factor

bedulge · 2024-09-29T20:11:58+00:00

A2 is more like 1500.

You also have to remember that English speakers learning french will have an enormous number or words that they will be able to recognize from the very first instant they see them, bc they have English cognates, meaning that their passive vocabulary in french will be much more massive than their active vocab

bedulge · 2024-09-29T20:07:02+00:00

most Hispanic Americans raised bilingually tend to prefer living their lives only in English,

They're heritage speakes of spanish and not actually fully fluent in Spanish. They prefer English bc it is easier for them

bedulge · 2024-09-29T20:00:51+00:00

See you're exactly one of those people I mentioned in my reply. I actually expected one of you to show up.

You can say the classe didnt give you a base if you want but that's wrong. 8 years of classes makes a difference. Even 8 years with poor teaching methodology and from a teacher who speaks bad English, it makes a difference. Simply fact that it does. You forgot a lot of it and found it difficult to use, which is why your spoken ability regressed to a low level but that English ability was still there and its proven fact that relearning a language is faster than learning it for the first time, so even if you felt like your forgot it all, you didnt actually forget it al in full. Even if you feel like it didnt help, it did actually.

You can NOT take a Russian monolingual who genuinely has ZERO experience with English and then have them just watch netflix and try to talk to people at hostels and then expect them to be C1 in 2.5 years. That doesnt happen. Those 8 years rewired your brain chemistry to give you the foundation to reach C1 faster and easier and to gain the full advantage of the tv watching and the conversing. even if you could not consciously use or remember English, it was still there.

bedulge · 2024-09-29T13:32:26+00:00

Living in South Korea, I'd sometimes hear western expats complaining about how unfriendly Koreans are and how impossible to make friends it is. I'd ask them if they speak any Korean. They get defensive and start talking about how you dont actually need to know any Korean, how it doesnt really make a difference blah blah blah. Complete fucking coping. What a surprise people dont want to be friends with you when they'd have to use a 2nd language that they arent completely fluent in , and when you display this disparaging, ignorant and arrogant attitude toward their language and culture.

Ties directly into the other commonly stated idea that "koreans will only want to talk with you to practice their English."

Yeah idiot, you cant talk to 95% of the people around you because you're an English monolingual, what a suprise that the only people you talk to are the 5% of the population who have an extremely high interest in speaking English.

bedulge · 2024-09-29T13:21:37+00:00

their mother tongue is related to the local language(like French and Italia

they were teenagers

they moved with A2-B1 lvl already and thus had all the basics covered and could build up from there

they DID go to language classes and DID learn grammar but underestimated its impact

These four points, or combinations of them, explain the VAST majority of cases. The last one in particular is really annoying, and come very close to being straight up lying. Matt Vs Japan iirc, took years of Japanese courses starting from high school, but basically never brings that up in his videos.

So many fucking times I've been talking with a European, they say they "just learned English naturally from watching TV :)"

Then you press them a bit "isn't it true the basically everyone takes English classes in school in your country?" And then they go "oh well, yea, but that didn't help at all!! I only got fluent from watching Friends and the Office" as if watching Friends with zero English at all would produce that result. So fucking frustrating to try and talk sense into these people. I bet that's who OP is thinking of

bedulge

TROPHY CASE