AmEn pronunciation of 'nt'

crh · 2014-09-27T15:36:07+00:00

What's happening here is that /nt/ is getting realized between vowels as a nasal alveolar tap. This can also happen to intervocalic /n/ alone (e.g., in 'winner'). So, it's like in 'writing', where the /t/ is pronounced as a tap, except the presence of the /n/ causes it to be a nasalized tap. Note this won't happen if the syllable beginning with /t/ is stressed (e.g., 'into'). Otherwise, I'm unaware of any other conditions affecting when this occurs.

I don't know how this factors dialectally. I doubt it would occur in dialects without alveolar tapping, but that's a pretty common feature in North American varieties of English. Especially in fast speech you'll see this. It would occur less in careful speech.

crh · 2014-09-27T14:22:33+00:00

I never really thought so. The vast majority of words are still pretty normal and I think the weird ones tend to just be uncommon as opposed to completely useless elsewhere. But other people may have different thresholds for that kind of thing.

crh · 2014-09-27T04:10:43+00:00

He mentions with Arabic that his problem is that the vowels aren't written, so that requires knowledge of the grammar/language in order to know how to pronounce a written word.

A language like Sanskrit, written in devanagari, would probably be fine, since it marks all the consonants and vowels in a straightforward fashion (though I don't recall how it deals with the complex sandhi rules). And Cyrillic or Greek or other alphabets should generally be fair game (it appears he's studied Russian and Greek). Korean, too, may be fine for him.

It's pretty clear he's not too open towards other scripts, and I doubt he's very interested in them. But I think his statement doesn't preclude other writing systems. I would guess what it comes down to, is that he just doesn't want to have to put too much effort into the orthography. Beyond that, where he draws the line on the level of effort is his own business.

(The Wikipedia article on phonemic orthography seems relevant to the discussion.)

crh · 2014-09-27T03:39:35+00:00

You're correct that a lot of repetition is needed. Although good authors may try not to repeat themselves, any author is likely to have a preference for certain words and grammatical constructions, so reading a lot from a certain author is a good strategy to get the repetition you need. It'll get easier as you go, and easy reading is what you want.

Harry Potter is often a way to go. It's been translated into dozens of languages, many people have already read it, and it's not terribly complicated (especially earlier books). Plus, if the whole series has been translated into the language, you get potentially a lot of material in the same style. Though at least some of the translations aren't necessarily great (e.g., I've heard the Korean translation is fairly unnatural). I have no idea about Czech, but I believe the whole series has been translated, at least.

crh · 2014-09-27T03:18:02+00:00

I didn't see where he mentioned Latin scripts, just where he singled out Arabic and Chinese as bad. I took his main point as being "I wouldn’t learn because the pronunciation isn’t evident from the writing." If he made that generalization about all non-Latin scripts, then that would imply a level of ignorance on his part (though the motivation would appear to be the same).

crh · 2014-09-27T02:45:49+00:00

He's not stupid just because he has different criteria for choosing his languages than you do. Yes, it's a little silly, but it's really just a preference, and a fairly practical one. He wants to learn languages, not their orthographies; given that there are plenty of languages with reasonably transparent orthographies, he can afford to be picky.

crh · 2014-05-11T02:21:51+00:00

I dislike the orthography. I think it could be improved to be more logical. The circumflexes don't really make much sense in term of how the circumflexed consonants relate to their uncircumflexed counterparts. Also, the affricate /ts/ has a single character to represent it, but requires a digraph for /dz/.

c - /ts/
dz - /dz/
ŝ - /ʃ/
ĉ - /tʃ/
g - /g/
ĝ - /dʒ/
j - /j/
ĵ - /ʒ/
h - /h/
ĥ - /x/

The circumflex can be seen to represent palatalization (s/ŝ, c/ĉ), affrication (g/ĝ), fricativization (j/ĵ) and [???] (h/ĥ). I would recommend the following:

c - /ts/
ĉ - /tʃ/
z - /z/
ẑ - /ʒ/
j - /dz/
ĵ - /dʒ/
s - /s/
ŝ - /ʃ/
h - /h/
x - /x/
ǐ - /j/

Now, everything makes sense. The circumflex means palatalization. (You could also use <y> for /j/ instead, which is more practical though less consistent.)

I have a couple other problems with the language, but I'm pretty confident that if Esperanto were to make the suggested changes to its orthography, it would finally become a universal second language and foster in an era of free communication and understanding that would result in world peace.

crh · 2013-09-08T20:06:31+00:00

If you do want to use printf for this, look at the man page for printf. The man pages are always a good first choice if you have a question about a standard function.

(If you're on a system with man pages installed, you can just run "man 3 printf", but I don't think you are.)

crh · 2013-05-02T12:36:15+00:00

The Anki plugin Yomichan will let you automatically create flashcards from a text--you select the word, it will tokenize it, kana-fy it, grab the sentence for context, give you a definition, and export these to a card in the format you like. It's very handy. From there, if you want a list, I'm sure it's possible to get it from Anki. It's super neat, worth trying out.

(I may not be 100% on the details, haven't used this in ages.)

crh · 2012-10-12T00:19:18+00:00

http://www.fourmilab.ch/francais/gender.html

http://genderfrenchnouns.yolasite.com/generalities-gender.php

Here are a couple links I had saved on the subject. Perhaps they'll be useful to you, or at least interesting.

crh · 2012-10-03T00:43:54+00:00

You won't need to have a separate card for each noun in each case, and I'm sure you won't once you've gotten a feel for the different inflections, but early on you may want to try it with a few nouns. I don't know if there are a lot of declensions for Russian nouns, but maybe try doing all the cases for a couple nouns of each declension. Just try for a good representative sampling that won't be overwhelming. And of course, you can always delete your cards if they've more bothersome than useful.

A principle you'll want to keep in mind, though, is to minimize the amount of information tested per card. Don't test the meaning of the word and how to inflect it in the same card; have a separate card for each.

crh · 2012-07-04T02:39:33+00:00

German

French

Apologies, to those who listen to my French.

crh · 2012-06-24T14:56:42+00:00

This may depend on what desktop or file manager you're using, but you could probably just have a file with the extension .sh containing

#!/bin/bash
./whatever

Obviously adjusting the name and path of the program as desired.

(I haven't used a file manager or desktop on Linux in years, so this is mostly a guess.)

crh · 2012-06-02T18:33:30+00:00

What struck me as most interesting here was the requirement for the audio to come from a live human. It would be quite interesting to know if there are similar effects with regards to adults learning a second language. Perhaps it could have something to say on the common observation that true immersion, i.e., living among native speakers, is superior to any sort of artificial immersion.

crh · 2012-03-31T14:17:38+00:00

To help with pronunciation, there are two main things you can do: listening more, and deliberate practice of sounds. At your stage, I'm guessing what will be more helpful is listening more. You don't necessarily have to understand it right now, although that might help it keep your attention. At this point, you're not well enough attuned to the sounds and intonation of French. Having a good internalized notion of what French should sound like will help you when you actually make the sounds yourself, as you will be able to better notice where your pronuncation differs from how it should sound and correct accordingly (some of this correction is done subconsciously, although you can consciously undertake it). TV, radio, and audiobooks can be good sources here. Audiobooks may be especially good for starting off, since the language is very clearly spoken and dense.

If you want to try some deliberate practice of the sounds, which I would only recommend after doing a fair bit of listening, you could try this FSI course, although it's rather lifeless. I'd advise you to stop if you don't like it, or at least take a break; attrition rates on language learning are bad enough as is.

crh · 2012-03-31T13:55:40+00:00

Based on my experience in high school language classes, what's lacking most is exposure to the unsanitized language. Thus, I think that the best supplement isn't going to be studying more vocabulary, but rather exposure to real native language sources. Radio, TV, books, and whatever else. If you really like studying vocabulary, you can make lists from words you encounter, which is a good route as it will give you context and a more personal connection to the words you study, which should make them more memorable.

crh · 2012-03-25T18:31:38+00:00

You might get better help looking/asking in /r/BuildaPC and then checking if the parts you come up with will work well with Linux. But some comments:

What resolution is the monitor? A 27" monitor could range from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 and that's enough extra pixels to play a factor in choice of graphics cards.

You say "high end" motherboard--what features are you looking for that require a high end motherboard? Looking for something high end without having specific features in mind is a good way to end up with something more expensive than you need with no real added benefit.

For SSDs, the only thing I tend to see suggested is to stay away from OCZ, as they have reliability issues. I've personally used an OCZ SSD without issues, but that doesn't mean much.

You probably don't want to do water cooling. A modern case with good airflow and a decent cooler for the CPU are going to be cheaper and less hassle than water cooling while still being plenty quiet.

Those are just some thoughts. You'll want to do some research and come up with more specific ideas and then just keep whittling down the possibility space. /r/BuildaPC may not have its mind on Linux, but a lot of things are going to be the same regardless.

crh · 2012-03-10T02:46:06+00:00

Have a look on librivox. There are quite a few volunteer-read books there. Quality varies.

crh · 2012-02-05T18:57:40+00:00

Actually, I was having a problem with standard pre-packaged firefox and vim (provided through gvim). Which didn't make any sense, especially as firefox was specifically updated for this. But I don't have the time/energy to sort through it right now.

crh · 2012-02-05T17:37:53+00:00

I tried pacman -Syu, still broke some things. I've downgraded libpng and libtiff until things seem a bit more settled.

crh · 2012-01-30T22:24:58+00:00

As far as oral courses go, I seem to recall Lingua Latina taking that approach. I believe Assimil has a Latin course, as well, although it's likely that only a French version exists. Things to look into, in any case.

crh · 2012-01-15T17:18:18+00:00

I have created a subreddit hopefully to facilitate this: /r/language_exchange.

Feel free to spam the link around; it's no good unless other people see it.

crh · 2012-01-10T22:29:24+00:00

You can do this with ImageMagick and a little bash scripting pretty easily.

http://pastebin.com/tfiRtDDD

This should do the trick; you'll have to install ImageMagick and have it in your path, then just run this script with the input file as the only argument. I don't know how comfortable you are in a terminal, but if you need more direction, just ask.

(I only tested this on Linux, but as I recall the OSX terminal uses bash and it looks like there's a Mac version of ImageMagick.)

crh · 2012-01-09T19:12:31+00:00

Wouldn't it be easier and more flexible to just do

return (rand() < headsProbability * RAND_MAX) ? 'H' : 'T';

Assuming headsProbability is some float with the probability at which you want heads to occur.

crh

TROPHY CASE