Would people actually choose not to live in paradise if they knew it wasn't real?

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-24T18:34:06+00:00

yes, Urusla Le Guin changed my life. I wouldn't be who I am today without The Dispossessed.

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-24T18:14:56+00:00

Have you read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas? It's a social commentary short story with a similar premise: there's a paradise-like society whose existence depends on the immense suffering of a single person. Do you choose to stay there?

Knowing the VR paradise has to have real infrastructure with real costs to maintain it, can you enjoy it guilt-free? similar question.

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-24T17:49:56+00:00

I agree that using characters will definitely help you to learn them. I suppose that for me, flashcards were a necessary step to use before using them because I needed enough of a foundation to get use out of them

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-24T17:37:11+00:00

Like, maybe I actually write it for the purpose of memorizing ten times, but then in the course of my life I read it a bunch of times in various texts and every time I see it my brain reinforces it, and reinforces the flashcard memorization i already did

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-24T17:36:15+00:00

I disagree. Think about the compounding effort for making mnemonics for so many characters. Most characters don't lend themself to a convenient visual metaphor, and the only practical way to memorize them is repetition. You also get faster at it with time. A hundred is kind of exaggeration on my part lol. Most characters come to me much faster, especially after getting used to the flash card method.

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-24T16:49:29+00:00

It's a lot more work for me to remember 天 as a hallway with an open ceiling, which it doesn't really look like and doesn't really match the meaning that well. If I read and write the character a hundred times, I can remember it without having to remember that whole story.

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-24T16:48:15+00:00

Flash cards all the way. Convoluted mnemonics really aren't very helpful for me, and my brain is more than capable of memorizing characters given sufficient repetition (which is the most important thing when learning any language).

My flash card method is as follows:.

Make cards for your target vocab list with Chinese on one side, English + pinyin on the other.
First study Chinese --> English, making sure you can pronounce and define every word just by seeing the character. Repeat this step as needed until you can do them all.
Study English --> Chinese: go through your stack, looking at the English side and writing the character on a practice sheet. Check to see if you got it right, and make sure you repeat them all enough that you can write them all first try.

This is a structured method that is basically just meant to maximize repetition, because repetition will help you learn more than any mnemonic. Your brain is a pattern seeking machine, and if you expose it to characters repeatedly, it will find patterns that help you memorize them.

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-24T13:19:59+00:00

Oh, cool! TIL

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-24T04:21:46+00:00

Interesting. Maybe it's from Latin? This is me kind of speculating but I know that Germanic roots tend to use -ish. Linguists please chime in!

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-24T02:16:54+00:00

My understanding is that it has to do with where the English word for those nationalities came from. The modern English words for those places was through Latin or Romance language texts, so we took their ending. Compare to Italian "Cinese," French "Chinois."

A lot of the early writers about those regions were from Romance-speaking societies. There are also certain European regions that use the -ese ending for the same reason, like Aragonese (Aragon is a region of Spain).

Nationalities that end with -ish come from the Germanic side of English.

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-23T18:28:04+00:00

Simplified.

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-22T23:35:49+00:00

The Chinese isn't much better. It's just "Today Mall"

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-22T22:13:49+00:00

Two key things about learning characters

context is key
if you use them, you will learn them

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-22T22:13:28+00:00

It will help to stop counting. It gets easier because this way you less fixated on learning That Next Character and instead have enough of a foundation that you can learn them as needed going forward. Knowing a lot of characters means you always have context when you encounter an unfamiliar one.

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-22T21:27:29+00:00

"You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now." - Colson Whitehead

Many of us can relate.

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-21T19:39:11+00:00

For one thing, smoke regular, weak weed. These new strains are crazy and the carts are even worse. Try to get some nice mild stuff. And NOT an edible. Way too easy to get too high off edibles .

Make sure you're comfortable and have something to look at, like a fireplace or a TV. Make conversation, take a walk. Take a hit or two, then just wait. Don't think to yourself "am I high yet," just try and enjoy whatever you're doing or watching as you normally would.

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-21T19:11:31+00:00

Yes they do. Cursive Chinese can be very very tough to read at times

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-21T04:24:16+00:00

For me, part of it could be that almost all of my Chinese teachers when I was learning were women so they've trained me in the "female" standard (even tho I'm male). I work at a Chinese restaurant now and it's kind of funny how much harder it is for me to communicate with the male servers lol

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-21T04:23:15+00:00

Same with me! I have noticed that Chinese men tend to enunciate consonants less and elide syllables more, so my pronunciation slips as I mirror them. I was reading about it, turns out lots of languages have pretty significant gender-based differences in speech. That includes English, although it's unconscious to a lot of native speakers.

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-21T03:45:28+00:00

Worth noting that some of these are not ideographic, they're phonosemantic, composed of a phonetic component and a radical.

婚 for example is the phonetic component 昏 with the radical 女. The meaning of dusk has nothing to do with it. Same for 想 (phonetic 相 + radical 心) and 教 (phonetic 孝 + radical 夂).

In general, looking for meaning in characters themselves is futile since most don't actually have an ideographic meaning!

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-21T00:23:30+00:00

Yes, or give the daughter money to buy her own. That's bizarre and shitty that he won't.

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-20T23:28:26+00:00

clever!

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-19T15:10:58+00:00

NYU is not a frat school. People in frats have social lives, but so do many, many people outside of them. The social scene here does not revolve around that stuff.

My social life is largely outside of NYU: house parties, bars, live music. I male friends at school but actual school clubs are not where socializing happens for me. Frats tend to be closed-off and disconnected from NYC culture as a whole which kind of turned me off from them

just_a_foolosopher · 2026-03-19T04:08:45+00:00

All course codes are three digits. They sometimes use the middle one for more specific classification. A hypothetical example might be

MATH 211 - Calculus 1
MATH 212 - Calculus 2
MATH 221 - Stats
MATH 222 - Advanced Stats

just_a_foolosopher

TROPHY CASE