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Makes me want to see what English lessons are like from the perspective of ESL students, especially with all the ridiculous rules and exceptions.
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Nov 1, 2017 14:50
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Inescapable Duck posted:Makes me want to see what English lessons are like from the perspective of ESL students, especially with all the ridiculous rules and exceptions. It could be worse. Alphabets are easier to learn than other options, genders aren't really important, and it's not a tonal language.
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Nov 1, 2017 15:02
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Doctor Spaceman posted:It could be worse. Alphabets are easier to learn than other options, genders aren't really important, and it's not a tonal language. I dunno about alphabets being easier to learn. At least with a syllabery you've got a 1:1 correspondence between symbol and sound. With an alphabet based language (English especially) it's a total crapshoot.
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Nov 1, 2017 16:26
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The_White_Crane posted:I dunno about alphabets being easier to learn. Hiragana is still a total bitch. There's 46 symbols, and many of them look similar to each other (sometimes completely identical except for one or two short lines floating in the corner) but have no relation whatsoever in sound.
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Nov 1, 2017 16:47
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chitoryu12 posted:Hiragana is still a total bitch. There's 46 symbols, and many of them look similar to each other (sometimes completely identical except for one or two short lines floating in the corner) but have no relation whatsoever in sound. Well yes, but at least ね is always "ne" and れ is always "re". You never get anything like "rough" and "through", for example.
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Nov 1, 2017 16:54
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The fun part is the rules that most English speakers don't even consciously know, like adjective order.
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Nov 1, 2017 17:24
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My folks taught ESL for a few years and they basically said you can either teach lots of specific rules like adjective order and specific pronunciation quirks and things that arent real like not ending sentences with prepositions or you can help the students learn English thats obviously second language but functional enough to be understood and accept that with exposure theyll learn the nuances. “I goed to job” and able to respond to questions is a million times better than “I went to work” and being completely stumped at the follow up.
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Nov 1, 2017 17:49
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In my experience, basic English is super easy to pick up; then since English media is super accessible it's easy to pick up the nuances and hosed up rules. Then you should date a native speaker for a while to work on your pronunciations. I'm fluent in two languages and I've tried to learn four others at varying points; English is by far the easiest. gently caress tonal languages.
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Nov 1, 2017 18:42
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FrozenVent posted:We spent way too many English classes reading out loud from a novel, switching readers every page. What a waste of teaching hours that was. I don't think I'll ever be able to enjoy To Kill a Mocking Bird. This, a thousand times this. We were in a split honors/normal English class, and popcorn reading drove me up the wall. It would start alright, until it hit some of the trainwrecks who could barely read, much less read aloud. It would sap any enthusiasm for the reading, and if you were remotely decent at reading you could finish a chapter by the time the class read a page.
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Nov 1, 2017 18:50
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FrozenVent posted:In my experience, basic English is super easy to pick up; then since English media is super accessible it's easy to pick up the nuances and hosed up rules.
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Nov 1, 2017 18:50
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chitoryu12 posted:My French classes in high school had a native French speaker in them! He was born and raised for a good chunk of his life in France and still had a French accent, and he could speak conversational French around the house perfectly. He was basically learning the language theory at that point. Spanish classes always had a couple of native Spanish speakers because of a fair number of Mexican immigrants/first generation kids who were looking for an easy A. They'd do poorly in the classes with white teachers who learned proper Castilian Spanish, but the South American teachers just passed them through if they just spoke and wrote in Spanish all semester.
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Nov 1, 2017 21:05
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Too late for the thread title, but just in time for the movie. https://thewaether.itch.io/ready-player-gently caress quote:NOW PLAYING: Experience KATE BARRETT'S Holy Grail of Pop Culture GOTY
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Nov 2, 2017 02:05
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ryonguy posted:Too late for the thread title, but just in time for the movie. At first I thought "They already made the porn parody?" Cornwind Evil has a new favorite as of 04:45 on Nov 2, 2017 |
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Nov 2, 2017 04:42
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Knoxville Touchdown, ha.
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Nov 2, 2017 05:58
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Sham bam bamina! posted:This is the part where I smugly explain that you're a big dumb baby because um actually characters don't have to be perfect and furthermore Counterpoint to your sarcasm: People who proclaim that a book was objectively bad because it had characters who act in a negative fashion are super lovely to deal with, and they're popping up more and more. Please don't be one of them.
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Nov 2, 2017 06:57
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(to explain the joke; the name is a clear reference to the protagonist of No More Heroes, who is named Travis Touchdown and designed visually after Johnny Knoxville, and based on the Japanese view of foul-mouthed, perverted, chan posting nerds who spend all their money on nerd poo poo and are terrible around women)
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Nov 2, 2017 07:00
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John Lee posted:Counterpoint to your sarcasm: People who proclaim that a book was objectively bad because it had characters who act in a negative fashion are super lovely to deal with, and they're popping up more and more. Please don't be one of them. On the other hand (of like four at this point), I've never read Wuthering Heights, and despite my glibness earlier, I have no opinion on whether or not Midnight Voyager's hatred is warranted.
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Nov 2, 2017 07:23
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I think we can have a distinction between 'These characters are horrible people who do bad things' and 'These characters are unpleasant to read about'. A Confederacy of Dunces comes to mind where a horrible person can be lots of fun to read about.
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Nov 2, 2017 07:35
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FMguru posted:Everything I've heard about English is that it's really easy to grasp the basics of (because you don't have to memorize six different kinds of case declensions for every verb, or track the genders of nouns, or tones, or any of that jazz) but it's hard to get real good at without lots and lots of practice because the lack of rules means a thousand and one special cases (for spelling, for pronunciation, for pluralization, etc) and because being composed of like five other languages smashed together means an enormous vocabulary full of words that mean almost but not quite the same thing. I got good at English by not giving a poo poo about the rules and just saying what felt like it sounded right as opposed to trying to figure out if what I was saying was grammatically correct, and it has served me pretty well so far. That same basic framework has helped me with other languages but I feel like compared to English, you need a slightly larger knowledge base to start with before you can do that. I'm also an odd case because I've basically known English almost as long as I've known Spanish but I just didn't like speaking english because it didnt come as naturally to me as Spanish did so I still sounded like I barely knew English because I constantly either used weird tenses or just flat out slipped into Spanish despite the fact I was actually fluent. I'm also biased because compared to Chinese and Japanese, learning to write English is easy mode. I still am terrible at writing Chinese and I've been studying it for years, i just use my phone and hope no one ever asks me to hand write anything. Bringing it back to bad books, any book by Niall Ferguson. It's amazing because he writes entire books where basically everything he asserts is wrong, and he wastes time with counterfactuals of WHAT TOTALLY COULD HAPPEN GUYS, TRUST ME, where things like Britain staying out of WWI results in a peaceful Europe where the British Empire and Imperial Germany form a proto-EU in 1915 and there is no communism or fascism everywhere and isnt it all just loving great? But at the same time he ignore actual historical facts because they are inconvenient to his thesis of how great the British Empire is or whatever trash he's trying to push out this week. He isnt the worst historian I've read by a long shot but he is taken as the gospel by too many people because he is very easy to read compared to the much drier than most actual history books.
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Nov 2, 2017 08:46
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Inescapable Duck posted:I think we can have a distinction between 'These characters are horrible people who do bad things' and 'These characters are unpleasant to read about'. A Confederacy of Dunces comes to mind where a horrible person can be lots of fun to read about. Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 09:08 on Nov 2, 2017 |
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Nov 2, 2017 08:55
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Don Gato posted:i just use my phone and hope no one ever asks me to hand write anything.
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Nov 2, 2017 09:40
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Inescapable Duck posted:I think we can have a distinction between 'These characters are horrible people who do bad things' and 'These characters are unpleasant to read about'. A Confederacy of Dunces comes to mind where a horrible person can be lots of fun to read about. Actually, 'The Great Gatsby' Is Trash quote:Carraway is a young, well-to-do white guy who takes it upon himself to affectively mansplain his basic life plan to the reader, like some scotch-breathing friend of a friend at a dinner party you should have skipped. We're supposed to be along for the ride with this guy, or so it seems—he's neither so unlikeable as to have a temperature, nor likable enough we hope he turns out OK in the end. quote:Plot-wise, The Great Gatsby—like so much realist narrative fiction—is easily boiled down to a handful of bullshit tacked around some semblance of Character Motivations. Nothing substantial really happens—and not in a conceptually compelling kind of way, like Gaddis or DeLillo or Delany, or in a way that nonetheless brings the text alive with nuanced language, like Gass or Stein or Morrison. Basically, we just follow Nick around as he is witness to infidelity on the part of his cousin's husband, later to become drawn in as a sort of wingman for Gatsby to try to help him get in said cousin's pants. There's a bunch of parties where Nick is mostly a bystander, periodically interjecting whitewashed observation as people bicker over relationships and Gatsby blathers amidst his privilege about how he was in the war once. Eventually, there's a car crash and some murder, but even that seems only there to force the story to a head, to wield its point—which, I guess, is that life is short and no one's happy? Well, no poo poo. quote:Did I mention that several of these characters speak like white nationalists? "It's up to us, who are the dominant race," says Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband, "to watch out or these other races will have control of things." "We've got to beat them down," Daisy concurs, cementing such an outlook as part and parcel of the novel's emotional marrow. "We're all white here," Nick's date Jordan offers later, an attempt to calm down a fight between the men, as if that fact alone should end the struggle over who owns Daisy's heart.
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Nov 2, 2017 10:11
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FrozenVent posted:In my experience, basic English is super easy to pick up; then since English media is super accessible A quick reminder that literally Hundreds of millions of people in Europe alone never consume
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Nov 2, 2017 10:18
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I didn't think the characters were supposed to be particularly likeable or aspirational figures.  Further, I'm not really sure what to make of a complaint that racist characters use racist language, to be honest.
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Nov 2, 2017 10:46
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Wheat Loaf posted:I didn't think the characters were supposed to be particularly likeable or aspirational figures.
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Nov 2, 2017 11:02
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Jerry Cotton posted:A quick reminder that literally Hundreds of millions of people in Europe alone never consume I'm not sure what your point is? English language media is a lot more accessible to the average person than, say, movies in Gujarati or Pashto.
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Nov 2, 2017 12:12
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Sham bam bamina! posted:The whole thing's a lovely hot take from an idiot, which is why it was posted. It's come up before too. Is it meant to be a joke review?
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Nov 2, 2017 13:27
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Wheat Loaf posted:Is it meant to be a joke review? In that the author is a joke, sure.
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Nov 2, 2017 15:10
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John Lee posted:Counterpoint to your sarcasm: People who proclaim that a book was objectively bad because it had characters who act in a negative fashion are super lovely to deal with, and they're popping up more and more. Please don't be one of them. Inescapable Duck posted:I think we can have a distinction between 'These characters are horrible people who do bad things' and 'These characters are unpleasant to read about'. A Confederacy of Dunces comes to mind where a horrible person can be lots of fun to read about. Yeah, I felt like they were horrible people and I wasn't having any fun reading about their horribleness. Wuthering Heights is the kind of book where there's a background detail of a character hanging a basket of puppies. It's not relevant to the scene, it just seems to be there to remind you that there is no character that isn't horrible in some way. When Heathcliff was young, one of the characters accidentally dropped a baby down stairs. Heathcliff caught him by sheer reflex. He regretted it because he'd rather the baby have died as a result out of spite for the guy who dropped it. Catherine is so self-centered that it actually leads to her death when she pitches this increasingly elaborate series of fits that involve her starving herself and running out into the moors. Everyone's just so miserable and loathsome that I have no reason to want any of them to succeed. Everything is terrible, everyone is terrible. If anyone isn't terrible, they're made to suffer by the people who are both terrible and more successful at the things they do. It's a portrait of utter misery, and it's contagious. Everyone was miserable after reading that thing.
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Nov 4, 2017 19:56
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Midnight Voyager posted:Yeah, I felt like they were horrible people and I wasn't having any fun reading about their horribleness. Wuthering Heights is the kind of book where there's a background detail of a character hanging a basket of puppies. It's not relevant to the scene, it just seems to be there to remind you that there is no character that isn't horrible in some way. When Heathcliff was young, one of the characters accidentally dropped a baby down stairs. Heathcliff caught him by sheer reflex. He regretted it because he'd rather the baby have died as a result out of spite for the guy who dropped it. Catherine is so self-centered that it actually leads to her death when she pitches this increasingly elaborate series of fits that involve her starving herself and running out into the moors. Everyone's just so miserable and loathsome that I have no reason to want any of them to succeed. Everything is terrible, everyone is terrible. If anyone isn't terrible, they're made to suffer by the people who are both terrible and more successful at the things they do. Great literature means everyone is miserable while discussing important things with the most obscure symbolism possible, and if you don't get it or like it you're an uncultured swine with bad taste.
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Nov 4, 2017 20:22
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ryonguy posted:Great literature means everyone is miserable while discussing important things with the most obscure symbolism possible, and if you don't get it or like it you're an uncultured swine with bad taste. In Catch-22, everyone is miserable while discussing important things directly and honestly. Does this make it merely good literature?
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Nov 4, 2017 20:28
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I also misread hanging the basket of puppies, thinking it was hanging them up as decoration, which is another kind of silliness.ryonguy posted:Great literature means everyone is miserable while discussing important things with the most obscure symbolism possible, and if you don't get it or like it you're an uncultured swine with bad taste. You write what you know.
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Nov 5, 2017 03:52
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ryonguy posted:Great literature means everyone is miserable while discussing important things with the most obscure symbolism possible, and if you don't get it or like it you're an uncultured swine with bad taste. You want fries with that persecution complex?
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Nov 5, 2017 04:14
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i hate literature
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Nov 5, 2017 04:47
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The Vosgian Beast posted:You want fries with that persecution complex? 
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Nov 5, 2017 04:51
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I think my favorite part is "with the most obscure symbolism possible". Why can't this dildo be just a dildo, instead of, you know, standing in for a dick?
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Nov 5, 2017 05:14
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quote:everyone is miserable while discussing important things with the most obscure symbolism possible Twitter?
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Nov 5, 2017 06:16
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Assegai by Wilbur Smith. The perfect white protagonist, the black best friend who is also his sevant but they're totally equals and the protagonist of course becomes an honorary Maasai and the Maasai have exotic spirit visions about the protagonist and his love interest. The extremely cartoonish villain, a German baron who tries to fly a loving blimp from Germany to Africa. That's his master plan and the center of the plot. I was angry when I got to the end, and I hear Wilbur Smith's other novels are variations on the same crap.
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Nov 5, 2017 09:57
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Grevling posted:The extremely cartoonish villain, a German baron who tries to fly a loving blimp from Germany to Africa. That's his master plan and the center of the plot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_104_(L_59)
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Nov 5, 2017 10:20
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Cool, I didn't know about that. The book is still poo poo though.
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Nov 5, 2017 11:24
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