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H.H posted:I don't know Mandarin, but my friends who studied it say that the morphology is very simple. The difficult part is pronunciation and writing. Sorry to dig this up but I'm just catching up on the thread and can actually answer this. Grammatically Chinese is superficially similar to English (SVO), which means at basic levels putting a sentence together is pretty simple. But this also leads to native English speakers falling into the trap of thinking that something is correct when it is not. Where time and place go in a sentence is a classic example. The writing gets a bad rap. It really isn't that bad. When you think about it, most adults don't read English phonetically. You just recognize the first and last letters and a few in the middle and the word jumps out at you. That's basically how you read Chinese. The difference is that there are a few hundred rather than 26 "letters" and several of the arrangements look similar. This is a bad example but for instance 人 入 and 八 have nothing in common. A better example is 李 and 季 which are easy for learners to confuse. But there are mnemonic ways to learn the writing that avoid confusion. See the series for learning characters in Chinese or Japanese by Heisig. But the important thing to remember is that this writing system is designed around the idea that it doesn't matter what your spoken language is. I find once you can recognize the characters, reading Chinese is pretty straightforward. Once you have a broad character knowledge it's not that tough to get the gist of something. The next hurdle is recognizing compound words. For instance 馬 means horse and 桶 means bucket but 馬桶 means toilet. Most of these you just have to learn, though obviously context helps and some make sense. 電腦 or "electric brain" obviously means computer. The worst is when you see two or three characters in a row and you're trying to decide if you should read them independently or as one or more compounds only to realize the characters are being used for their phonetic values to represent a foreign word, like 威士忌, or might soldier envy, or wei shi ji, or "whiskey". Tones and pronunciation are the other sticking point. Chinese has a lot of sounds that English lacks, specifically in its range of consonants. This is where a lot of English speakers get hung up. They can't get their head around the difference between a j and a zh or a c and a z or worse an sh and an x. Tones are their own can of worms. I'm not even convinced that people coming from a different tonal language have any advantage in learning the tones of a new language. It might make it easier to pick out which tones are being used, but it isn't like high tone in Mandarin tells you anything about high tone in Thai. Fortunately Mandarin only has four tones and a neutral and how they interact can fit on an index card. For example a third tone before another third tone becomes a second tone and a third tone before a fourth tone is shortened. This all makes a lot of sense when you speak the language quickly. The tone modification rules are really just a codification of what your mouth does naturally. Still it's possible to make mistakes. I once said 我酒店看我們的朋友 when I had intended to say 我九點看我們的朋友. This is the difference between saying I saw our friend at nine o'clock and I saw our friend at the brothel. My confession is that I'm better at talking about Chinese than I am at speaking it. Edit: One last thing on morphology. Syllable construction rules are very strict and there just aren't very many sounds to begin with so yeah it's actually pretty easy to remember all possible syllables and how they're pronounced, which is a huge difference with English. Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Oct 23, 2016 |
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Oct 23, 2016 04:08
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 05:50 |
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There's still a lot of stigma around transgendered people and so I assume pansexual is shorthand for "I don't care what you were born with or what you have now, I'm only interested in you" whereas bi might signal a more straightforward interest in men or women.
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Dec 2, 2016 07:29
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It is incredibly rare for blood in the semen to be a symptom of prostate cancer. It's not impossible, but it's not typical.
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Dec 8, 2016 06:19
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Quote-Unquote posted:Wasn't that one of the things that led to that Silk Road guy getting busted (besides his my_crimes.txt)? iirc he tried to hire a couple of hitmen to kill someone, and of course both of the hitmen were actually just feds. Because literally all hitmen on the internet are actually feds. Yes and then one of the cops turned out to be crooked and was arrested shortly after the story broke.
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Dec 16, 2016 12:07
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There's a really simple way to test if you are the strongest man in the world and that's to sign up for a local MMA competition. But these guys of course never do it. They always have bullshit justifications like their skills can only be used for self-defense or that the rules in the competition make it too much like a game or a sport and so their opponent will be able to win through trickery rather than through strength or talent. This is of course complete nonsense, but it's what they tell themselves so they can go on believing that their pajama fighting masters are the real deal and they'll be just like them someday. Who knows if that particular confession is true or not but I know enough people like this in real life that it doesn't really matter. Many people actually have that opinion and I can't roll my eyes hard enough. And then I'm the rear end in a top hat for sucker punching them in a bar.
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Dec 25, 2016 11:19
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Just go teach English abroad. What could possibly go wrong?
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Jan 7, 2017 16:35
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The Asian bride confession follows the classic fake formula. It opens innocently enough with a plausible premise and then throws out a shocking off hand comment before gradually getting more and more absurd.
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Jan 28, 2017 18:25
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I have one solution for both the guy with no taste in film and the dude thinking about getting romantically involved with his therapist: Go watch "Antichrist" by Lars von Trier. Please report back.
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Jan 31, 2017 10:27
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BigBadSteve posted:About all the advice so far for kissy therapist goon assumes that she want a relationship with him. My advice was to watch a film where a therapist ejaculates blood after having his genitals mutilated by the patient he is romantically involved with, after which a fox tells him that Chaos Reigns.
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Jan 31, 2017 11:21
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If it is true then the pimp didn't want a dead John on his hands any more than the John wanted a dead pimp on his. But if the pimp had any sort of contact information on the guy, he'd probably put a hit out on him.
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Feb 6, 2017 06:27
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If you see loot crates you should quit.
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Feb 22, 2017 05:14
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:I trust Toys For rear end Burn on this one tbh A minor change.
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Mar 1, 2017 13:02
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Hey, maybe you did kill him. There's always the possibility of internal bleeding or a punctured lung!
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Mar 1, 2017 15:05
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My understanding of the current US legal system is that the technology works and is accepted, but a talented lawyer will find a technicality to call into question the procedure used to charge you. There's always going to be some missed signature or lost finger print or whatever and you can get a whole case thrown out from that. You'll end up paying way more than what the fine is just to keep your record clean which is sometimes worth it. As for the recent confessions which are all painfully fake, there already exist threads in CC to test plot ideas for holes, they're wrecking a regularly amusing thread so their editor doesn't call them out on switching monster genders halfway through a paragraph.
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Mar 9, 2017 19:12
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Also smart, creative people are frequently loving miserable because society sucks and doesn't inherently reward brains or talent. There's a reason why we have the expression "Ignorance is Bliss". Your kid could be fine, but he could also become overwhelmed by existential ennui and live a bitter, jaded life where his potential is stifled by a society that doesn't appreciate him or rejects him outright. So just be happy he's a happy kid because all of that could come crashing down at any moment.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:43
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Good to hear you got clean. But having worked in the English teaching field in Asia for awhile, the most unbelievable thing to me is that you found a country where there were both schools willing to fire you for suspected drug use and officials corrupt enough that you could get forged visa stamps.
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Mar 13, 2017 02:14
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poopnanners posted:How is this unbelievable? I should say that it's not impossible or that various circumstances couldn't conspire to create the scenario as described, but having seen serious sacks of poo poo at low points in their lives stumble from job to job, there seems to me that there's something missing between "got suspected of doing drugs so I got fired" and "I bribed a government official for a visa because of my overstay" and then to "I went home and got clean". First, I've literally employed people at schools who were drug users and showed up drunk or high as a kite and the schools either didn't notice or chose not to notice. You have to do something really flagrant to get called out on being drunk or high out here. It's going to depend on the country and prestige of the school of course, but I would say in general drug education focuses on "drugs are bad and will kill you" and not "these are the signs to look for". See Taiwan's recent "Ketamine one time, adult diapers for the rest of your life" campaign. I have my doubts that people at a school could see a gangrenous arm and recognize it for what it was and not assume that the eccentric foreigner just hadn't caught some funny disease because of his poor diet. Before you ask, yes when I noticed a teacher was behaving this way, I did send them home, but given that I was managing forty schools I couldn't be everywhere at the same time and while my lead teachers would sometimes report them, not once did a local school call me to complain. The only complaint I ever got was from an apartment complex when one of my teachers poo poo in front of the taxi stand when none of the drivers would go and get drugs for him. I should also note that sending them home didn't mean they were fired. It was usually easier for us to give a guy a warning or to switch what school he was placed at than to fire him because there just aren't enough teachers to fulfill contracts. And this is more or less common across the region. Second, when we talk about corruption, we're generally not talking about finding the one immigration officer willing to take a bribe. It typically runs much deeper than that. Depending on when and where this confession is set, different immigration offices or border crossings are or were known for being easier to get through or to get the stamps you need. Notoriously there was a bar in Bangkok at one point where you'd go in, sit at a table, and slide your passport and cash across to the "fixer" sitting there and then a week later you'd get your passport back with all the proper stamps in it, no questions asked. But this kind of cultural attitude towards bending rules doesn't stop at immigration. It runs through basically everything. So for a school to suddenly notice strange marks on his hand or arm, to connect it to what it meant, and then to go and fire him doesn't seem to fit to me. That isn't to say that it couldn't happen or that teachers never get fired, but in all honesty it would be more believable to me if it said, "Because of my drug habit, I was missing a lot of classes and the school reluctantly fired me after several warnings." Third, we have the "going to jail because of the visa problem" part of the confession. Again, this all depends on where the story is set, which was conspicuously absent given the anonymous nature of it, and precisely when. Regulations and enforcement of regulations wax and wane with regularity out here, but typically a visa overstay doesn't result in jail time. Best case scenario, you're fined for the overstay and deported at your own expense with a usually temporary return ban. It doesn't make sense to jail you because ultimately the country doesn't want you there and doesn't want to pay to keep you alive. Worst case scenario, you are placed in a detainment center with other illegals until such a time that you can pay your fine and buy a ticket out. So this guy may have been in that situation, but he says right away that his friend gave him the money for a ticket, so it's doubtful he wouldn't have been able to cover the cost of an overstay fine, which is itself probably not that much more expensive than the bribe he'd have had to have paid to get the falsified stamps. More circumstantially, most schools require you to wear long sleeves year round, so the chances of intravenous drug use being noticed is low. Lots of teachers wear bandages on their hands to hide tattoos, so if he was looking for veins there, it wouldn't have been out of the question for him to mask it and get away with it if that's what he really wanted to do. But I'm not a drug user and I don't think like one, so who knows what was going through the guy's head. In short, I think the confession is plausible and it's possible he cut out a lot of fat to get to the point and all of my admittedly minor nitpicks are addressed in some form or another. But in total they added up to me to look more like a creative writing project about the redemption of a drug user than an actual factual accounting of someone's low point, especially when the last part of the confession is about him getting a vague amazing job and hiding getting clean from opiods from his parents while visiting them.
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Mar 14, 2017 05:37
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A shorter way to put this: if it was the kind of country where drug use would have been noticed and he would have been fired immediately for it, the odds of him being able to bribe his way through a visa overstay are much lower.
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Mar 14, 2017 05:48
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8 Ball posted:Hasn't that podcast one been posted before only it was a youtube channel instead? I believe so yes.
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Mar 15, 2017 16:57
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quote:Junkie goon here. Country was Vietnam. School was a private English school for children, not a government school. Jail was speculation on my part and it's possible that wouldn't happen (either way it could've resulted in a big legal shitstorm and bring my parents/family into it). To be fair I never said it wasn't or couldn't be true, just that there were a lot of details inconsistent with my own first hand experiences. I wasn't looking at the severity of it, just things like visas and getting fired teaching English from a private school (even less likely in my experience, typically they just don't renew contracts) and and why you didn't just get another job since you basically can't walk down the street in SEA without getting offered one, sober or otherwise.
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Mar 17, 2017 05:43
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It almost reads like he intentionally made a strawman response to every one of his wife's complaint. quote:1) Our son needs a stable home. Incorrect - military families do fine and in fact many "military brats" have better childhoods than other kids. My wife can also home school our son and avoid many pratfalls of a public education. She didn't say other kids needed stable homes, she said yours did. Some kids do alright moving around a lot, other kids end up seriously messed up. It depends on the kid and I'm going to trust the mother's instinct. quote:2) We are putting our lives in danger. Incorrect - I have a gun and street smarts, and we will stay in many tourist friendly locations. We are also avoiding obviously dangerous countries like the Middle East and North Korea. You can't bring your gun with and your street smarts don't apply in every country. There are people who spend their whole lives conning and fleecing foreigners. You will not outsmart them every time. Danger is more than just geopolitics. You are going to be dealing with diseases, food bacteria, and poverty levels you are not used to. This is insane to subject a child to. quote:3) We are making a financial mistake. Incorrect - after selling the house and everything in it, plus the cars and adding our savings, we will have over 200,000 dollars. I plan to put that in the stock market and, after the adventure is over, retiring and setting our son up for college. This seems like an absurdly low amount of money to fall back on. Have you considered the cost of travel, housing, entry visas, medical insurance, daily spending money, and emergency savings to get three people back to your home? You're not going to be able to work legally and you're insane if you think you can just walk into a random country and start hunting their wildlife or build temporary housing. I don't even want to get into the logistics of trying to turn $200,000 into something meaningful in the time you're gone, being able to pay for a college tuition, buy a new home, and retire on it. quote:4) I am doing this for selfish reasons. Incorrect - I am inviting these 2 because they mean the world to me and I plan to share this experience with them. I could just as easily do it alone, actually it would be much easier alone because I'm not afraid of sleeping on the side of a mountain or eating an animal I hunt myself. But out of the kindness of my heart I am bringing my wife and son on this journey. This adventure isn't about your family or your child. It's about you and just inviting them along for the ride doesn't make it any less selfish. You're upending your whole life and the life of your wife and child because you are mentally ill.
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Mar 19, 2017 14:29
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HAT FETISH posted:lol nobody is picking up on the "my wife has it easy compared to me, all she has to do is look after the house and our kid and also be a grief counselor" thing I figured if we are supposed to take these in good faith then going after that part of the confession is just saying, "This is obviously fake."
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Mar 20, 2017 02:56
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I don't mind the heroin or drug addiction confessions. That's a real confession. I just don't have much to say about the use or dealing of drugs as that's outside my experience. Idiot drug addicts visa issues? Sure, I've run into that more than once, but I can't really give advice on getting clean or overcoming addiction.
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Mar 20, 2017 07:29
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SatansOnion posted:I absolutely can nazi it backfiring That party will be a gas.
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Apr 8, 2017 09:20
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Jose posted:He dick kick the poo poo out of Andy dick at a bar once This is what I came to post. For whatever reason, the image of Jay Sherman smashing Andy Dick's face into a bar while shouting, "IT STINKS!" again and again is truly endearing.
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Apr 9, 2017 13:38
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limp_cheese posted:It's also really hard to control chemical weapons. A change in the wind and suddenly you're gassing your own people or people you didn't mean to gas. It's effectiveness is dubious as well since if it's near your own troops they need to be wearing gear that makes it harder to fight. If you're using it on the enemy they just need to have the gear and your attack is completely ineffective. I agree with this except the context here is obviously specifically Syria. It's not like we (meaning western governments) gave a poo poo about these people before the chemical attack and given all the horrors of that conflict, some kind of horrific death was probably inevitable anyway. Blowing up an empty airfield hardly changes anything. Basically, it's complicated and while chemical weapons are morally worse, things aren't better after we "retaliated".
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Apr 11, 2017 01:36
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I believe a goon took me to Heart of Darkness when I was in PP awhile back, but it could have been one of any number of nightclubs. All I know is that he went to go buy a round of drinks and my brain decided it was time to find a quiet place to pass out. I spent the next hour taking tuktuks up and down the street my hotel was on unable to find it because little did I know they shut the front gate at night and you had to bang on it to wake up the dude sleeping in the lobby to get back in. Anyway, the nightclubs in PP probably have a lot of freelancers or girls who will ask for a "gift" if they go home with you but from what I can tell Heart of Darkness is hardly the kind of place where you'd instantly assume something shady was going on. There are way worse places in South East Asia than a popular Cambodian nightclub.
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Apr 16, 2017 16:16
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The Management posted:But heart of darkness takes place in Africa. Apocalypse now, which was based on it, is in Southeast Asia. And Phnom Penh is full of exactly the kind of people who would think this is really clever.
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Apr 16, 2017 16:52
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tesilential posted:Lol what? Seems like this was entirely his son's fault. A reasonable person wouldn't feel the need to review a file that they worked on just a few hours prior just in case it was tampered with. You're joking, right? But seriously, I love how all these fake confessions find clever ways to work in, "Well, because of Asperger's" somewhere towards the middle or end after giving a nearly credible opening.
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Apr 27, 2017 16:48
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yeah I eat rear end posted:It deserved a lecture on how important work stuff is, but that's all. Any responsible person goes over their presentation one last time before getting up and giving it. It's not to make sure it wasn't tampered with, it's to make sure there aren't any mistakes you can correct at the last minute that may have been missed before. It's also the year 2017. The text of a presentation is way, way less important than the pictures and graphs, etc. That you would do a dry run without those is totally baffling.
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Apr 27, 2017 17:07
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Panfilo posted:Nah, the kid should be punished, just not physically. tesilential posted:I glossed over the kid being 13, he should know better by now. Maybe the problem was not enough spankings when he was younger. Assuming we take this confession at face value, the kid literally suffers from a mental disability. Physical punishment is out of the question from the get-go because seriously what the gently caress is wrong with you and punishment probably isn't the best approach regardless. That doesn't mean that the situation shouldn't be addressed and proper behavior explained and modeled, but we're not dealing with a normal 13 year old. And if it were just a "typical" 13 year old, a far more important question is, "Why does the kid think this is appropriate behavior in the first place?" and that's way more important than making sure the kid knows he did something bad.
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Apr 27, 2017 17:20
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tesilential posted:One of my buddies had his kid diagnosed with Autism when he was like 3 months. Now I don't know if he has it or not but IMO maybe treating him like a weird outcast from the start is not the way to go. We actually can tell from pretty early on if someone is displaying autism-like symptoms, even from 3 months. That's partly why there was the unfortunate correlation with vaccines because those are starting around that time as well. But you're right in that we shouldn't officially label kids that early. Why? Because labeling in the United States is a legal status that literally stays with you for life. You have to go to court to get the label removed. That doesn't mean you shouldn't intervene as early as possible if you suspect your kid might be displaying early signs of autism or ADHD or whatever, but it means you should avoid being officially labeled in a legal sense because it's possible it is only a temporary condition and the child will become more "typical" as they get a bit older. Instead, it's recommended that you use the term "developmentally delayed" which isn't official and has no legal ramifications and you can stick to that for years before revising the diagnosis to something official when it's necessary (like when you're starting school and need special services for the child). It's just a catchall that you and your care provider can use to get the ball rolling on early intervention, but it won't shoehorn the child into special education before they can even walk.
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Apr 28, 2017 07:12
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therattle posted:A convenient belief that means you don't have to give anything. If only there was some way of ascertaining if a charity was legitimate before giving it money! Perhaps we could have some kind of centralized body that we all agreed to give portions of our income or wealth to on a, say, annual basis and they then used that money for the good of everyone, like some kind of "public" good. Like roads, or schools, or fire departments. Things like that. Then everyone could benefit and you wouldn't have to personally vet each individual organization you were thinking about giving money to and you wouldn't have to feel guilty for not giving away more than was required of you.
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Apr 29, 2017 15:08
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bradzilla posted:Government utilities and taxes aren't charity, my dude. It's semantics. The whole point of taxes is that we can pool funds to benefit the common good, be it through infrastructure development, public safety, or welfare systems. A charity that builds houses for the underprivileged is functionally no different than low income housing provided by the government through taxation (I mean yes obviously there are differences, but I'm talking ideologically and ideally).
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Apr 29, 2017 18:49
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You'd think dad would have just put the money in the cabin walls to begin with.
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May 17, 2017 03:42
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That one reads almost like the psycho goon who was in Thailand before getting fired for eating chalk in front of children who never left his hotel and thought the bar girl on the corner was into him.
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May 29, 2017 04:54
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What's with all these single virgins feeling like they would have to tell a hypothetical future girlfriend they hosed a prostitute? Use protection and you'll probably be fine and get tested before you engage in a sexual relationship with a new partner. If a future partner wants to know your sexual history aside from STI status (which is really all they have a right to know), just say you had a fling but never anything serious.
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Jun 2, 2017 03:11
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I have female friends who I drink with solo and who have even crashed at my place when my wife has been out of town and my wife was cool with it. If she thought I was going to gently caress every woman I know she wouldn't have married me. The other part is my wife has met my female friends and trusts those people even if she isn't exactly close to them. If I ever made friends with a woman who my wife specifically felt was trying to gently caress me, she'd tell me and that would be the end of that friendship, but so far it's been a non issue.
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Jun 2, 2017 07:45
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I'm a white guy in Asia under 80kg and 40 years old, so....
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Jun 2, 2017 10:51
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 05:50 |
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I'm immensely fuckable
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Jun 2, 2017 11:19
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