Slashdot Mirror
Is Germany Raising a Generation of Illiterates?
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "Over at Starts With A Bang, the weekly question comes in from Germany, where we're informed: 'In Germany, many teachers have adopted a new way of teaching children to write properly. The way is called "Writing by Reading" and essentially says: Write as you wish, you're not bound by any rules. Recently, this way of teaching has been heavily criticized [link in German], but not before it has been "tested" on several years of school children.' The reading wars have been going on in the US, too, but will this wind up having a negative outcome? Or, as this piece argues, is it likely to be a wash?"
i rite az i wish and it doz afekt my wrighting.
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The US has been raising illiterates for decades (if not longer). In this metric we can truly shout
We're number one!
We're number one!
We're number one!
I doubt they could catch up with our functional illiteracy rates even if they tried.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I take value in writing correctly (my native tongue is Dutch, not English, in case anybody finds errors).
But language is not something defined by laws; it is alive, changing and evolving all the time.
I may enjoy writing following proper grammar rules, but that's just my personal preference and just because I like it, doesn't mean everybody should do so.
If the text written using this method can be read as easy and fast as text written according to the rules, what really is the problem?
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No.
I call this bullshit. The latest PISA results show that Germany is improving in the verbal (language) subtests.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
If the text written using this method can be read as easy and fast as text written according to the rules, what really is the problem?
The problem is that a lot of people with the power to hire and fire may pretend that they cannot read the text "as easy and fast as text written according to the rules". HR may judge a prospective employee as "uneducated" for not following traditional prescriptive rules.
I realize that Slashdot Summaries are one of the important, protected, habitats of a mixture of questionable proofreading and overt editorializing; but isn't something important being left out here?
The scheme in question is known as 'write by reading'. This apparently boils down to 'write however you want', according to a blog post that barely touches on the matter aside from a link to a German newspaper. Is it possible that this 'write by reading' theory involves some 'reading' somewhere? Maybe the notion that children will pick up grammar by exposure to it, which would make spending the time previously allocated to Learning Your Grammar Rules Children on reading things that are both examples of good writing and also useful, interesting, or otherwise better than distilled essence of grammar a plausible alternative?
Now, I'd be the first to agree that the standards of pedagogical research are... notably tepid... and education is much ruled by fads, many with little or no basis in evidence beyond anecdotes; but can we really have a useful discussion if we are going to start from a position of such inspiring intellectual honesty?
The question: "Do children pick up grammar from exposure to well written, but not otherwise grammar focused, texts sufficiently efficiently that we are better off skipping the lessons in pure grammar in favor of receiving the grammar as a side effect of reading that will also have other uses?" is a perfectly reasonable one, and it isn't immediately obvious which side the facts would come down on, so some research would be nice; but I'm pretty sure that 'Writing by Reading' is not actually a polite expression for 'Thare iz no ruls in Sckool.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Does it go on forever?
They had to test it on school children. Environmental law is too strict to allow testing on rats.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I was raised on the phonics approach; my girlfriend was raised on the whole word approach. I'd never knowingly met anyone educated in the whole word approach and had read "Why Johnny Can't Read" years ago, wondering, "where the hell is it that they teach this crap! This sounds insane!" And yet, studies show that while we learned phonics to learn how to read, our minds actually read whole-word once we're well-practiced. Anyway, the gf has 2 master's degrees and is working on yet another post-graduate degree, so apparently it works well enough.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Do they always jump in feet first with these new teaching methods or something? Don't they test it on a small control group or a dozen to make sure it's not the latest new-age garbage?
It always surprises me how often I hear parents complain about a new way of learning something in school. Latest was my neighbors talking about a new way to teach math, they tried helping their kids but the methodology was so alien to them that they were stumped.
And that's where a lot of the new, marginally improved (if at all) methods fail, because parents have to be able to act as back up teachers, and if it's completely different than how they learned it. Fail.
In the original article they talk about "reading through writing". The other way around would be traditional, with the help of a Fibel (hornbook?) that's being *read*.
Independent of the question if this is a good idea, it's a lot easier in German to write something more or less correctly when spelled as it's spoken. That's because German (like e.g. Italian) has a much more "regular" orthography than English. You wouldn't be able to write "fish" as e.g. "ghoti" as (wrongly) attributed to Goerge Bernhard Shaw. In German you could spell "Fisch" maybe also as "Visch" or "Fiesch", but not much different, and most people would probably understand what's meant. So it's perhaps not that much of an outlandish idea to let children write German words like they speak them as it would be in English.
Most nations are raising illiterate people. Illiterate people vote the way their party leaders want them too and they're more content with menial jobs like flipping burgers or working in WalMart. They also produce a correct amount of replacement workers that can come into the workforce to fill more menial jobs which is good
for the economy. As always I blame the parents.
Also, stop picking on Germany they may go all Reichy on your ass!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I tested it on my kids, and didn't even know there was a controversy. I never could sound out words. I was raised under the "sound out only" rules. When I finally, despite all their efforts to the contrary, started reading like an adult, I read faster and with fewer errors than anyone in the class. It just took me 2 years of being functionally illiterate in a room of literates to jump 5 grades in a day.
Finland (arguably the best education in the world) does just that. Expose them to words and letters, but don't start reading until they are old enough to read words. I'd have been exactly on track in the Finland system. So maybe that's why they get better results for less money than the US. They use methods that are better suited to how children learn, rather than forcing children at an unnatural pace, based on what some senile old educators dictate should be covered on that year's standardized tests.
Learn to love Alaska
Most Germans speak and write better English than I do - and I'm posting this from the UK. For German, at least, it probably doesn't help to have had several attempts at reforming German orthography within the last 30 years.In the same period, I _think_ Dutch has had one major spelling reform.
+1 to the person suggesting formal German hochdeutsch: also, for the historically inclined, it may now be safe to start teaching how to read fraktur / black letter type again or the German speaking nations will miss out entirely on the original books and literature pre 1930 or so.
So now this should be a great thread. Slashdotters will comment on an article about writing without rules, wondering about whether this creates a generation of illiterates, without actually reading the article.
If a literate person chooses not to read, or an illiterate person cannot read, will the decrease in paper demanded raise a generation of enough trees in forests that can fall without making sounds?
I went to primary school in Germany from 1996 on and I was in one of those classes that learned "Reading by Writing" (I explained above that the referenced article gets the German original article the wrong way around).
The way it basically works is, that you get a phonetics-alphabet and learn just the sounds and then you write them down in the way you think is right. My class was, in direct comparison to the class that learned traditionally, on average half a grade better in writing and reading by year 4. But my class had only eleven pupils and our teacher had the chance to explain errors and nuances. Usually, classes nowadays are more than double the size.
I am sure that, without proper guidance, many mistakes can be made. The primary thing my parents loved was, that I was able to read stuff the first day I came home from school with my phonetics-alphabet. I could read my children-books from day one. We didn't start with the letter "e" or "o" and only short words. This gave me a real thirst for books and I read "Robinson Crusoe" in second grade.
I'm losing track, is it the Koch brothers or cultural Marxism which are doing the rounds on youtube as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man today?
Honestly, the article was published in a WAZ group newspaper. They are conservative and opposed to this learning concept. While it is true that there is no evidence that the method is more effective than other methods, especially not in German (German education scientist seldom read work from other countries), there is also no prove that this other more regulated approach is more effective. In the WAZ article, there are also no publications referenced only statements and opinions of people opposed to this present education method. I am personally in favor for the method which tries to teach the correct writing in the beginning, however, I have no prove that that method is more effective.
BTW: Most people becoming teachers in Germany choose this path, because it is easier than other subjects at university (except economics). German teachers education is actually the real problem, but it will not be fixed any time soon.
Having poor reading and writing skills is different than none and, besides: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Same logic as for canteen food?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Definitely. We would certainly not be sitting here discussing stuff like whether school kids learn this or that way. For the same reason you see few discussions about the impact of Google Glass on society in Somalia: We'd have real problems to deal with and no time to squabble about pointless drivel.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Write as you wish, you're not bound by any rules
This was (maybe still is) the fashion in UK schools for a long, long time. So long in fact that the current generation of teachers were brought up this way. The idea being that correcting grammar and spelling mistakes would somehow "stunt" creativity - and that creativity was more important than you know: being understood or communicating clearly.
Since the teachers were not taught that there was a correct way of writing, they cannot possibly pass on to the next generation a skill they never gained, themselves.
Downward spiral, anyone?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Hooked On Monkey Phonics!!!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
You've never tried talking to a person under 20, have you?
Germany used to have a pretty good education system. But like the rest of Europe it's on the sharp decline. The goal is now instead of a well rounded education to give you the bare minimum of what's necessary so you can do your job. Schools have been turned from a place of education to something where you can lock up kids at least part of the day so they don't cause too much trouble, because a sensible education simply is not possible if you have 40+ kids in a class and 3/4th of them doesn't speak the language.
But rest assured, it ain't just Germany that's suffering from this.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There are forces at work to try to pair back public education using nefarious means
Interesting. Tell us more.
Spelling in German is quite trivial, because you spell a word exactly as you pronounce it. There are some exceptions, but they are, too, bound by rules that one will learn eventually; they don't have to be force-fed to schoolchildren. So, considering this is a language where a spelling-bee makes almost no sense, no, Germany isn't raising a generation of illiterates.
Just a note that the linked blog page trots out the old chestnut about Cambridge researchers discovering that it doesn't matter what order you put the letters in a word, as long as you get the first and last ones right. Which is, of course, a load of blockols.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
English has very little in the way of grammatical marking. Counter-intuitively (to English speakers), this makes English harder to learn, because the grammatical structure is just as complex as any other language, but it's not explicit.
In most European languages, children grow up with a good intuition about the grammar of their language, but some amount of formal instruction is very valuable so they can understand how to structure their communication with a minimum of ambiguity. In Canadian schools, for example, English (as a first language) is taught with relatively little formal grammar, but French with a great deal.
Also, although it's not really natural for a language community to have a high degree of uniformity artificially imposed on it, and each generation does speak it is slightly (or perhaps significantly) different from the previous, there is a practical value in having, and learning, an agreed-upon standard variation. In particular, for languages like English and German, which are widely spoken, it is enormously valuable to have access to the large numbers of speakers and the large bodies of fiction and non-fiction writing.
Just read the book by Lynne Truss, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", to see how important the punctuation marks, comma and apostrophe, are for conveying meaning. She gives quite clear examples of how they are misused to completely obscure the intended meaning. Although it is not a "peer-reviewed" scholarly publication, it is peer-reviewable (for anyone sufficiently English-literate) by observation of the writings all around us. She observes the reality of poor communication due to poor usage of the rules of (English) grammar.
The book is a hilarious read (again, if the reader is sufficiently English-literate), but is very serious about the communications problems it "documents".
Sorry if I'm not the first person to wonder about this question, but there are some eery and striking similarities in my mind with ebonics and common core. I know they have a problem with Turkish people there but I didn't realize it was that bad.
As a linguist, I am very familiar with Truss's book, and I can assure you that it is not taken seriously as scholarship. As prescriptive pleading, sure, it's a classic, but it offers no support for the claim that loosening of orthographical standards seriously impedes human communication (or one's thought process, going back to the OP).
By European, you mean British. The British actually care about their language and how it is written. Some Americans, quite a few, are educated, erudite and worldly, but so many think that "All y'all" is an actual construct.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
This method is called "Lesen durch Schreiben" (Reading by writing) and was indeed used to teach writing first, which then caused the kids to read on their own. That part worked OK, the orthography was indeed a mess. That's why this method is mostly abandoned. Hardly any primary school uses that any longer. I do feel sorry for all the kids who acquired orthograpy problems and now suffer on secondary schools. Greetings from a german primary school
But have issues with your statement re. the impediment of communication by loosening orthographical standards.
You are probably aware law is one of the 'sciences' that needs a very accurate description in writing and it is in many languages exactly in law we see the recurring use of otherwise obsolete words and terminology.
Having discussed this phenomena with some legal scholars I do believe they have little choice in the matter, a word stands for a historical meaning and it would be dangerous if not outright irresponsible to use different terminology without including an addendum with transcriptions.
Then there is the use of Latin rooted words, phonetic spelling can drastically change or even inverse their meaning and without an authorised transcription this would become a legal nightmare.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
How about grammar-nazis? Should they now be referred to as grammar-stalinists?
That is what "education" is. Were the (insert nationality) kids able to read 50? 75? 100 years ago? Without doubt, those who went through the school system could. Yet at every opporunity since, the so called educators felt compelled to try something different. Why? Because a) life would be boring if they did not and b) it is the only way to increase their ranks and funding (ie, no crisis, less funding).
You can apply the same to math and the varoius sciences as well.
We have learning techniques for reading and writing that work, just use them. Please stop using our children as guinea pigs for testing new methods!
The difference is probably that it's fairly easy to avoid one of them in case you're not interested in it.
If you're not gay, it should be fairly trivial to simply not go to some gay pride march. At least I was not aware of any that round up people and force them to dance along.
It wasn't that easy to simply ignore and avoid the Nazi bullshit in Germany back then.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The meaning is perfectly clear. In fact, chances are good that this is uttered all the time by children that are excited. The fact that a few pedants are too stupid to infer from context that this isn't a call for cannibalism does not change the fact that people would infer the correct meaning.
Now, if you're living in a culture where cannibalism is normal, then is the time to worry about the grammar.
After the alteration of the writing rules several years ago (adapting spelling and punctuation rules to the stupidity of the people), I reckon this is just the inevitable next step ... going back several centuries to pre-Duden-times, the results should be clear - uncertainty when reading a text as to what the writer actually meant in some cases, and the helpless anger of people that still follow the rules and figuratively hurt when reading wrong spellings (like they're/their/there in English) ... ... ... while sometimes teachers may be at least part of the problem, a most likely larger problem is the home of the kids ... parents that don't care about their children, and/or because they themselves are schooled below average.
Why is it so hard to either teach children correctly, or fail them if they don't learn? Of course, with the trends like "no kid left behind" or contra-productive financing decisions (reducing financing for schools that have too few kid finish successfully) seem to favor this
Of course, kid failing in school have multiple reasons
Hm ... I don't think is about handwriting, but SPELLING and punctuation ... which is still needed on the computer, too ...
Germansdon'thavelongwordstheyjustdon'tlikeusingspaces, much.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Somehow this was how my two children developed. I do everything "good enough" and utterly depend on my spell checker. My daughter has a PhD and teaches college English. My son has a law degree and is a contract manager for a major corporation. They were the first generation to go to college on both sides of our families. Yes, I'm sure both of them are mine.
First, I doubt that Finnish spelling is as complex as English.
Second, I was exposed to letters in kindergarten, then started reading words in the middle of 1st grade, just like everyone else in my 1st grade class (the ones who could not were held back [OK, the one person flunked]). Before that (reading from "Tip", our school's equivalent of the more famous "Dick and Jane" books), the closest that we got to reading in the Fall half of 1st grade was the teacher trying to tell me that a bucket started with the letter "p" and was pronounced "pail" even though there was no champagne bottle in it (she didn't like it when I used that very point, for some reason).
(For the non-US, kindergarten was a half-day grade zero that exposed children to letters, digits, minimal socialization, and most importantly naps when we were not sleepy. Nowadays, most children have a grade -1 called "pre-school" as well, ignoring the question of whether they have had day care from infancy because their complete set of parental units had to work)
Third, why are we discussing methods of teaching English in the US when the article is whether Germany is raising a generation of illiterates? Is there a slashdot.org.de to which this should have been limited? Or should we also discuss here whether Chairman Mao's decision to drastically simplify Chinese orthography from historical Chinese is designed to produce a nation of illiterates, or is it just NewSpeak (from 1984), since modern PRC Chinese will be unable to read anything from before the change or anything written by Chinese writers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the Chinese Diaspora?
thares no poynt to lurn proppr spellng and gramars
William Shakespeare would probably agree. Once, he spelled his name three different ways on the same sheet of paper. Likewise, so would The Honorable David S. Crockett. So, for that matter, would a German co-worker of mine who moved to the US at about 12 years old, and never really learned the spelling rules although he had not a trace of accent when I knew him (Stanford Math department didn't care much, either, since they gave him a PhD after he left the company).
I'm from Germany and I have children in school, so I've got some first-hand experience whith this sh*t.
My daughter (approaching 11, grade 5) was taught this "Writing by Reading" stuff in the first years of primary school. The basic idea is that the kids a) basically spell as they hear it and b) refine/correct it by being exposed to correctly written texts. For a child that is an avid reader like my daughter (50-100 pages a day), with a mother that is a teacher for german and english (highschool level), this only was a minor problem. But her BFF avoids books like the plague, and therefor has loads of problems with writing. Most teachers at the local primary schooö frown upon this newfangled method (at least the ones with deaceds of experience) and try to teach ther pupuls correct writing, circumventing or stretching the new teaching rules.
Luckily, my son (8 3/4, grade 3) got more conservative teachers and so his spelling is OK.
Basically, this method was obviously invented by some people who took their own household literacy levels as the standard. We could deal with it, as we are a household of bibliolaters (~10000 real books in the living room alone, more in the studio and the attic, and the kids already have hundreds of books on their own), but in an average household (five books national average, at least one of them a cook book and one a religious book), this method is bound to fail.
The invention of this method is in a straight line with similar decisions on the german language - we had a bunch of grammar and vocabulary reforms, created by some couldheaded people in their ivory tower, clearly disconnected from reality. Now we have this bound-to-fail paedagogic method. Lets see what they cook up next.
PS: Writing as you hear it at least is way easier in German than it would be in English. Although there are lots of exceptions to the rules, there is a basic synchronity in the german language between the written and spoken word. In comparison with english, where the linguistic sources of gaelic/celtic, french, frisian/german and scandinavian origin clash, this is kids play. But German grammar sucks at other places to make the playing field more than level again.
Some time ago there was an article in a nationwide german paper, where a father (jounalist) was totally shocked upon his childs literacy level. His offspring was at the end of grade four and wrote him a card for fathers day:
Text as written by the child: "Liba Fata ales gute zum Fatatak ich hab dich lib"
Gramatically correct text: "Lieber Vater, alles Gute zum Vatertag. Ich habe Dich lieb."
Translated:"Dear father, all the best for fathers' day. I love you"
Yes, the writing can be understood. It is not German, though. It might be Internet-German or Texting-German or whatever. It is like writing "wooster soos" instead of "worchestershire sauce".
In addition to this horrible teaching mess there is the bad influence from TV shows and from texting. I read an essay by a sixth-grader on the net, who added "lol" in his text where he thougt he made a pun, like the artificial laughters in those mediocre Disney-sitcoms.
All we can do as parents is to fix the educational potholes the school leaves in our childrens by field-testing obviously stupit methods.
You can't apply such a method to any language. I don't know about Finnish, in German it is bad enough. In English it would be a catastrophy. The more simple the transliteration rules for a language are, the better.
And: The more you are exposed to books, the better, if you got taught by this method. For those with a lower household literacy, this might break a childs education at a very early and basic point. In my opinion, one of the biggest reasons for school is to make the road to education level for all kids, to at least give them a reasonable chance regardless of their social background. A method that relies to a large extend on the intelectual capabilities of the family instead of the school to teach one of the most basic skills is unfair and bound to widen the gap between social classes.
So you were only eleven pupils on one teacher. Well, you could not get into a more unrealistic test group. In my times, we were 42 in a class, in my childrens classes there are 24 resp. 26 pupils. There are studies that show that 12-14 children are the upper bound for a teacher to really take into account everyone in the class.
When it comes to grading, being half a grade better does not mean anything a) if the grading is adapted to the learning method used and b) in a language class, anyway. Of course, if a teacher is a proponent of a new method, there are many ways to assure that the new method turns up either better or worse results, depending on what you want to prove.
And on reading "Robinson Crusoe" - this was probably a childrens edition, because the normal, complete text makes even a literate adults head spin.
This was all tried in the UK in the late 50s and early 60s and rapidly gotten rid of. Sadly, I am not surprised that the educationalists seem not to know their asses from their elbows and have resurrected a completely discredited theory yet again. All it does is cripple another generation of kids.
Hong Kong has its own language education problems but Chinese learning won't be infected by this sort of silly stuff - Chinese writings are mostly pronunciation-neutral.
says: no
I was born in the USSR. We were taught reading in the kindergarden at the age of five (well, my parents have taught me to read at the age of four because I kept pestering them about that). At school it was assumed that everyone was able to read so we have started to learn writing with the start of the first grade.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Were number one!
Were number one!
Were number one!
As an American, I see Americans with terrible spelling of their own English and see many Germans with a better command of English.
This "no rules" bullshit is why Americans are so poor at English compared to many Europeans.
This will be terrible for Germans in the long run.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I saw a boy in a yellow shirt with a telescope.
Now tell me if it can be determined, with or without the addition of punctuation, if the person speaking was using a telescope and saw a boy in a yellow shirt or if saw a boy in a yellow shirt holding a telescope.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Whooooosh
I don't "claim to be a writer", I AM a writer and have been one for most of the last 20 years. For the last 9+ years, I've helped write and maintain thousands of pages of documentation for one of the world's most widely-used pieces of Open Source software. But apparently my jokes go straight over your head. Assuming you even have a sense of humour, which it doesn't appear that you do.
Just like with the "multiple personality" joke, which you also didn't get (and keep claiming says something different from what it does), so let me spell it out for you:
AC: I don't care about Identity theft ... I suffer [sic] of multiple personality disorder, you clod!
Me, in response to AC: I don't have multiple personality disorder, I *am* multiple personality disorder!
That's borrowed from Salvador Dalí, the Spanish artist who did weird paintings of clocks melting and suchlike. When asked whether he obtained inspiration for such pieces by using psychedelics, he replied I don't do drugs. I am drugs. It's a pretty well-known quote, actually.
BTW, don't think I didn't notice how you went searching through my posting history to dig that up and try to twist it into "evidence" that I suffer from MPD. Which I do not now, nor have I ever.
But--since we're on the subject--MPD has certainly impacted my life, and if you had any idea just how much (and you were something like a normal person capable of empathy), you'd be able to see that (a) being able to joke about it now is actually a pretty big deal for me, and (b) when I say that I've dealt with toy surprises in my breakfast cereal that are scarier than you, I'm not really joking.
In any case, that's just one example of your many mischaracterisations of me (and others).
But that's to be expected since you're a stalker, a bully, a liar, and a coward.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Really funny.. coming from an American rag. When I see a semblance of literacy competence coming from any American continent's resident, I'll take the Germany concern seriously...
I am a full-time professional writer and editor of software documentation with nearly two decades of experience in my field... who's having a hard time believing that anyone could be that incredibly stupid and/or that completely devoid of any sense of humour whatsoever.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
you merely document - a child can do that
ONLY a non-professional or a complete moron would say this.
Good, effective, accessible documentation is absolutely essential to the success of our products. We know this because our customers tell us so.
And--guess what?--writing good software documentation is HARD.
If it were that easy, my employer wouldn't have paid to move me halfway around the world instead of hiring someone local.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Ok, this is off topic, but I was a Fallout fan with 1 and 2. I never played 3 because it was using a FPS engine, so assumed that it was just a generic FPS using the Fallout name to make sales. Earlier this month Fallout 3 was on sale cheap, and decided I would give it a try. I was pleasently surprised. Yes the game uses a FPS engine, but the game is a real Fallout game. The game feels like a fallout game, and it definitly puts the Fallout story and gameplay above the FPS elements.
For $20 you can get the 'Game of the Year Edition' that has all of the DLC content included. It is definitly worth it. Even at 5 years old, it is still a fun game that has aged very well.
I've actually seen this in a person. My main problem with him was all the bad spelling in official communication and his sloppy way of putting it all to words when he talked. Long story short, it was tiring to read his messages or listen to him. Later I've found he was also very sloppy in logical thinking, which led to a number of awkward situations where he would contradict himself minutes after stating something he seemed terribly sure of. I'm not sure which causes the other, or even if they are related in any way (although it sure seems like they are). There is also another aspect: etiquette. I've met managers who use "u" for "you" or other such abbreviations in business (very very official) e-mails. I find it indicative of a lack of professionalism. We all make small mistakes and we all like to wear jeans in the office or write friendly-sounding e-mails to our collaborators, but I don't think we should push it so far that u and I go to da meetings in shorts and bright yellow vacation shirts (up in this bitch).
It was a friggin' joke, and you are a humourless and clueless troglodyte.
Bored now. Ignoring you now.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.