I can not speak to NPR, but during 2008, 09, 10 the TV version of NPR, PBS, aired 70% positive stories during it's 6 o'clock news program for Obama/democrats and only 38% positive for McCain/republicans. An obvious "activism" to borrow your word.
You posted this fallacy before and were corrected then too. Unfortunately I see it didn't take, so here it is again: you don't understand what neutral means. Neutrality doesn't mean applying a quota to make sure both sides are presented "equally positively". Neutrality means the presentation is consistent with reality. If one of the two sides really is in the wrong, or has more negative events happening, then neutrality would be showing them as they are, not suppressing information or making things up in order to hit the percentages. Things are very seldom balanced in real life, and insisting on fifty-fifty distribution of "positive events" (whatever that means) when reporting is distorting reality.
As a media consumer, the big problem when judging the neutrality of some source is that you seldom get to directly experience the events reported on. In some cases you can get the facts - for example, instead of listening to the Fox report of some Obama speech you're better off actually getting the text and judging by yourself. In other cases that's not really possible, but what helps is expanding your sources of information - that "averages out" the biases of individual outlets. It's often very informative to check non-American news sources, for example the BBC. While the BBC itself isn't 100% neutral either, you can sometimes find stories that were either completely ignored by American media, or maybe presented very differently.
Sorry i can't remember the quote exactly or whom it was from but it went along the lines of "Give me two sentences written by a truly innocent man and I will find something with which to hang him"
Survives in odd corners, eg some embedded applications
Looks like the computing world is composed mainly of odd corners, otherwise how could such a peripheral language be the most popular in the programming community?
In Windows 7, if I have to launch something that's not pinned to my taskbar my workflow is WINKEY + Type the program name + ENTER. Windows 8 preserves this workflow. You'll be typing the program name into a Metro search bar, but at the end of the day the same program starts up on the Windows 8 desktop.
That's true, but I don't remember all the names of all programs I have installed, only the ones I use often enough. In W7 I didn't even need to remember those - they are on the quick launch bar or as shortcuts to the desktop. Moreover, some programs install multiple apps, whose name I don't even know to begin with - the app folder in the start menu lets me see what those are.
Altogether the start button is very useful to me: it's the place where I find all the programs, including newly installed ones, and where I can go to the things I use quickly (Control panel, my download folders, etc). That's where I create my own folders and organize programs based on my particular usage pattern, push things I used less into folders or conversely pop them from their app folders to the top level, or easily create multiple shortcuts letting me start an app with different parameters. The start button menu provides much more information than the stupidly huge Metro tiles (why would I ever want to waste so much good screen space just for a line of text for a program name? I'm not running my desktop on a tiny 3'' phone screen!).
Add the stupid full screen paradigm (why the heck would anybody run a multitasking OS and get a large screen with good resolution, just to be blocked from having multiple things on it? might as well run DOS!) and I see a lot of pain and no gain (at least on the desktop). No, Metro on desktop Windows is a huge and potentially killer mistake - W8 looks like the next Vista to me. Well, W7 is stable and powerful enough, so I'll probably skip this release altogether.
I know of no religion that denies science. Hell, even the Pope recognises and acknowledges that evolution is real.
You can't be serious. While some religions do officialy acknowledge parts of science, there are many branches and offshoots that deny parts or all of it. What kind of alien being are you, if you never heard of this? Or this? Or this, or this? Or, heck, how can you not have heard of this?
You know, after your first paragraph I thought we may have a reasonable discussion; unfortunately, after your second, I realized I need to wait for you to learn how to read first.
Ethically you want to do what is closest to your heart if you will, but unfortunately you need to eat, and usually this involves doing the opposite of ethical (or at least far from what the ideal-ethics tell you)
You know, this sounds weird to me. Can an ideal that forces you to die of hunger be called "ethical" in any kind of reasonable real world moral system? That means nobody (at least nobody alive) can ever be "ethical" (or honest, or moral, or whatever you want to call it). That makes the particular ideal deeply flawed, and the moral system it belongs to is at least extremely questionable, if not completely senseless.
Now, I recognize the fact that people have and sometimes still do die for ideals - but the death is almost always caused by external factors opposed to whatever ideal they fight for, not by the ideal itself - the only exceptions I can think of are some bizarre suicide cults.
. During 2008, 09, and 10 NBC aired 70% positive stories about Obama/democrats but only 38% positive for McCain/republicans. NBC is like the left version of FOX News. Biased
Your reasoning is faulty, or, more probably, you don't understand what bias means. Being neutral doesn't mean you should provide an equal number of positive/negative stories about the two sides. It means your reporting should match reality.
For a rather extreme example, consider Ted Bundy (I wanted to say Hitler, but didn't want to Godwinize the thread so early:) ). Would you call any report that calls Bundy a murderer biased, because it doesn't mention an equal number of positive facts? Surely not. The man was a murderer, and you're not biased calling him that, even if you don't mention he also helped old ladies cross the street.
In the particular case you're complaining about, the Republicans' campaign was a catastrophe (for a variety of reasons which I can't be bothered to enumerate). Given the situation, NBC shouldn't be forced to make up good stuff about Republicans or hide the bad in order to hit the percentages. It's not NBC's fault reality has a liberal bias (or at least had one at the time).
if you ignore the idiot wing of the right, [...] a lot of conservatives are concerned that the scientific method is properly being followed
This may have been true twenty or more years ago, but I'm afraid it's no longer the case; the Republican party has been coopted by what you call the idiot wing. What used to be a nutty fringe, non-consequential and easy to dismiss is now the mainstream of the conservative movement.
modern scientific studies have become so complicated that verification of them is like understanding half of what's being argued at the Supreme Court today. Most people can't do it.
But we're not talking only some esoteric studies. The problem is orders of magnitude worse. A majority of conservatives (not all of them, of course, but pretty clearly a majority) have adopted an attitude of global rejection of science, including old and established scientific theories. For an obvious (and scary) example look how, during the recent debates in the republican primaries the MAJORITY of the candidates (five out of the eight in the running at that moment) have professed their disbelief in evolution. As mayor Bloomberg says http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6b989370-164a-11e1-a691-00144feabdc0.html>here, it's mind-boggling. The fact that the candidates who didn't reject evolution (like Huntsman) suffered for that is an even better proof that in the conservative movement the inmates have taken over the asylum.
And, in another show of useless pedantry, I have to note that Vinge named his material Cavorite as a homage to Wells who used the name in his 1901 book The First Men in the Moon
I was under the impression that for most objects considered to be in a "zero gravity" freefall, tidal forces were negligible
Freefall doesn't matter in this case - tidal forces depend on the size of the object and the gradient of the gravitational field. For small objects in a slowly changing field, they're negligible (for example, humans on the surface of the Earth). If the object is large (like the moon), or if the gravitational field changes quickly enough (for example around a black hole, or a neutron star) tidal forces can be significant.
It's impossible to tell the action of gravity near a planet's surface from upward acceleration of one's frame of reference.
[Pedant point] Except that the gravitational field near a planet's surface is spherical while the equivalent field generated by constant acceleration is uniform. You can easily distinguish between the two cases without peeking out a window by measuring the force vectors in two distinct locations. Near a planet, locations not on the same vertical will show forces that aren't parallel (they point towards the center of mass). If the locations are on the same vertical, the forces will point the same way but they'll be different in value (since the locations aren't equally far from the center of mass - basically you'll get a tidal effect).
Of course, this doesn't mean Einstein is wrong, just that your example should either consider the action of gravity sufficiently far from the planet's surface, or maybe the gravity of an infinite 2-dimensional plane of matter, which would indeed generate an uniform field:)
I have a Win7 HTPC connected to my TV, running the built in Windows Media Center. I use it for storing music, movies and photos, recording a few TV shows, serving media to extenders in other rooms, Netflix/Hulu and just a bit of Youtube. Could you please tell me what advantages you find in using XBMC over WMC? Thank you!
I believe a popular hypothesis was that older women go through menopause to focus on helping the community instead of raising their own children. However I don't know if the hypothesis includes an explanation as to why this is unique to humans
It's probably because humans are the species with the longest childhood. For most other species, the offspring matures relatively quickly and leaves the mother, freeing her to bear and raise another generation. But it takes an inordinate amount of time for human children to become independent - I think we are the only species where the duration of the fertility period for women is comparable to the time it takes for a child to become an adult. Mothers still have to care for older children while bearing and raising younger ones. The availability of help in raising the kids becomes an evolutionary advantage, allowing the mother to have more children and ensuring they're better cared for.
This may also explain other peculiarities of the human species - for example, for most mammals fertility comes in cycles, allowing the raising of a generation to independence before the next one comes. This is not the case in humans, who are fertile all the time.
I'm against this book ban and any other on a school wide scale, but parents should always have the last word on education (since they could after-all simply homeschool if they had the resources).
Let's do a bit of reductio ad absurdum on this theorem. Parents should always have the last word in their children's feeding (since they could after all simply feed the child at home if they had the resources). Does this mean the parents should be allowed to starve their kids, or feed them rat poison if they consider it the right thing? Obviously not: the child also has rights which put limits on the parents' choices, so parents aren't allowed to feed the kid poison.
The same reasoning applies to education: parents should definitely NOT have the last word on the education of their children; most parents aren't qualified to decide, and decisions made by an ignorant or bigoted parent can have a serious impact on the child's future; they can reduce the kid's ability to choose for himself once he becomes capable of choice, and can significantly reduce his chances in life. Children should get as good an education as possible, and most parents don't have enough specific knowledge to understand what's a "good" education and what not. Those people shouldn't be allowed to interfere - especially in a case as the one above, where a zealot nutjob limits not only her child's access to some information, but also the access of all his classmates.
The traditional lifespan for a console generation is 5 years. That's the gold standard going back to the Atari 2600 days
Maybe, but at the time 5 years meant significant improvements in technology. New consoles had significantly faster processors, significantly more memory and visibly better graphics. With the current generation we're already fairly deep into the diminishing returns zone, and the process will continue, so I expect the interval between consecutive generations to grow longer and longer. It would be dificult to design a new console both reasonably priced and with major improvements over existing ones - we're already at the limits of the resolution of television, we're already at the limits of audio quality, all consoles are already online. I think the biggest changes will be in peripherals, like the Kinect.
I don't really like to pimp out my own software, but we're deep enough in the thread that I hope I don't step on anyone's toes. I have been writing a Japanese study tool called JLDrill http://jldrill.rubyforge.org/ Basically it is a spaced repetition drill program. Other programs like Anki are more flexible and better supported (and easier to install...), but JLDrill has some specific Japanese study tools that you might find helpful. If you like, give it a try. If you have any problems give me a shout.
How do you retain all of them conversationally? Did you grow up multilingual? My non-English skills are continually crumbling from disuse.
I didn't grow up multilingual as such, but I did start pretty young - my parents got me a private foreign language teacher before I was even in school. She taught me the basics, and then I started reading a lot and that helped me build a vocabulary. Truth is, I wasn't reading in order to improve my language skills - I just liked the books, and wanted to understand what's happening.
I find it's important to keep regular contact with a language, even if the contact is fairly limited - I try to read books in every language I know (the Gutenberg project has been a big help), and to watch a few foreign movies with their original soundtrack from time to time. That's not a perfect solution - I was told my vocabulary is a bit too formal, but web forums help somewhat in keeping track of colloquialisms. Moreover, that doesn't really replace regular conversation practice - I visited France a few years ago and for the first day or so I had a bit of a problem finding my words. If you're interested, there are often groups such as the Alliance Francaise (can't get Slashdot to show the proper c-cedilla) that provide language courses, cultural events or simply people you can practice your language on:)
Just a quick tip. Start on kanji as soon as possible. Knowing the kanji creates mnemonics for learning vocabulary. It also helps you decipher new vocabulary that you've never seen before. I wasted a lot of time before I realized that learning the kanji and and vocabulary at the same time is *faster* than learning the vocabulary alone.
Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. I just finished learning hiragana and katakana, and still practising reading/writing, but I'll try to start on the kanji as soon as possible - even though I expect it'll take me years to become anywhere near fluent:)
My teacher insists on the polite forms (the course is sponsored by the company, and, obviously, they're mainly interested in business interactions), but I try to go beyond that - I expect reading as much as I can will help there.
Thank you! After reading the reviews, the book seems to match pretty well my initial goal (reading cursively). 99 bucks new is a bit steep, but I'll check my local library, or see if I can get it second hand.
The problem comes from Stallman's idea that all software should be FOSS and money should be made from support
You know, I always thought this model provides completely the wrong economic incentives. If a FOSS developer writes completely stable and easy to use code he shoots himself in the foot (financially) because his customers won't *need* support, so won't ever pay him anything. On the contrary, he'd have good reasons to write obscure and unmaintainable code, difficult to customize, configure and expand. On the other hand, a developer (or company) that makes money selling the software has serious incentives to make it stable and usable, since a single support call may wipe their profit for this particular sale.
That said, I don't regret learning Spanish, but learning it just so you can get a cheaper tourist trap is not worth it at all.
Of course it's not worth it, if all the benefit you find in knowing another language is saving a couple of bucks at some touristy place. But knowing a different language is much more than that. You have now access to new worlds of literature, movies, poetry and music first hand, without a translator to intermediate (because, as the Italians say, "traduttore, traditore"!). You can talk to more people directly, understand their culture, expand your mind. You can read a whole set of new web sites, see different perspectives, or read news that aren't easily available otherwise. It opens lots of new possibilities for you - for example if you want to work for a global company, or if you ever feel like work in a different country for a few years. And even without any of those, the very effort of learning a different language improves your brain and slows mental aging.
I'm relatively fluent in three languages now, and can more or less read another two. I read books in all of them, and I find it really enriches my mind. I just started learning a fourth (Japanese), and am really looking forward to reading Japanese books in their original form (even though learning enough of the kanji characters will be a pain).
Slashdot Mirror
I can not speak to NPR, but during 2008, 09, 10 the TV version of NPR, PBS, aired 70% positive stories during it's 6 o'clock news program for Obama/democrats and only 38% positive for McCain/republicans. An obvious "activism" to borrow your word.
You posted this fallacy before and were corrected then too. Unfortunately I see it didn't take, so here it is again: you don't understand what neutral means. Neutrality doesn't mean applying a quota to make sure both sides are presented "equally positively". Neutrality means the presentation is consistent with reality. If one of the two sides really is in the wrong, or has more negative events happening, then neutrality would be showing them as they are, not suppressing information or making things up in order to hit the percentages. Things are very seldom balanced in real life, and insisting on fifty-fifty distribution of "positive events" (whatever that means) when reporting is distorting reality.
As a media consumer, the big problem when judging the neutrality of some source is that you seldom get to directly experience the events reported on. In some cases you can get the facts - for example, instead of listening to the Fox report of some Obama speech you're better off actually getting the text and judging by yourself. In other cases that's not really possible, but what helps is expanding your sources of information - that "averages out" the biases of individual outlets. It's often very informative to check non-American news sources, for example the BBC. While the BBC itself isn't 100% neutral either, you can sometimes find stories that were either completely ignored by American media, or maybe presented very differently.
Sorry i can't remember the quote exactly or whom it was from but it went along the lines of "Give me two sentences written by a truly innocent man and I will find something with which to hang him"
It's attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, see here.
Survives in odd corners, eg some embedded applications
Looks like the computing world is composed mainly of odd corners, otherwise how could such a peripheral language be the most popular in the programming community?
Meanwhile in China, students are learning.
...learning the version of history approved by their government
It's indeed fortunate that history is taught objectively and neutrally in the US
In Windows 7, if I have to launch something that's not pinned to my taskbar my workflow is WINKEY + Type the program name + ENTER. Windows 8 preserves this workflow. You'll be typing the program name into a Metro search bar, but at the end of the day the same program starts up on the Windows 8 desktop.
That's true, but I don't remember all the names of all programs I have installed, only the ones I use often enough. In W7 I didn't even need to remember those - they are on the quick launch bar or as shortcuts to the desktop. Moreover, some programs install multiple apps, whose name I don't even know to begin with - the app folder in the start menu lets me see what those are.
Altogether the start button is very useful to me: it's the place where I find all the programs, including newly installed ones, and where I can go to the things I use quickly (Control panel, my download folders, etc). That's where I create my own folders and organize programs based on my particular usage pattern, push things I used less into folders or conversely pop them from their app folders to the top level, or easily create multiple shortcuts letting me start an app with different parameters. The start button menu provides much more information than the stupidly huge Metro tiles (why would I ever want to waste so much good screen space just for a line of text for a program name? I'm not running my desktop on a tiny 3'' phone screen!).
Add the stupid full screen paradigm (why the heck would anybody run a multitasking OS and get a large screen with good resolution, just to be blocked from having multiple things on it? might as well run DOS!) and I see a lot of pain and no gain (at least on the desktop). No, Metro on desktop Windows is a huge and potentially killer mistake - W8 looks like the next Vista to me. Well, W7 is stable and powerful enough, so I'll probably skip this release altogether.
I know of no religion that denies science. Hell, even the Pope recognises and acknowledges that evolution is real.
You can't be serious. While some religions do officialy acknowledge parts of science, there are many branches and offshoots that deny parts or all of it. What kind of alien being are you, if you never heard of this? Or this? Or this, or this? Or, heck, how can you not have heard of this?
"Democracy doesn't guarantee good government, it guarantees the government the people deserve."
Hehe, to quote H. L. Mencken: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
You know, after your first paragraph I thought we may have a reasonable discussion; unfortunately, after your second, I realized I need to wait for you to learn how to read first.
Ethically you want to do what is closest to your heart if you will, but unfortunately you need to eat, and usually this involves doing the opposite of ethical (or at least far from what the ideal-ethics tell you)
You know, this sounds weird to me. Can an ideal that forces you to die of hunger be called "ethical" in any kind of reasonable real world moral system? That means nobody (at least nobody alive) can ever be "ethical" (or honest, or moral, or whatever you want to call it). That makes the particular ideal deeply flawed, and the moral system it belongs to is at least extremely questionable, if not completely senseless.
Now, I recognize the fact that people have and sometimes still do die for ideals - but the death is almost always caused by external factors opposed to whatever ideal they fight for, not by the ideal itself - the only exceptions I can think of are some bizarre suicide cults.
. During 2008, 09, and 10 NBC aired 70% positive stories about Obama/democrats but only 38% positive for McCain/republicans. NBC is like the left version of FOX News. Biased
Your reasoning is faulty, or, more probably, you don't understand what bias means. Being neutral doesn't mean you should provide an equal number of positive/negative stories about the two sides. It means your reporting should match reality.
:) ). Would you call any report that calls Bundy a murderer biased, because it doesn't mention an equal number of positive facts? Surely not. The man was a murderer, and you're not biased calling him that, even if you don't mention he also helped old ladies cross the street.
For a rather extreme example, consider Ted Bundy (I wanted to say Hitler, but didn't want to Godwinize the thread so early
In the particular case you're complaining about, the Republicans' campaign was a catastrophe (for a variety of reasons which I can't be bothered to enumerate). Given the situation, NBC shouldn't be forced to make up good stuff about Republicans or hide the bad in order to hit the percentages. It's not NBC's fault reality has a liberal bias (or at least had one at the time).
if you ignore the idiot wing of the right, [...] a lot of conservatives are concerned that the scientific method is properly being followed
This may have been true twenty or more years ago, but I'm afraid it's no longer the case; the Republican party has been coopted by what you call the idiot wing. What used to be a nutty fringe, non-consequential and easy to dismiss is now the mainstream of the conservative movement.
modern scientific studies have become so complicated that verification of them is like understanding half of what's being argued at the Supreme Court today. Most people can't do it.
But we're not talking only some esoteric studies. The problem is orders of magnitude worse. A majority of conservatives (not all of them, of course, but pretty clearly a majority) have adopted an attitude of global rejection of science, including old and established scientific theories. For an obvious (and scary) example look how, during the recent debates in the republican primaries the MAJORITY of the candidates (five out of the eight in the running at that moment) have professed their disbelief in evolution. As mayor Bloomberg says http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6b989370-164a-11e1-a691-00144feabdc0.html>here, it's mind-boggling. The fact that the candidates who didn't reject evolution (like Huntsman) suffered for that is an even better proof that in the conservative movement the inmates have taken over the asylum.
much like the Cavorite in A Deepness in the Sky.
And, in another show of useless pedantry, I have to note that Vinge named his material Cavorite as a homage to Wells who used the name in his 1901 book The First Men in the Moon
I was under the impression that for most objects considered to be in a "zero gravity" freefall, tidal forces were negligible
Freefall doesn't matter in this case - tidal forces depend on the size of the object and the gradient of the gravitational field. For small objects in a slowly changing field, they're negligible (for example, humans on the surface of the Earth). If the object is large (like the moon), or if the gravitational field changes quickly enough (for example around a black hole, or a neutron star) tidal forces can be significant.
It's impossible to tell the action of gravity near a planet's surface from upward acceleration of one's frame of reference.
[Pedant point] Except that the gravitational field near a planet's surface is spherical while the equivalent field generated by constant acceleration is uniform. You can easily distinguish between the two cases without peeking out a window by measuring the force vectors in two distinct locations. Near a planet, locations not on the same vertical will show forces that aren't parallel (they point towards the center of mass). If the locations are on the same vertical, the forces will point the same way but they'll be different in value (since the locations aren't equally far from the center of mass - basically you'll get a tidal effect).
:)
Of course, this doesn't mean Einstein is wrong, just that your example should either consider the action of gravity sufficiently far from the planet's surface, or maybe the gravity of an infinite 2-dimensional plane of matter, which would indeed generate an uniform field
I just installed it on a Windows 7 system
I have a Win7 HTPC connected to my TV, running the built in Windows Media Center. I use it for storing music, movies and photos, recording a few TV shows, serving media to extenders in other rooms, Netflix/Hulu and just a bit of Youtube. Could you please tell me what advantages you find in using XBMC over WMC? Thank you!
I believe a popular hypothesis was that older women go through menopause to focus on helping the community instead of raising their own children. However I don't know if the hypothesis includes an explanation as to why this is unique to humans
It's probably because humans are the species with the longest childhood. For most other species, the offspring matures relatively quickly and leaves the mother, freeing her to bear and raise another generation. But it takes an inordinate amount of time for human children to become independent - I think we are the only species where the duration of the fertility period for women is comparable to the time it takes for a child to become an adult. Mothers still have to care for older children while bearing and raising younger ones. The availability of help in raising the kids becomes an evolutionary advantage, allowing the mother to have more children and ensuring they're better cared for.
This may also explain other peculiarities of the human species - for example, for most mammals fertility comes in cycles, allowing the raising of a generation to independence before the next one comes. This is not the case in humans, who are fertile all the time.
I'm against this book ban and any other on a school wide scale, but parents should always have the last word on education (since they could after-all simply homeschool if they had the resources).
Let's do a bit of reductio ad absurdum on this theorem. Parents should always have the last word in their children's feeding (since they could after all simply feed the child at home if they had the resources). Does this mean the parents should be allowed to starve their kids, or feed them rat poison if they consider it the right thing? Obviously not: the child also has rights which put limits on the parents' choices, so parents aren't allowed to feed the kid poison.
The same reasoning applies to education: parents should definitely NOT have the last word on the education of their children; most parents aren't qualified to decide, and decisions made by an ignorant or bigoted parent can have a serious impact on the child's future; they can reduce the kid's ability to choose for himself once he becomes capable of choice, and can significantly reduce his chances in life. Children should get as good an education as possible, and most parents don't have enough specific knowledge to understand what's a "good" education and what not. Those people shouldn't be allowed to interfere - especially in a case as the one above, where a zealot nutjob limits not only her child's access to some information, but also the access of all his classmates.
The traditional lifespan for a console generation is 5 years. That's the gold standard going back to the Atari 2600 days
Maybe, but at the time 5 years meant significant improvements in technology. New consoles had significantly faster processors, significantly more memory and visibly better graphics. With the current generation we're already fairly deep into the diminishing returns zone, and the process will continue, so I expect the interval between consecutive generations to grow longer and longer. It would be dificult to design a new console both reasonably priced and with major improvements over existing ones - we're already at the limits of the resolution of television, we're already at the limits of audio quality, all consoles are already online. I think the biggest changes will be in peripherals, like the Kinect.
I don't really like to pimp out my own software, but we're deep enough in the thread that I hope I don't step on anyone's toes. I have been writing a Japanese study tool called JLDrill http://jldrill.rubyforge.org/ Basically it is a spaced repetition drill program. Other programs like Anki are more flexible and better supported (and easier to install...), but JLDrill has some specific Japanese study tools that you might find helpful. If you like, give it a try. If you have any problems give me a shout.
Thank you! I'll check it out.
How do you retain all of them conversationally? Did you grow up multilingual? My non-English skills are continually crumbling from disuse.
I didn't grow up multilingual as such, but I did start pretty young - my parents got me a private foreign language teacher before I was even in school. She taught me the basics, and then I started reading a lot and that helped me build a vocabulary. Truth is, I wasn't reading in order to improve my language skills - I just liked the books, and wanted to understand what's happening.
:)
I find it's important to keep regular contact with a language, even if the contact is fairly limited - I try to read books in every language I know (the Gutenberg project has been a big help), and to watch a few foreign movies with their original soundtrack from time to time. That's not a perfect solution - I was told my vocabulary is a bit too formal, but web forums help somewhat in keeping track of colloquialisms. Moreover, that doesn't really replace regular conversation practice - I visited France a few years ago and for the first day or so I had a bit of a problem finding my words. If you're interested, there are often groups such as the Alliance Francaise (can't get Slashdot to show the proper c-cedilla) that provide language courses, cultural events or simply people you can practice your language on
Oh, I didn't realize that was an old edition. The new one is cheaper.
Heh, much better, thanks again!
Just a quick tip. Start on kanji as soon as possible. Knowing the kanji creates mnemonics for learning vocabulary. It also helps you decipher new vocabulary that you've never seen before. I wasted a lot of time before I realized that learning the kanji and and vocabulary at the same time is *faster* than learning the vocabulary alone.
Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. I just finished learning hiragana and katakana, and still practising reading/writing, but I'll try to start on the kanji as soon as possible - even though I expect it'll take me years to become anywhere near fluent :)
My teacher insists on the polite forms (the course is sponsored by the company, and, obviously, they're mainly interested in business interactions), but I try to go beyond that - I expect reading as much as I can will help there.
Might want to check out this book, it is good.
Thank you! After reading the reviews, the book seems to match pretty well my initial goal (reading cursively). 99 bucks new is a bit steep, but I'll check my local library, or see if I can get it second hand.
The problem comes from Stallman's idea that all software should be FOSS and money should be made from support
You know, I always thought this model provides completely the wrong economic incentives. If a FOSS developer writes completely stable and easy to use code he shoots himself in the foot (financially) because his customers won't *need* support, so won't ever pay him anything. On the contrary, he'd have good reasons to write obscure and unmaintainable code, difficult to customize, configure and expand. On the other hand, a developer (or company) that makes money selling the software has serious incentives to make it stable and usable, since a single support call may wipe their profit for this particular sale.
That said, I don't regret learning Spanish, but learning it just so you can get a cheaper tourist trap is not worth it at all.
Of course it's not worth it, if all the benefit you find in knowing another language is saving a couple of bucks at some touristy place. But knowing a different language is much more than that. You have now access to new worlds of literature, movies, poetry and music first hand, without a translator to intermediate (because, as the Italians say, "traduttore, traditore"!). You can talk to more people directly, understand their culture, expand your mind. You can read a whole set of new web sites, see different perspectives, or read news that aren't easily available otherwise. It opens lots of new possibilities for you - for example if you want to work for a global company, or if you ever feel like work in a different country for a few years. And even without any of those, the very effort of learning a different language improves your brain and slows mental aging.
I'm relatively fluent in three languages now, and can more or less read another two. I read books in all of them, and I find it really enriches my mind. I just started learning a fourth (Japanese), and am really looking forward to reading Japanese books in their original form (even though learning enough of the kanji characters will be a pain).