4 ms·

+1 The books by Soviet authors always seemed so much less verbose than those from the West. I particularly appreciated this, as I had - and have - poor English

+1 The books by Soviet authors always seemed so much less verbose than those from the West. I particularly appreciated this, as I had - and have - poor English ability (like many other Indians), but was nevertheless forced into an exclusively English based education (also like many other Indians). There are gems like Spivak from the other side, but I find it much rarer. Even papers are annoyingly verbose - almost as if to compensate for general lack of novelty. (forgive the rant).

javajosh 5y ago
First, I find it hard to believe that someone who can correctly construct a phrase like "almost as if to compensate for general lack of novelty" to have poor English. Or perhaps your definition of "poor" is different than my own. Second, why not just ignore the verbiage you didn't want or need? It's easier to remove exposition if you don't want it than to add it in if its missing!
- thwoieruwe234 5y ago
  if someone would mark all the "important" bits in red, I could. alas, they don't, and drone on and on and on with smattering of important bits thrown in. for instance, Thomas & Finney's book is what... 2000 pages ? In comparison, Piskunov was something like 200-300 pages IIRC. btw phrase usage is not "good" english - it's in fact an easy tactic to get around it. this is a very obvious in the outputs of Indian state/academia, esp. in the humanities - lots of fancy sounding words/phrases, but very often, zero actual knowledge. some of the judgments of the indian courts, will even make you weep... but i digress. personally, non-generic non-templated emails still take a lot of effort and constant second-guessing. (this took ~5-10m to write, and probably still has grammatical errors and semantics issues).
  - javajosh 5y ago
    My senior year quantum prof was a Landau student, and he was so terse and inscrutable - it was an awful class. Given the man's combination of thick Russian accent, lisp, and poor English, a bit of redundancy in his delivery would have helped! But I get your point.
selimthegrim 5y ago
Spivak wasn't verbose?

javajosh 5y ago

First, I find it hard to believe that someone who can correctly construct a phrase like "almost as if to compensate for general lack of novelty" to have poor English. Or perhaps your definition of "poor" is different than my own. Second, why not just ignore the verbiage you didn't want or need? It's easier to remove exposition if you don't want it than to add it in if its missing!

thwoieruwe234 5y ago
if someone would mark all the "important" bits in red, I could. alas, they don't, and drone on and on and on with smattering of important bits thrown in. for instance, Thomas & Finney's book is what... 2000 pages ? In comparison, Piskunov was something like 200-300 pages IIRC. btw phrase usage is not "good" english - it's in fact an easy tactic to get around it. this is a very obvious in the outputs of Indian state/academia, esp. in the humanities - lots of fancy sounding words/phrases, but very often, zero actual knowledge. some of the judgments of the indian courts, will even make you weep... but i digress. personally, non-generic non-templated emails still take a lot of effort and constant second-guessing. (this took ~5-10m to write, and probably still has grammatical errors and semantics issues).
- javajosh 5y ago
  My senior year quantum prof was a Landau student, and he was so terse and inscrutable - it was an awful class. Given the man's combination of thick Russian accent, lisp, and poor English, a bit of redundancy in his delivery would have helped! But I get your point.

selimthegrim 5y ago

Spivak wasn't verbose?