panglott

74 ms·

811.
by panglott 11y ago
The thing is, in this country in the last decade or two, we've seen the rise of dual-language immersion schools that are actually effective at teaching bilingualism. These are mostly English-Spanish, but there are French immersion
812.
by panglott 11y ago
The mandatory minumum year of foreign language is already outside the "critical period hypothesis" anyway. If you buy the critical period hypothesis anyway, which I do not.
813.
by panglott 11y ago
That most Americans do not have occasion to speak a language other than English day to day is exactly the reason most of them will not learn another language. The "badly" problem is actually a really huge one.
814.
by panglott 11y ago
What percentage of American high-school students who take their mandatory year of foreign language continue on to speak that language proficiently and competently? What "practical skills"? The supposed economic value from learning
815.
by panglott 11y ago
There is a very distinctive culture to Esperanto: people who continue to hope for positive social transformation and international and intercultural harmony. Esperantist and conlanger William Annis (on the Conlangery podcast) said something
816.
by panglott 11y ago
I think we have some strange ideas about how and why studying languages are "useful". Most Americans are monolingual English speakers, and almost by definition can't study a language that's more "useful" than E
817.
by panglott 11y ago
The key premise is that one year of mandatory classroom teaching isn't actually going to get someone speaking proficiently, unless perhaps it's something like Esperanto. They won't be speaking Latin either, but at least some
818.
by panglott 11y ago
It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto. If all you&#
819.
by panglott 11y ago
I remember once reading an interview with a supposed hyperpolyglot, in which he revealed that he spent nearly all of his time (8+ hours/day) reviewing flashcards. I guess it's possible, if you really like doing flash cards. These
820.
by panglott 11y ago
Ah, the golden era of RealPlayer.
821.
by panglott 11y ago
Fafhrd and the Mouser are an interesting case: There are seven (pretty short) volumes of stories, written over nearly forty years, with the major anthologies halfway through. Lots of those stories are just short vignettes, not more than a p
822.
by panglott 11y ago
There's no way that page counts are a reflection of the size of the ideas in the book. You can huge ideas and absolutely marvellous worlds in under 200 pages. Maybe the book doesn't have 1000+ named characters. but why would that
823.
by panglott 11y ago
Not just mega-novels, it seems like the long novel of 400-600 pages are more common too. Seems like back in the day you could get a good story in 150-200 pages. But now reading books is a bigger commitment. I think I'm going to start o
824.
by panglott 11y ago
If the problem is racism and brutality in law enforcement, I don't think the right response would be "it was better before the 1960s". Law enforcement was racist before the 1960s because the law was explicitly racist then.
825.
by panglott 11y ago
Don't think about it as "language learning" or "language study". That is not how humans learn languages. Think about it as "language acquisition", something you will pick up over time. There is a bunch of
826.
by panglott 11y ago
I've mostly switched over to the Apple Maps app at home, Google Maps is such a brick. Not sure yet what to use on Windows, where Google Maps is still semi-functional if weird-looking.
827.
by panglott 11y ago
Excel is a great tool. It's great for keeping track of small or ad hoc collections of data. The problem is that it doesn't "grow" naturally with its needs. A small business or project can start with Excel, then migrate t
828.
by panglott 11y ago
This is less "inaccurate" than fundamentally conceptually flawed. Human ideological systems are not like biological systems that speciate through schism. They are creations of living human minds and societies that piece together i
829.
by panglott 11y ago
Platform lockin isn't exactly vendor lock-in, but there's a kind of lockin nonetheless. You're going to be dependent to some extent on your platform whatever your platform happens to be.
830.
by panglott 11y ago
It's not just you. My initial reaction was that it meant "we have come far", meaning that "we are close". My next thought was "That can't be right, he must mean we are distant from the goal." Why is t
831.
by panglott 12y ago
Not so much out of date as continuously maintained for nearly 20 years. It's a remarkably useful personal Web site from the era of Geocities ;)
832.
by panglott 12y ago
I'd also recommend DJP's interview about Dothraki on the Conlangery podcast (the last half of the show, starting about 55'00"): http://conlangery.com/2012/06/25/conlangery-56-growing-a-lex.
833.
by panglott 12y ago
Marijuana should definitely be legal, but I'm conflicted about opiates and cocaine. We can certainly establish a rational basis for banning them based on addictive potential, dependence, &c., if we put alcohol as the worst drug we&
834.
by panglott 12y ago
Stereotypes are a form of knowledge. They are just a really low-grade form of knowledge. That's why they're frequently confused with ignorance ;)
835.
by panglott 12y ago
This is essentially the stereotype of legalization activists, but it's not really true. I don't smoke pot, but have long been an advocate of legalization. It's so strange to me when people assume I do smoke because of this ad
836.
by panglott 12y ago
Sure! Depending on why you want to end the drug war, you could end up replacing it with something as bad or worse.
837.
by panglott 12y ago
Krugman is far from a dry writer. He just writes about a topic that too many people find dry and inscrutable, sadly.
838.
by panglott 12y ago
Apostrophes are commonly used for plurals in signs, in what has come to be called the "greengrocer's apostrophe". It was a standard in the 19th century that has come to be disfavored in literary English. https://e
839.
by panglott 12y ago
This is a common practice in signs. It's wrong in literary English, but is it wrong in signs? My pet theory is that quotes for emphasis were popularized in 20th century movie posters, where it was common to surround the movie title in
840.
by panglott 12y ago
Wow, that books looks just priceless, almost a parody of the position it advocates, to judge by the Amazon reviews. English degrees are worthless, except perhaps if you want to avoid getting dinged by every other reviewer for your poor writ

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