Supergrunch

Plurals (or any inflected forms) aren't headwords. Although it depends what you mean by "count" - I don't see why spelling rules shouldn't extend to inflected forms, which could be a weakness of my approach. As for QI, I don't really trust anything they say as they give no references. It's supposed to be funny rather than accurate, and if we can't check these things, how do you think they manage?

This is a good example of something that you couldn't possibly know without researching, so I did a quick and dirty check. I searched the headwords of the Oxford English Dictionary for the following strings (where * is a wildcard ranging over strings of any length, including empty strings): *ie* = 5500 matches. *ei* = 2500 matches. So while we might expect some of these to be obsolete quirks or false positives, it looks fairly clear that you're wrong. And for a bit of fun: *cie* = 300 matches. *cei* = 181 matches. So "i before e except after c" doesn't really seem to work either... but then we knew that already, I guess. (it is, however, said to work better as "i before e except after c, when pronounced [i:]", although that'd be harder to verify, and probably wouldn't work for all dialects)

Supposedly, God-honouring falcon of victory. Although I can't verift the "victory" part.

I went on the server briefly and saw Happenstance's house - I may be on some more later if I get some free time that isn't spent playing Skyrim.

Happy birthday to all!

This is partly because (in stark contrast to Japanese), Korean has one of the most perfect writing systems ever, so it's very easy to learn. It is fairly unfortunate, although strictly speaking, it's not an alphabet at all. And no alphabets are phonetic (apart form the International Phonetic Alphabet, used for scientific purposes), as alphabets represent the distinctive units of speech, rather than the actual sounds that are produced. Although as any writer of English will know, in many alphabets, this representation is far from exact. Done. Although I hadn't noticed until you pointed it out, thanks to my chunking strategy.

Kana, sure. Kanji... nope. Unfortunately the Japanese writing system isn't phonemic so if you learn to read it fluently, it'll almost definitely be after you've mastered the spoken language. But yeah, I guess you mean learning the kana plus a load of basic kanji, in which case, cool. As for general language-learning advice, mine is: alongside everything else, make sure you learn the grammar of the language, explicitly. Some Europeans might think this is odd advice, but in England (and the UK generally?) there is so little focus on grammar at school that some people may not realsie how fundamental this is to "getting" a language.

The webchat here is working fine for me for now at least. And of course you should all use real IRC clients.

Or Mooglish.

Just being an English speaker doesn't automatically make you able to understand every variety of English.

You don't seem to be there now...

These days, lol is merely punctuation...

Time to poke people in the chat again...

(double post because I'm just that funny)

Fair enough, hence my "if any." Anyway, let's all play nicely and get back to hating racists.

I'm not even sure what (if any) point you're trying to make here. I hoped obvious sarcasm was obvious. But yeah, it seems fairly clear that there are multiple uses of chav, some of which are classist and many of which aren't. But I don't see why everyone responded to chair with such hatred just because he suggested it was an inherently classist term.

Yeah, because telling someone to fuck off and calling them stupid is the intellectual way to win a debate.

[insert batsignal] So far the only person I've had a conversation with has been a random Turkish guy who wanted to improve his English.

She in fact has a genuine obsession with shit.

Glasses are for people who know they're awesome even with glasses. Although they should never be worn with shirts with small checks, or with black tie. And girls invariably look good with glasses. [/subjectivism]

It's under £7 on Kindle! Which i one of the only reasons I got it that way (I don't even have an Kindle, I use it on my phone). But yeah, I'll let you know how it is - I read the first chapter so far and it was quite gripping in a typical Murakami way.

All purely digital purchases...