Supergrunch
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Everything posted by Supergrunch
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This is basically the reason most people never end getting very far with foreign languages. While recognition and pronunciation of words and sounds is undeniably important, grammar is so fundamental to the whole process that without a good grammatical understanding of the language, you won't be able to make any sense out of what you're learning. Well, that's mostly just marketing bullshit really. :p Linguistic competence is basically composed of grammatical competence and lexical knowledge, and while it sounds like this product is good for teaching you the latter, I suggest you supplement your grammar with some other study. (Generative) linguists call languages that do this pro drop (mainly for theoretical reasons), contrasting with non-pro drop languages like English and French. Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Latin are also examples of languages that are pro drop - investigating the linguistic features that permit languages to be like this can get very interesting. It seems to be related to how complete conjugation systems are, but it gets somewhat complex.
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Same, but then all such judgements are basically arbitrary. It has very similar syntax to German, anyway.
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Assuming of course that you should even use all those words, which in many languages you don't have to. Anyway, good luck trying to find a meaning for "gozaimasu" - it means about as much as the word "do" in "I do not." :wink: As a linguist my professional description of dutch is "like German, but somehow squeakier." :p
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I would agree with this, the most fundamental thing to learning a foreign language is getting a good grasp of the grammar, which I wish the British education system would appreciate. It does depend on whether you actually want to learn the language or just build up a mental phrasebook however, and it's very unlikely that such an activity would do you any harm.
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Hmm, had a day of utter procrastination today. Got up about 10, did very little then went to one lecture, after about 10 minutes of which I realised it was more introductory than I had thought, but I stayed for the rest because it was still somewhat interesting, there were only about 8 people present, and I know the lecturer and wouldn't want to annoy him. Then spent the rest of the day trying to avoid revision in many ways, mostly by watching crap on iplayer and so forth. Then went for a walk with my girlfriend (who had by contrast been working like hell), which for some reason left me fairly exhausted, despite a total lack of any real exertion. Ah well, fun times. Must actually do some revision soon. And I'm not even an art student. (not that it's my beret or looks good on me )
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Well then, if you remain to be like me you should find your sexuality hitting you like a train relatively soon. :wink: Unless of course they want to be physically hurt.
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Go for it, this is one of my specific interests. I don't believe anything like this will be a substitute for hard graft, but it may well give some people a good start on learning particular languages.
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I very rarely eat breakfast. In fact I usually wake up feeling as if eating anything will make me feel sick, so unless I force myself to do so I don't usually eat anything until at least noon. -
I actually don't know what you mean... I was a bit like that at your age - while I definitely knew I was straight and attracted to girls, I never really had any crushes or anything, and had little desire for a girlfriend. I think some people just take a bit longer to develop that kind of side of themselves. That said, I was still fairly fussed about sex. :p
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Yep, Eenuh and jayseven speak the truth. Science does (mostly) understand women, even if they seem supernatural to you Jav.
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Reading Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. "And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring? Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God." Good stuff so far.
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Solution: Young people should drink a lot and deprive themselves of sleep to make their immune systems less efficient and so survive swine flu. Shamelessly stolen from Ben Goldacre, if I recall correctly.
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Re: The pill - why do people think it so important for the guy to wear a condom when the girl is on the pill? Sure, it decreases the liklihood of pregnancy, but (correctly) using just the pill is significantly safer than using just condoms, which is what's usually recommended. Of course if it's not a closed relationship then things are different, as the pill does nothing about STIs. Re: The original question - Hmm, to be honest I can almost imagine accepting the child as my own, although I suppose there could be difficulties. Either way, the cheating itself would be far more of a problem for me, but that too I might get over (in the extremely unlikely case of a certain someone reading this, do not take that as cheating being acceptable ). Anyway, I'd let the girl decide for herself, unless she needed any help in her decision. There does indeed seem to be an unresolveable imbalance of interests in a minority of cases. Disclaimer: Apologies for any spelling or semantic errors and/or odd views; I'm somewhat pissed.
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Aiming to send out a message to the world!
Supergrunch replied to Eenuh's topic in General Chit Chat
Happy birthday dude. -
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I got 79% once. :wink: In our department you can't actually get a score higher than 85%. So I'm of course aiming for 85% on my current essay.
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Time's World's Most Influential Person Is Moot.
Supergrunch replied to Dante's topic in General Chit Chat
I think marblecake is the irc channel of a group of hackers that were involved (or similar), and the other bit is a reference to The Game (you just lost it). -
First I was like: Then, I lol'd. These pictures are fairly awesome.
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I'm reading Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein at the moment, The Duty of Genius. Extremely interesting book.
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Viruses pick up genetic material an awful lot more than bacteria - in the latter case it's just limited to transfer of plasmids, whereas viruses (especially certain bacteriophages) do all sorts of crazy things. Including, in some cases, integrating themselves into the DNA of the host and lying dormant, then when given the right stimulus extracting themselves along with a bit of the host's DNA and using the cell machinery to form huge numbers of replicas, killing the host in the process.
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Viruses are well known for picking up sections of DNA from their host organisms - there are various ways in which this can occur.
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I know, hence why I didn't do it... Damn you Flinky!
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Joe uses eyepatch! It's not very effective... Jamba uses opinion! Critical hit!
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*resists the urge to summarise bluey's relationships in pokebattle form*
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No problem - it helps to learn the specific uses of each test before the exam, and you'll find that it's normally fairly obvious which is appropriate. For instance, contingency tests are used if they give you a table of data and you have to check that the results aren't merely a result of chance; regular chi-squared tests are used when checking the accuracy of a model against data; the basic t-test is used to find whether the sample mean is representative of the sample mean; two sample is used when two population means are being compared (though if there are merely two pieces of data for each member of the population, you should use a paired-sample t-test instead, or even Wilcoxon signed-rank if you want to be non-parametric about things); z-tests are used to check if your data is normally distributed; etc. (not sure which tests are on your course) It can still be easy to get confused though - it's best just to try and think clearly about what you actually want to find out.