Thursday, July 18, 2013

Mid-week Miscellany



OK....maybe I'm reading too much into this, but....

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They really should assign different colored packaging for products meant for different body parts.  Just sayin'.

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You know you're having a bad day when you come home from work to find your house looking like this:


It seems the City of Foat Wuth, TX hired a contractor to demolish a home down the street that had been condemned.  The one that should have been demolished was at 9708 Watercress.  The one that was demolished was at 9716 Watercress.  Maybe they should have given the guy driving the bulldozer a literacy test?

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Well, that's one way to chip away at the budget deficit.

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All is going well with foreign language (French) study.  Just as with English, conjugating verbs is a pain in the arse.  The idea of the "total immersion" method where you don't study all that noun/verb stuff but just dive in and learn by speaking is sounding pretty good, but I looked into the Rosetta Stone program and found it had a lot of dissatisfied customers.  Any other options?

Just thinking....if I were to move to France or Italy or Germany, etc, and spoke English, wouldn't I then be speaking a "foreign language"?  Ta Da!

S




8 comments:

  1. Maybe you should take a trip to Canada where they have French and English for everything. It'd be like living flash cards!

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  2. Being half-German, and often spending holidays with relatives in Germany as a child, I naturally learned German at school. German used to be much like English, and Low German – now only preserved as local dialects – still is. But Martin Luther decided it was too easy, and should be as complicated as Latin, and created High German. A thousand curses on him! It was quite a lesson in how complicated a Latin-based language can be. Simply remembering the genders (of which there are three: masculine, feminine and neuter) of all the nouns means you have to pause before you can even start a sentence. Then you have to work out what case you’re using, and from the gender and case decide what the endings of the article and the adjective are – even the noun with the genitive case. It’s not something you can just dive into. I can still remember learning by rote the different forms according to case of ‘a/the young man’. I still wake up at night screaming sometimes.

    Of course if you go to live in another country (preferably avoiding any use of English), and if everyone you meet is prepared to correct you, and explain why you’ve got it wrong, that is the best. But in reality… you need to do it from a combination of learning the basics and application.

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    Replies
    1. So Simon, if I say, "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod" you know what I'm talking about???

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  3. Humor aside, I applaud your desire to learn a new language. Kudos to you.

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  4. They should put a big red X on buildings to be knocked down like surgeons do before an operation.

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  5. Scott, confusing your deodorant with your hairspray is a VERY SMALL problem compared to confusing Preparation H with your toothpaste.

    Just sayin'.

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  6. How on earth did you get picture of the queen and the matching one of the flag? Long live the Queen!

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