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    • Showing only topics with the tag "language". Back to normal view

    10. What is a non-problematic word that you avoid using?

      ~talk Ask (survey)
      We all have words we dislike for one reason or another. I am specifically talking about words that are non-problematic, so slurs and politically incorrect words are out of the scope of this post....

      We all have words we dislike for one reason or another. I am specifically talking about words that are non-problematic, so slurs and politically incorrect words are out of the scope of this post. I am talking about words that you find inane, dense, overly broad, vague, imprecise, pedantic, confusing, or inadequate for any reason. Maybe you just don't like how they sound.

      As long as it is not a slur or politcally incorrect, for the purposes of this post, anything goes! Any language too!

      65 votes

    36. How many languages do you speak?

      ~humanities.languages Ask (survey)
      How many languages y'all speak? From how many different language families? How many scripts can you read? Any special grammatical quirks that your languages have? It doesn't matter if it's A2...

      How many languages y'all speak? From how many different language families? How many scripts can you read? Any special grammatical quirks that your languages have?

      It doesn't matter if it's A2 level or C2 level, share it with us!

      33 votes

    42. How did you learn to read?

      ~humanities.languages Ask
      Question is as stated in the title. How did you learn to read? I am re-listening to the great podcast, "Sold a Story" and it has prompted a lot of questions to myself, and now to others. So, I'm...

      Question is as stated in the title. How did you learn to read?

      I am re-listening to the great podcast, "Sold a Story" and it has prompted a lot of questions to myself, and now to others.

      So, I'm curious, how did you learn to read and what do you remember about it? I am extra interested in people who have learned from "non-phonetic" languages, and also have a new curiousity about French, which I consider a language that does not match the spelling of its spoken and written words (if that makes sense, I'm sure that is my own bias there, as an English speaker).

      My own reading experience

      I can't recall how I learned to read as a baby baby, but I have a lot of pictures of me with books from a very young age.

      I do remember being taught how to "read" aka how to take tests well that involved reading. For me I was taught like this:

      Look at the questions following the written material. Keep those in your mind. Some of those have direct passages referenced, go to those passages.

      When you are inside a paragraph, the topic sentence (first) tells you what the paragraph is about, and what point the author is trying to prove. The middle shit is usually examples and possibly useless, because the final sentence, is the conclusion, which reminds you of what the whole paragraph is about, and what you should think when you finish the paragraph.

      OFC, this fits in neatly with the "five paragraph essay", which is introduction, three examples, conclusion. It's like recursive writing.

      I want to talk about this way of learning to read, because I feel it really fucked with my ability to enjoy reading and my current attention span1. These days, I feel my eyes almost follow this pattern instinctively, there's a lot of going around the paragraph non-linearly, it feels like scanning for "useful" information while also "discarding" useless information. It's almost like I only know how to skim now, but I can't tell. I also have ADHD, so I'm sure this affects my methods of reading.

      However, since I learned this skill very early (at least at age 9), I can't help but wonder if the natural inclination was fueled up by this method of teaching, or what.

      1. When I would read fictional material which has less rigidity, I also felt I was taught to figure out what the tester was going to ask about and focus on that versus actually enjoying reading. Basically all my joy for reading is messed up.
      32 votes

    48. Non-American, English language news sources

      ~news Ask (recommendations)
      Hey all, I've asked in the past but it feels even more pressing and I'm not sure I got all the recs, I'm looking for good news sources - newspaper, magazine, radio, etc - that provide a...

      Hey all, I've asked in the past but it feels even more pressing and I'm not sure I got all the recs, I'm looking for good news sources - newspaper, magazine, radio, etc - that provide a non-American, but preferably English language but translatable can work, perspective on their national affairs, American affairs and international affairs more broadly.

      I assume Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand are among those most accessible, but I don't know which sources are more reliable. Or I can get a "news update" from RadioNZ or RTÉ but I'm not sure what programs to catch for more of international news.

      I can certainly check bias on a good bias checking website but if there are particular biases I'd love a heads up on those too. For example the Guardian is generally really good except I notice they're specifically bad about trans topics.

      I want to avoid tabloids, and people whose news is 3 hour daily videos. I'd like to avoid extreme bias. Free is great but I'm willing to subscribe to online access for a Canadian newspaper for example.

      (I am also interested in independent writers, like Heather Cox Richardson who is a historian that does daily news analysis and writeups with context. But I'm only following a few and they're all American so happy to diversify my sources. )

      Just looking to get the perspective on, well, lots of things from others countries and I have a lot of radio time I could be using for it.

      30 votes