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MrW TAC’13 Schnitzel/Mir/Sakura(de/ru/ja) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5229 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 33 of 53 24 January 2013 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This is a placeholder to report my progress or lack thereof during this TAC
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| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5059 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 34 of 53 25 January 2013 at 6:58am | IP Logged | |||||
Humanities are not easier than sciences and it is not easier to hide one's ignorance there. Try to prove you know a language that you don't know, for example. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5985 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 35 of 53 25 January 2013 at 9:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Here in the UK you are expected to specialise in just 3 or 4 subjects in the last two years of high school for the national A level exams. I remember a few years ago seeing some stats on pass rates and grades across different subjects, and was surprised to see that higher grades were generally awarded in maths and science compared to other subjects generally perceived to be "easier". My guess is that lazy minds do tend to be steered towards the humanities. The results suggest they don't do a very good job of faking it there.
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| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6623 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 36 of 53 25 January 2013 at 9:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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On the other hand, maths and sciences often give somewhat less room for interpretation. I studied economics here in Norway. I know it probably doesn't quite count as a science, but there is a lot of calculation and there is also a lot of writing so it's perhaps somewhere in between.
I always got A's on the exams with a lot of calculation and B's on the exams with a lot of writing. I mentioned it to one of my law professors and he said that all my arguments where very good and I included all the points and references in the laws that I should have taken into account, but my writing wasn't "elegant" enough. There was nothing actually wrong with my writing, it just lacked the elegance and beauty that the examiners like to see. Another professor said that she never gives A's because no one could possibly be perfect. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Dagane Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4514 days ago 259 posts - 324 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishB2, Galician Studies: German Studies: Czech | Message 37 of 53 25 January 2013 at 3:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's a complex question. I think too many people and almost every student think non scientific subjetcs are there just to be memorised. I think they must be thought, so I never learnt anything by heart and always had high marks in them save for foreign languages - I hated them__
But I also think such subjects are easier to pass. Perhaps you need even more time to study enough to pass the exams, but you don't need to think through what you're studying. So you can even study without learning. In the end, the minimum effort you must do could be more, but it's easier to tackle. My stance is that that's mostly because of the way teachers and study plans consider the subjects. As for Spain, I don't think we deserve this, it's pretty unfair. I know what has been happening since 1975, but I'm still very infuriated. One year and a half ago I finished my degree and what could I do? I did it all well at the university while managing to improve some hobbies I like and having fun. And the response of my country is that the best option is going abroad. I'm now going abroad, though because I wanted to do so. If I hadn't, I don't know what I'd have done. By the way, our society is way too passive. I was part of the very first 15M, and we were so few. Where were everybody? Weren't they aware of the shrouded horizon? Anyway, I also had problems with Skype, so I'm not sure of their usage as a way to keep a conversation in a foreign language to learn yet. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| BAnna Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4625 days ago 409 posts - 616 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Turkish | Message 38 of 53 27 January 2013 at 6:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've seen are a number of negative comments about Skype connectivity (not only in this log, but other places as well). I have had no problems at all using it for either video or audio calls between the US and Germany/Austria. I wonder if the problems could be locale-specific?
My own language learning experience has been enriched by Skype, since in my location in the US, there aren't that many native German speakers who want to improve their English, probably because they already live here and are experiencing an English immersion situation. Ironically in light of the techie vs. fuzzy (technology v. humanities) discussion above, Skype could possibly be viewed as technology in the service of humanities, although I have a lot of ambivalence about technology and its unintended consequences, so I'll say no more and go do something useful like grammar exercises... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5229 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 39 of 53 28 January 2013 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi all, I'm not sure if my posts are too long and cover too many topics in one swoop even if I do paragraphs unlike this, but I don't really feel like posting n separate messages unless I see a real need to do so. As always, feel free to comment.
WRT to Skype I upgraded it and now it runs quite smoothly and doesn't complain anymore that 'my computer is too slow'. For the computer illiterates out there, such claims were a goddamn lie because I haven't changed in my configuration one bit. Such false claims are just a common strategy to make users upgrade and avoid supporting older software versions, which is not that bad until the makers decide not to support 'slow' computers either and force you to buy new hardware. Boy do I hate this... BTW I still experience hiccups with it, but at least all of them should have a real reason now. OK, now for the more direct responses... @g-bod, Brun: thank you for your input, I had a couple of idiotic teachers like that, so I know how it feels. About how good lazy minds are at hiding, read on :) @Mapk, I find your comments generally very sensible but I'll strongly disagree this time. First one thing that may be just a linguistic slip-up: what's not true can't be proven -- if I don't speak a language there's no way I can prove I do. However, I can pretend, and I probably can fake it to a degree. I didn't say humanities are easier, and of course you can't hide your ignorance in any field forever, but provided you're surrounded by people that are more ignorant than you, or for whatever reasons won't expose you, you can do it for a considerable while. As an example, I really really hope it's different in other countries, but here we have a hypertrophied university body with an important part of fake investigators. Given their relevance in impact indexes and such (an admittedly imperfect quality measure), you can tell they're not deceiving many people outside the country but still they're not told on by their local colleagues, with whom they share the interest of milking the state for funds, nor, of course, will they be found out by the ignorant masses which will even applaud them as they yell when they feel any economic cutbacks will affect them. This is a generalized issue here, perfectly parallel to political corruption, and anyone who knows their stuff can tell after being with such Spanish 'investigators' after a while. The funny part is how some of them even think they're doing relevant stuff, but they don't ever wonder why no one uses their 'results', and they often give off clear giveaway signals, f.e. using deliberately obscure language to hide however little they have to say. But I digress... So, people hide (or at least try to do so) their ignorance from each other all the time, even with people knowledgeable in the same field. How can this be? Because ignorance of some areas doesn't imply ignorance of others, just the same as knowledge. Now, this is where the difference between sciences and humanities come into play, and makes the hiding much easier in the humanities. Knowledge in the sciences is much more hierarchical, meaning that if you fail to know one basic area, there is so much you can't possibly know about others that you'll be exposed as a phony as soon as you claim to. Say it is public domain you can't do math beyond basic arithmetic -- maybe you can claim knowing something about Geology or Biology (certainly nothing to do with population studies or radioactive dating) but if you pretend being deft with Chemistry or Physics you'll be found rather soon. Economics? Out of reach, too. Or, if you know no chemistry, how much geology or biology can you possibly know? Nothing at the cell level, nothing at the rock composition level. OTOH you can be a complete ignorant of history yet know a great deal of current Geography (including the 'social' aspects) inside out, and these are two adjacent, deeply intertwined subjects.
Both perspectives are only partially right. In any field or camp you hit sooner (humanities) or later (sciences) the barrier where there's more stuff that you simply must know (i.e. have memorized) before going any further than it is possible or practical to handle with minimal memorization. You really want to know that every theorem or result you rely on is true; even if you'd want to, it's not possible to reason why it is every time. So, in the end you memorize way more than you don't, regardless of field. Not saying that reasoning things and in general establishing links between bits of information doesn't help, though -- rather to the contrary because that's the most powerful working mode of the brain: by association.
I wrote 'statistically', just as in 'the per capita chicken count is statistically 1' if I have two and you have none. It is precisely because the response 'of your country' has been so negative that we, albeit statistically, deserve this -- don't delude yourself: there's no such thing as 'our country', there's only other Spaniards whose deeds amount to such a state of things that anyone in his right must ponder the option of leaving. Humankind might have gone through the first economic crisis because of ignorance, but that excuse expired two hundred years ago, for their mechanics are perfectly known and quite predictable. Now we still undergo them out of sheer stupidity, and if a big enough country does especially worse during one of them, I'm sorry but it's very probably due to what its inhabitants do. Is one to blame for what others did? That's IMO the real question, if one really didn't. The most severe of Spain's (of all Spaniards as a group) sins are 1) that passivity you mention, for a few couldn't have done so much evil if a majority wouldn't have let them*, and 2) a widespread moral resignation (en español: renuncia, no resignación) to look at the consequences of one's own actions, that results in the generalized belief (and practice) that it's OK to abuse 'the system' in any way because you're not really abusing anyone. This is beautifully rendered in this pearl of wisdom from a politician that some of you will recognize: "public money is nobody's" (so it's not a problem that it is stolen, right?), but it's actually the other way around: every time the system is abused by anyone, everyone is being abused. I, however, have long ago resigned to make people snap out of it. *Remember: you can sin in thought, in word, in commission, and in omission. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 40 of 53 26 February 2013 at 12:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hey mrwarper, how's life down in Spain? Any news from the plain?
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