(no subject)

[shadowkat]

1. Hmmm...interesting:

North Carolina Republican Calls it Quits with GOP, Joins Democratic Party. Now if everyone else in the country would make the same decision, all would be well.

Can't say I blame him. Just don't understand why more people aren't jumping ship? Because if they did, maybe Trump would slither back under whatever rock he had crawled out from under. I preferred it when he was busy with the Celebrity Apprentice and Miss America. Damn, NBC for canceling. That kept him busy. And easy to ignore. Now he's everwhere - in the book store, on the television, in the newspapers,on the internet, it's getting harder and harder to ignore the idiot.

2. Celiac disease, and, more generally, gluten intolerance, is a growing problem worldwide, but especially in North America and Europe, where an estimated 5% of the population now suffers from it. Symptoms include nausea, diarrhea, skin rashes, macrocytic anemia and depression. It is a multifactorial disease associated with numerous nutritional deficiencies as well as reproductive issues and increased risk to thyroid disease, kidney failure and cancer. Here, we propose that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide, Roundup®, is the most important causal factor in this epidemic.

Weird. Except I think I had this since I was a child, so not really sure what fish have to do with it.

3. The Wonderbag as a Slow Cooker

4. This Tree Beautifully Reveals the Relationships Between Languages



Click at the link above to get a poster of it.

And go here for Nordic Languages Chart

Comments

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

This chart is about genetic relationships. English borrowed from French wholesale, but in terms of where English came from, it's more closely related to German and Norwegian. Which just goes to show you that language trees can't tell you everything you might want to know.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I thought it was mainly interesting, but not overly informative. Leaving too many things out of the mix.

I remember my mother telling me that German was in some respects easier to learn because of its direct relationship to English than say Spainish, which sort of is counter-intuitive, if you learned English first. She sucked at German, though. But my immediate family sucks at language in general. My father tried Russian (still knows five phrases), my mother tried German, my brother tried Spainish, and I tried French -- I got the furthest and remember the most. But it did throw my English off considerably. For years, I was adding "e"'s to the end of words and screwing up tenses. Also, I could learn to read/write it - but not speak it or understand spoken french. The problem was basically the same one I had learning to speak English...certain sounds I can't make sense of. I hear them, but they don't translate in my head, they are garbled. So I'd hear a sentence, but it would get out of wack somehow. I don't understand it exactly - this is what a specialist told me. (I've been tested, they don't call it dyslexia by the way -- they call it visual and auditory coordination something or other...Psychologists apparently hate the term dyslexia, they feel it isn't definitive or clear enough, like the other long and impossible to remember description is?)

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

Understanding spoken languages takes practice. When I was in grad school taking my Russian proficiency test, we didn't have to speak, but we did have to do a listening test. One of my good friends turned to me as soon as that test was over and exclaimed, "That was so easy!" I replied to her, still shaken a bit from the test, "I didn't think it was so easy!" Turns out I did significantly better than she did on that section of the test. I think she missed some of the subtle things that were going on, on the tape. Still over all we both passed the test (grammar, reading, writing and listening) and only about half the candidates did on that occasion.

Personally I've had quite a bit of practice by now. I can understand most spoken Slavic languages, though I only know Russian grammar reasonably well. I can read Spanish slowly, but the frequent Spanish conversations I hear in my neighborhood grocery, mostly are beyond me. I can understand a good deal of the careful Spanish they speak on Spanish language TV. (That's where I first learned about 9/11!) I can understand carefully spoken Italian though I never studied it. I can read some French, but I can only catch a spoken French word here and there, because it sounds much different from the Spanish, and I never had anything, but a class in reading French. I took German in college, but most of that is gone.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Let's see 6 years of French, 2 months living with a French family in high school, various French poetry contests, and doing a French Cafe where we had to speak it and do a menu, and oh, a French tutor, and a year of French in college.

I don't know, practice doesn't appear to have been the issue here. ;-)

Although it may have been the horrid teachers...