Language Overflow

CowperKettle

02:26

> The word dime comes from the Old French disme (now dîme), meaning "tithe" or "tenth part", from the Latin decima [pars].

Cardinal

03:55

@AIQ (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ

Forfeit (sport)

In various sports, a forfeit is a method in which a match automatically ends, and the forfeiting team loses. There are two distinct forms of forfeiture. One occurs when a team is unable (or refuses) to meet the basic standards for playing the game, either before the game begins or as a result of actions that happen during the match. In such a case, the team not forfeiting wins the match. Another is punitive forfeiture, in which a team has been found to have broken the rules of a sanctioning body during a match they have won and must have the results stricken from the record; whether or not the...

Anonymous

@Cardinal Yep. And that's per-game vocabulary. In some games like chess, you resign.

Cardinal

@snailplane Nods

Cardinal

06:03

I just wrote:

I find the definitions conveying different definitions. Actually, length, rhythm, and the rhythm pattern are three different things. Not sure, what makes you confuse. — Cardinal 2 mins ago

is "I find something doing something else" an idiomatic sentence to say?

Anonymous

09:25

@Cardinal It's grammatical, but it's not what you want to say.

Anonymous

You should think of it like this:

Anonymous

> I find [(that) the definitions convey different definitions].

Anonymous

Here, I find means something like 'it seems to me (that X)'.

Anonymous

Yours is more like this:

Anonymous

> I find [the definitions (which are) conveying different definitions].

Anonymous

09:27

Which is possible in the right context, a sort of present-tense narration where you describe happening across some definitions, then you supply a little extra information about those definitions, but it doesn't seem like that's what you wanted to say.

Anonymous

I think that, most of the time, it isn't what anyone would want to say.

Anonymous

So I'd suggest just using convey instead.

Anonymous

Also, for the last sentence I'd go with something like "Not sure what you're confused by here, exactly."

Anonymous

The left-edge deletion of I'm is fine (it makes the sentence sound more casual), but it would have to be "what makes you confused" to be grammatical the way you've worded it. I'd just word it a bit differently, myself.

AIQ

10:11

@snailplane I see you have gone back to plane! Not that I knew you when you were a plane previously ... How good are you in your third language? Are you as good in it as you are in your second? I am learning Spanish, but I am not young anymore, my brain doesn't work as good as before. I don't know how long it will take me to gain fluency ...

Anonymous

@AIQ I haven't used French nearly as much as Japanese. Spanish even less.

Anonymous

If you want to get good at Spanish, just try to put all of your time into Spanish for a while. Don't do anything in any other language if you can avoid it.

AIQ

Japanese is your second language?

Anonymous

Just make friends and speak to them in Spanish constantly, and stop thinking "am I going to be able to learn this? How good am I?"

Anonymous

Naw, not chronologically, but it's the language I've learned the best, so I figured that might be what you meant by second.

Anonymous

10:15

Spanish is my second language.

Anonymous

But yeah, stop evaluating, just start doing, and do as much communication as possible.

Anonymous

Obviously that has to include a lot of input and not just output.

Anonymous

What happens as we get older isn't that we no longer have neuroplasticity, it's not that we lose the capability to learn a new language, the sounds, the grammar, and so on. Instead, what happens is we get really good at the languages we know, and our brains get really optimized for those cases. We fail to recognize distinctions that are irrelevant to the languages we know well, because we naturally optimize away the brainpower we would spend on those, since it doesn't normally buy us anything.

3

AIQ

Okay, I am just learning basic things now from Youtube and Edx ...

Anonymous

And so learning new languages becomes more difficult, but it's not like we can't do it. You don't lose the capability to recognize the sounds of the world's languages as you age.

CowperKettle

10:19

@snailplane Wow, such an unbreviloquent sentence!

waves hello

Anonymous

@CowperKettle Thanks! Maybe someday I'll manage a Brexitoquent sentence.

AIQ

Snailcar you are a gem, thanks!

ooops, I mean plane

Anonymous

For more information about the science of language acquisition, specifically as pertains to my lengthy starred message above, I highly recommend Anne Cutler's Native Listening.

Anonymous

@AIQ Don't sweat the vehicular polymorphism. Any ol' vehicle is fine.

Decapitated Soul