@ColleenV Me, I've given up taking Windows restore points seriously. If push comes to shove and something gets broken, I never seem to be able to restore to a previous "unharmed" state. Mostly, though, that was a problem before I started using Win 7 about nine years ago. And why I don't want to move on to Win 10.

Artificial intelligence turns brain activity into speech

Amazing.

Country song of the day:

Australian song of the day:

@Robusto I actually went a step further and switched everything over to Apple. I haven’t had to troubleshoot a problem that required me to do anything beyond search the Apple support site since. I am happy to trade all that customization potential for something that just works. I'm also fortunate enough to be able to afford an iMac (I did get it used though)

@ColleenV I have an older Mac Pro and a somewhat newer (6-yr.-old) homemade Win 7 box. The problem with Apple is they make great software but crap hardware. My Mac Pro runs really hot because the heat sinks have separated from the CPU cores. But I have so much stuff on that machine that I can't afford to just dump it, because Windows doesn't have Final Cut Pro or Digital Performer, etc., and my Adobe Creative Studio is on the Mac platform and at this point can't be switched.

Also see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/….

@userr2684291 not really, but I guess that's where I start!

And web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm as a quick reference.

awesome, that's what I was looking for. Thanks a lot!!

No worries.

@FelipeOliveira By the way, most dictionaries, and the LDOCE is one of such dictionaries, offer a pronunciation guide along with the meaning of a word. You can click on the speaker icons (for British English and American English) to listen to the pronunciation and compare that to the IPA transcription right next to it.

Of course, the pronunciation of a word in careful speech often slightly differs from the one you can hear in conversation.

That's a way more pratical, and active way of learning the system. It will help me a lot

I usually have no problems with american english pronunciation, but i'm starting to have questions about sound variations in the japanese language. So I wanna write some questions about it, but had no clue how to express the sounds I hear, and interpret the possible answer

@FelipeOliveira Ah, I see. Have you seen this? I don't know if that'll help you, though. At any rate, you'd do well to discuss that on Japanese.SE / their chatroom if they're active there. (Or just wait for snailboat.)

But yeah, the IPA is, as the name says, international, so it's very likely used to describe Japanese pronunciation as well.

Yeah, I just wanted to know the "IPA System" and knew i'd get a quicker answer there, I will move further discussions to there!! Thank you again for your help!!

No worries.

This reminds me... I gotta learn a couple Chinese characters today. I'm currently at 这.

which dialect are you learning?

Haven't really decided yet / don't really know. I'm just learning characters for fun, lol.

that's awesome, that's by far the hardest part of japanese for me. I've just bought two new novels, entirely in japanese, to help me with Kanji

I think I'm gonna go for the Standard Mandarin one. Mandarin is the most common, so I think its standard variety will do.

But... I don't know anything about that stuff yet, so it's not important for now.

And standard mandarin seems to be fairly easier than cantonese, in both characters and pronunciation

Asian languages are so interesting, I heard that the grammar in Mandarin has a lot of simmilarities with english though

japanese grammar has nothing to do with english or romance languages, it's scary at first, but I'd argue its grammar is simpler than the one in english

I wouldn't know.

The little I've read about Chinese grammar, it seems fairly straightforward...

And yeah, I'm learning simplified characters, which I suppose restricts me a little.

Are you learning those characters as a whole, or did you learn radicals first? (i'd assume chinese characters are constructed by radicals as well)

I'm learning them as a whole.

Yeah, I think they're composed of radicals/elements as well.

Well, by "as well", you mean as well as the variety used in Japanese.

@Robusto yeah, I still have my PC around for a couple of things. My husband does all of his design work on Mac and just uses an old Surface to drive his CNC machine. Everyone’s situation is a bit different and they certainly do make it hard to move between OSes

@FelipeOliveira Ah, yeah. The dictionary I'm using already performs such a decomposition for me.

Soon I think we will be back to dumb terminals and renting time on the “mainframe” (I think they all it the cloud these days :))

@FelipeOliveira I've only just begun learning these, so they're fairly easy, but thanks for the recommendation.

I'll probably just brute force them, though. But I've realized myself that I can learn parts of a character separately.

there's a method where you link stories to the kanji, so when you see a kanji, instead of remembering it's meaning, you remember it's story and then it's meaning within it

there's a book called "remembering" the kanji, I head people can learn pretty fast with it

i'm sure there's something like that for mandarin too, but tbh i'm also learning them by brute force pretty much

I had already learned many kanji by just chatting in japanese, so it was heard to switch methods midway

I mean, aren't the Chinese characters used in Japanese pretty much the same thing as those used in Chinese?

From what I remember, Japanese simplified some of the (traditional?) Chinese characters, and Chinese (Mandarin) did the same, but differently.

There are some that are the same in shape and meaning, some change in meaning (like ridiculously disconnected from one another) and some are just completly different and exist in only one of the languages. I could be wrong, but in terms of complexity of the kanji, from harder to easier would be Cantonese, Japanese, and then Mandarin

Japanese characters also have two readings, one related to the old chinese way of reading and one related to a japanese only meaning/reading

on'yomi and kun'yomi that is

Right. But the basis is the same, is what I'm saying. So, in my ignorant opinion, they're the same thing, lol.

which adds another layer of difficulty to it, like there's not enough already lol

Yeh. I don't have a use for Japanese, but I might have for Chinese. And that's why I'm learning it (slowly).

I feel like much of that stuff could be simplified if they both transitioned to something akin to pinyin. You'd still have to learn words, but you wouldn't have to learn the different characters.

At least not that many of them.

I see! I started learning japanese out of interests in the culture. And after that, I begun to find asian culture interesting as a whole. I might as well try Mandarin somewhere in the future

even though I find chinese characters very hard, I find them very interesting, sets those languages apart. If it was too easy, anyone could do it... since it's not, it makes it more interesting IMO

Haha.