English Language Learners

Mistu4u

03:18

@all the users of ELL, how about creating a meta post as to how to write good questions, so that the site does not seem to be new user hostile. For example, maximum of this user's questions were either closed or not voted upon.

So I think there should be a meta post describing all the Dos and Donts of this site and how to write a good question an an ideal way. Honestly, I don't think a new user visits FAQ before posting and FAQ is not that so much clear about the practical situation.

Anonymous

03:50

@Mistu4u The closest thing we have right now is probably J.R.'s post, Details, Please

Anonymous

But a New User Guide type thing could be neat.

Mistu4u

@snailboat Hmm JR's post seems very good. I did not know that. From now on, I would refer new users to this post if they don't understand the way of posting clearly.

Mistu4u

04:09

@snailboat, I often wonder how much time do you remain online? :-O

In Us, it should be night, isn't it?

Its like you are the night-guard of ELL while the world is sleeping :-P

Anonymous

@Mistu4u I live in California, so I'm on the west coast of the U.S. That makes it 21:16 where I am

Anonymous

On the east coast, it's past midnight

Anonymous

I won't be going to bed for a couple hours yet

Mistu4u

@snailboat I am really a noob on those facts about US. So US is so large that east-coast and west-coast time differs that much! there must be several time-zones in US and different Standard Times!

Anonymous

04:27

@Mistu4u Yep! The contiguous 48 states (which is all of them except Hawaii and Alaska) have four main time zones: Pacific (PST/PDT), Mountain (MST/MDT), Central (CST/CDT), and Eastern (EST/EDT)

Anonymous

The S and D are for standard and daylight saving time, since we move the clock back an hour for about half the year.

Anonymous

Anyway, none of those details are particularly important to remember

Anonymous

I grew up in central time, near Chicago. When I moved out west to California, I moved two hours into the past! :-)

Anonymous

Alaska is in a fifth time zone, one hour earlier than west coast time. And Hawaii is another hour earlier yet!

Anonymous

So when you count those two, the U.S. goes across six time zones.

Mistu4u

04:29

@snailboat Actually, sometimes I feel a little awkward when my US friends on different chats in SE or in Facebook talk about these time-formats. Knowing them can hopefully relieve me of the embarrassment.

Anonymous

@Mistu4u You'd be surprised how often people in the U.S. don't really know what the abbreviations mean :-)

Mistu4u

@snailboat That happens in every country :-)

Anonymous

The abbreviations for Hawaii-Aleutian are HAST/HADT, and for Alaska they're AKST/AKDT.

Anonymous

That's because Alaska's abbreviation is AK. (All of the fifty states have two-letter abbreviations.)

Anonymous

So the main timezones for the U.S. are HAST/HADT, AKST/AKDT, PST/PDT, MST/MDT, CST/CDT, and EST/EDT

Anonymous

04:32

That's from west to east

Anonymous

I'm in the PST/PDT time zone :-)

Mistu4u

@snailboat Huh! A lot to take!

@snailboat It reminds me of Angels and Demons once again where Professor Langdon says "Damn! You guys don't even know your own history"

:P

Here is now 10.05AM. My father is going to the office and now I am about to eat my lunch :-)

Anonymous

Ah! Good morning :-)

Mistu4u

@snailboat Thank you!

:-)

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Well, if you want to remember the abbreviations, that's the list. But I don't think it's a big deal if you want to prioritize other things as more important

Anonymous

04:37

They say prioritizing is an important part of learn, since we all have limited time and there are more things to learn than we ever could, but...

Anonymous

Personally, I just learn whatever seems interesting to me! That way I keep my motivation up :-)

Anonymous

So I end up learning lots of oddball facts

Mistu4u

@snailboat True!

Hize

@snailboat

Mistu4u

@snailboat I follow the same rule. It also happened that before my semester exam in Computer Science, I was reading about WWII in Wikipedia!! (Can you believe that?))

Mom is calling for lunch. Bye @snailboat

Anonymous

04:52

@Mistu4u Have a good lunch!

Anonymous

@Hize Hello!

Mistu4u

05:09

@snailboat Completed my lunch. It was fine.

I think the concept of Lunch and Dinner in India is slightly different from UK and US. In breakfast, we don't eat a lot. We eat heavily in our lunch (past 12AM generally) or dinner (past 9PM generally).

Whereas, in US and UK, AFAIK, they eat heavily in the breakfast and the tiffin in the evening (I don't know what they call it) and eat a little in Lunch and dinner!

Anonymous

@Mistu4u You know, it kind of varies. I think people traditionally have dinner as the heaviest meal of the day here, but there are a lot of people who say "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" (that sentence has become somewhat trite through repetition, though I suppose it's true)

Anonymous

Me, I don't know. I don't differentiate between specific meals so much. If I have a big meal, it's usually breakfast or dinner. I very rarely eat a big lunch

Anonymous

Growing up, I never ate lunch at all.

Anonymous

A lot of my friends have very specific ideas about what kinds of foods are "breakfast foods", and what kinds of foods are "dinner foods", and so on

Anonymous

I don't really understand that. My body doesn't care what time of day I eat something at, as far as I can tell :-)

Mistu4u

05:16

@snailboat Looks like we follow the same. There is some routine working here.

<< Changing the topic >> BDW it reminds me, around here, people generally say (I am sure they don't know exactly happens!) that in US culture children leave their parent house, just after their adolescence, is that true?

I watch a lot of Hollywood movies, but it doesn't seem so necessarily true. But it seems chilren hate living with their parents, however their parents don't!

Anonymous

@Mistu4u I moved out when I was eighteen

Mistu4u

@snailboat Wow! So they do hate it...!

Anonymous

With the economy and such, they've been saying how it's less true in the last 10 or so years. People want to move out, but they can't because they can't find jobs

Anonymous

So I think people have increasingly been living at home with their parents

Mistu4u

For that a job is needed!

Anonymous

05:19

It's stigmatized, though

Anonymous

You're looked down on in U.S. society if you still live with your parents after you get out of high school

Anonymous

And yeah, people do say things like "I can't wait to get out of here" when they're teenagers waiting to move out

Mistu4u

@snailboat Seems strange to me. Around here, they are looked down upon, who don't look after their parents or live with them after being self-dependant. Also parents want their children to live with them.

Cultural difference, I guess!

or value differences.

Hize

That sounds weird.

Mistu4u

05:44

@Hize Yeah, too weird :D East-West difference I think.

Anonymous

American society is pretty weird, to be honest.

Mistu4u

@snailboat Goods and Bads are in every society I guess. Nothing can be ideal.

Like one thing, I like very much about American society, is the frankness among a family's members.

Children don't fear to ask anything they want to know about. Around here, parents don't participate in family talking much.

And they feel shy to talk about anything or everything.

Anonymous

07:53

What does is not designed to be used directly by language learners portion mean? — Mistu4u yesterday

Anonymous

08:09

@Mistu4u I remember specifically Geoffrey Pullum writing that CGEL wasn't designed to be used directly by language learners, but was a resource that could be used for (for example) making English textbooks to learn from

Anonymous

And it is highly technical

Anonymous

There's no reason a language learner can't use CGEL, but it certainly would be easier to use if you're already fluent and have some basic linguistics knowledge

Anonymous

The book does a good job of explaining the terms it uses, which is good, because they redefine a lot of things

Anonymous

But they also use linguistics jargon like obtain without explanation

Anonymous

And it has sentences like "In this grammar, moreover, we have significantly reduced the syntactic heterogeneity of the adverb category by redrawing the boundary between adverbs and prepositions"

Anonymous

08:13

Not terribly hard to understand, but if someone's having trouble understanding English, they'll probably trip over reduced the syntactic heterogeneity

Anonymous

They also wrote a textbook based on CGEL, called A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

Anonymous

CGEL is a comprehensive reference work, designed assuming that readers will read individual sections out of order, rather than working through the entire book

Anonymous

A Student's Introduction is a textbook designed to be worked through in order

Anonymous

And unlike CGEL, it doesn't require you to understand basic linguistics before you pick up the book.

Anonymous

(It's also only 300 pages instead of 1860)

Mistu4u

08:18

@snailboat Man, addition of this line is indeed funny. Seems like a book made for natives.

Anonymous

@Mistu4u I would say: a book made for fluent speakers with some linguistics background

Anonymous

I'm sure language learners can master technical jargon in their fields of choice, if they put the time into it :-)

Mistu4u

I follow Swan's grammar book. So far, seems a good choice for me (or anybody else).

Anonymous

Which book is that? Is it the one titled simply Grammar?

Anonymous

When I search online, I also see Practical English Usage

Mistu4u

08:22

Yeah, that one.

Anonymous

Is that one on the resources section yet?

Mistu4u

@snailboat That I have to see.

wait

Anonymous

A-ha, it is!

Anonymous

The other book I added to the resource list myself was Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace

Mistu4u

Okay, I am in a village now. So internet is a bit slow. Actually doing from a 2G network.

@snailboat Okay, never heard of it.

Anonymous

08:26

Unlike Strunk & White, you won't find hordes of angry linguists grumbling about Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace :-)

Anonymous

It was recommended by Arnold Zwicky on language log a few years back, so I picked it up

Anonymous

It's a book about style. It doesn't really help you write correct English

Mistu4u

@snailboat I see. Simple books should be recommended here.

awe

@Mistu4u Have you seen the experience lately for a fresh user? The FAQ have quite recently been re-designed to be more like a help center, which is greatly improved compared to the original FAQ. It is also been made more visible for unregistered/new users right there it their face:

Anonymous

@Mistu4u I think we should make it clear who the books are useful for. Learners are at all different levels, I think

Anonymous

08:29

A lot of the learners here are really pretty good at English, don't you think?

Mistu4u

@snailboat Agreed.

awe

Anonymous

When I added CGEL, it was because we (or maybe just I?) talk about the book sometimes, and I wanted to make it clear who the book was for. It's not targeted at language learners, but it is a book that will help people write good answers

awe

ell.stackexchange.com/about

Anonymous

Listenever is apparently going through CGEL, so I wish her the best of luck with that :-)

Mistu4u

08:31

@snailboat Oooo...How do you know that?

Anonymous

@Mistu4u She keeps posting quotes from it!

Mistu4u

@awe I am stating the problem is around asking questions...not understanding how ELL model works!

Anonymous

2

Q: future tense of a present tense

My time for the marathon next year will certainly be worse than it is tomorrow. (The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language) Is is being present tense saying is is the same tense of future as will (simultaneity); or is is anterior to will?

tenses

Mistu4u

@snailboat I see. She is stuck between "ELL" and "ELU"!

Anonymous

@Mistu4u I'll be honest. I don't really get the split between ELL and ELU.

Anonymous

08:33

I post technical stuff on ELU, and people are like "don't say that stuff. Use regular terms the way people are used to"

Anonymous

It says it's for "linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts"

Mistu4u

@snailboat Well the key concept between the differentiation is it.

But still even if we follow the rule problem still persists. Read this comment of mine.

@FumbleFingers, If the question is about Lit Crit (I did not really even try to understand the question), I think the problem this particular user is facing that (if at all she is a learner), she does not know whether it's a lit crit or not. If she posts in ELU and the question is rather simple, it gets closed there and if it's a lit crit and she is unable to understand that and posts here, the question gets closed. I think we need to think about this problem. — Mistu4u 3 hours ago

Anonymous

So I thought it'd be okay if I stuck to technical terms and modern grammar on ELU

Anonymous

I don't understand the Lit Crit thing. I never have

Anonymous

There's the question of syntax--how do the words fit together?

Anonymous

08:35

The question of semantics--what do the words mean?

Mistu4u

@snailboat, It's undeniable that you can't really differentiate between these two sister sites to microscopic level (I couldn't find any more better phrase).

How can a learner know which is LitCrit and what is common semantic?

So closing them in no time isn't fair.

Anonymous

Well, the words have a clear meaning.

Anonymous

I don't think there's really more than one possible interpretation

Anonymous

Literary criticism is supposed to be like

Anonymous

"What was the symbolic meaning behind the storms in The Great Gatsby?"

Mistu4u

08:38

I did not try to understand honestly. Fumble Fingers seems to be like jumping over the question...so I thought it must be a LitCrit

Anonymous

That's sort of a prototypical example where anyone can come up with their own "interpretation"

Mistu4u

@snailboat Hmm.

Anonymous

So when you say something is off-topic Lit Crit, you're saying "there is no interpretation here, the reader has to come up with their own, and that means it's just down to the opinion of whoever's analyzing it"

awe

For more in depth you have the help center:

ell.stackexchange.com/help

Anonymous

Unfortunately, most of the time they say that, it's false.

Anonymous

08:40

Words tend to have meaning.

Anonymous

And anyway, when the answer is "these words have two possible meanings, A and B" or even "these words have three possible meanings, A B or C"

awe

I think new users are more likely to read that, than dive into the meta sites.

Anonymous

That's not Lit Crit either

Anonymous

@awe New users don't know meta exists, usually.

awe

@snailboat Exactly..

Anonymous

08:41

In this case, the compound preposition "away at" (if you care to analyze it as such) has clear semantics

Mistu4u

@awe I seriously doubt new users generally read FAQ or HELP.

Anonymous

@Mistu4u New users, as a rule, don't read anything.

Anonymous

They came to the site because they wanted to ask a question

Anonymous

Anything else, including reading stuff, is just getting in their way :-)

Mistu4u

@snailboat LOL. That is also true. Also how can I forget, the first time, I entered SO, I was too severely downvoted.

awe

08:43

@snailboat The StackExchange team has made a good effort to make it more visible for new users, without getting in the way.

Mistu4u

Then I read the FAQ and HELP

@snailboat Anyway so might be the question get closed for primarily Opinion Based.

Anonymous

@Mistu4u That's a misuse of P.O.B.

Anonymous

P.O.B. questions are "What's your favorite book on grammar?"

Anonymous

To be honest, lots of questions on ELL are primarily opinion-based, but we like them. Probably half of the good answers on the site are "I think you should write it like this instead"

Anonymous

@awe This is sort of true. Actually, the old system was designed with the idea that you'd read through the whole thing

Mistu4u

08:47

@snailboat I agree. I always support not closing question unless either they are duplicate or readily unsalvageable.

Anonymous

And there was a badge to reward you for doing so

Anonymous

That was the behavior they tried to encourage

Anonymous

The new system is not designed to be read through in one sitting.

Anonymous

Now it's on a zillion different pages, and the idea is that you only go there when you want to know stuff, and then you click the page about the thing you want to know about

Anonymous

That way you learn individual things when you want to know them

awe

08:48

@snailboat Yes, but opinion on how to say things, is normally based on how those things are said in your cultural environment, and so is very relevant for how the living English language is.

Anonymous

@awe I agree, and I think it's good that we have all these opinion-based answers.

Anonymous

If we tried to make ELL into a site where every question had to be completely objective, we would have very few questions

Anonymous

Oh, bold and italic combined, you are too much power for one human to wield

awe

@snailboat It wouldn't even have made it to beta...

Mistu4u

I think SE is popular among people because they only allow quality posts; not like Yahoo Answers, where people ask "Can a 32 bit Os be converted into 64 bit by another 32-bit installation" :-D

Anonymous

08:51

@Mistu4u I'm not sure all the posts on ELL are of high quality. But I think the perception may be that they're lower quality than they actually are, in some cases

Anonymous

For some language learners, it's really hard to write questions in English.

Anonymous

I can sympathize since I'm learning other languages, and I know what that's like :-)

Mistu4u

@snailboat That's why TPTB let us edit any post. :-)

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Yeah, I try to clean up posts sometimes :-)

awe

@Mistu4u Yes! When I search on Google for a programming related question, I always dive right into the first hit on SO first if it is represented on the first search result page.

Anonymous

08:53

@awe What do you think about ELL answers?

Mistu4u

@awe Yeah, Google knows everything including the quality.

Anonymous

Are they ever useful to you?

Mistu4u

@snailboat It will also keep ELL's health sound.

Anonymous

@Mistu4u ELL is doing fairly well right now. It gets a lot of questions, and questions are the lifeblood of the site

Mistu4u

@snailboat Very. In fact, as soon as I am stuck in some programming, I make no delay in posting in SO.

Anonymous

08:54

Answers, sure, but you can't have answers without questions.

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Oh, I'm sorry, let me rephrase. I know SO posts are useful to you--you implied that pretty strongly :-) I was asking if you ever find ELL posts useful.

awe

@snailboat I haven't been around here on ELL too long, so I would know.

Mistu4u

@snailboat ELL is also practically very handy. Almost all my questions were born from practical situations where I had faced problems.

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Ah, just like they're supposed to be! Hehe.

awe

I have been around on ELU for a while, so I thought I might have something to contribute with here on ELL as well.

Mistu4u

08:57

@snailboat Yeah sure.

Anonymous

@awe What's your impression of ELU versus ELL?

Anonymous

I've only used ELU a little bit.

Mistu4u

@snailboat Is it an HR interview round? :P

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Haha, I'm sorry, am I asking too many questions?

Anonymous

I wrote a few answers on ELU this week.

Anonymous

08:58

I thought I'd try out posting over there again

Mistu4u

Nope, but it sounded like one HR question. Reminded me an experience where the HR Manager asked me in an interview that What's your impression over politician A over politician B?

I was saved that time by giving a diplomatic answer!

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Wow, I can't imagine someone asking that question in an interview in the US

Anonymous

Though I've only really had technical interviews

Anonymous

I'll be right back, I need to get some water

Mistu4u

@snailboat I don't know about other countries. But in India, we fear HR round more than technical rounds. They can ask you anything.

awe

09:00

@snailboat ELU is generally more academic with more linguistic depth than ELL. Although I think maybe some questions that has been traditionally accepted on ELU on the more basic type will suit better here on ELL now that we have this. I think most of my rep on ELU has been on such questions... :-)

Anonymous

@Mistu4u I don't even remember if HR ever interviewed me.

Mistu4u

@snailboat, I like to share one more experience of my friend. I hope you heard about TATA, a giant industrial company from India. they have a lot of companies. One of them is TCS (Tata Consultancy Services). In their HR interview, they asked my friend "Why TCS?" Natually, he said a lot of good things about TATA and their companies. So suddenly they asked "Oh! So you just love the TATAs. so why don't you say where is the headquarter of TATA salt?"

You can now guess my friends condition.

He was totally dumbstruck.

Anyway by God's grace, he was selected there. Currently TCS is the highest profiting IT company in India.

Anonymous

@awe Ah, I see. Well, I've vacillated a bit between writing more and less technical answers on ELL... I try to gauge it a bit on who I'm writing the answer for, but I think sometimes I judge incorrectly.

Mistu4u

@snailboat Pray, you don't have to face it.

Anonymous

@awe Like, Listenever is a native speaker of Korean, and English is about as linguistically dissimilar from Korean as possible, so it's a difficult language for her to learn. But she seems to favor a really technical approach, constantly asking about technical linguistics terms

Anonymous

09:05

So when I write answers for her, I'm willing to use technical terms

Anonymous

But sometimes it's hard for me to know what terms are appropriate and what will seem like an intimidating mishmash of jargon :-(

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Hehe!

Mistu4u

@snailboat :-P

Anonymous

@Mistu4u Wow, that sort of quiz does sound terrifying.

Mistu4u

@snailboat hmm, they are. :-)

Anonymous

09:08

I don't really understand what purpose HR serves, anyway.

Mistu4u

@snailboat I fear the opposite; I fear is it (my answer) going to fulfill the asker's need? :-P

Anonymous

@Mistu4u It's hard to know sometimes. That's why a lot of the questions on the site could do with more elaboration

Mistu4u

@snailboat Until either of us become one, it would remain a mystrey to us :-D

awe

@snailboat If you mean technical in the sense of a technical area that is the same as she is asking (like within i.e. computer programming), it would be OK. If you by technical mean linguistic technicalities like grammar etc. you should be more cautious to use terms without explaining.

Anonymous

I wrote a really long answer yesterday, and it's possible it wasn't really useful at all because they intended to ask something other than what they really did. And I didn't ask them for more details, so I don't really know...

Mistu4u

09:10

which answer?

Anonymous

@awe Ah, but she (meaning Listenever) uses technical terms from linguistics, like depictive secondary predication. I have to use the same language if I'm responding to her :-)

Mistu4u

I really lose patience reading too much long answer. The answer which JR gave to my "shall we" question, was rather a good size answer.

Anonymous

0

A: "What do you think about?" or "What you think about?"

Sometimes, when we're describing language, it helps us explain stuff to say one form of a sentence is the basic form, and others are derived from it. For example, we might say these two sentences are related: 1a. She likes ice cream. 1b. Does she like ice cream? Sentence 1a is a dec...

Anonymous

It didn't get any upvotes, so I tried to figure out what was wrong with it

Mistu4u

@snailboat The length definitely.

However if you ask me, I will definitely read the answer and don't fall back seeing this one's size.

Anonymous

09:12

@Mistu4u Well, it's a fair criticism. If it's too long, and no one will read it, then it's not helpful

Anonymous

The shortest answer would be "What do you think about? is correct. What you think about? is not."

Mistu4u

@snailboat Sure. You can't hope an answer of this size would anybody read (mostly)

awe

@snailboat OK, I see. My view is that you should not be too technical, and in this case maybe even throw in some basic explanation to what the OP mean. Not to make it clear for the OP, but make it clear to others reading this question that might not know. One central philosophy of StackExchane is to "make internet better"!

Anonymous

@awe You're right, that's a good point

Mistu4u

@snailboat, But one thing, I understood after sticking around with SO for over an year, that if your answer is of quality, you would get upvotes, sooner o later.

Anonymous

09:14

@Mistu4u Well, upvotes on ELL can be kind of unpredictable.

Anonymous

I've seen answers telling people to say incorrect English voted up above answers that give correct English

Mistu4u

@snailboat Then you take the lead and downvote. Use your democratic power instead and comment wherever possible.

Anonymous

@Mistu4u I do both of those things, but people don't seem to like it very much ;-)

Anonymous

I noticed that if I do both of those things at the same time, people usually get defensive

Mistu4u

@snailboat People are people, mixture of both wise and stupid.

Anonymous

09:17

If I comment first and give them a chance to edit it, it seems they're less likely to take personal offense to it

Mistu4u

Oh, I gotta go now. Some urgent work popped up. Bye everyone. :-)

Anonymous

Ah! Good luck!

Mistu4u

Thanks.

Anonymous

@awe I'm not sure whether I've always done a good job of defining unusual terms. I try to do it, but I wonder whether I always remember to...

Anonymous

I've probably written some less-than-good answers.

Anonymous

09:33

Even when people don't take personal offense, though, I think they tend to think my comments are wrong :-)

Anonymous

So arguing rarely leads anywhere productive.

awe

@snailboat Can you link to an example?

Anonymous

I could find one.

Anonymous

Great Lakes are, not *Great Lakes is, surely. Fun fact: in the US there's geographical variation as to whether numbered roads take an article. Where I grew up (near the Great Lakes, incidentally), we'd say "driving on 280" or "take 355 north", but in Southern California people tend to say "the 60" or "take the 101 north". — snailboat Sep 22 at 7:04

Anonymous

Matt ignored my comment and left his example ungrammatical :-)

Anonymous

09:40

Eidetic and photographic memory refer to a flawless or near-flawless memory. They shouldn't be used for someone who has merely a good memory. — snailboat Sep 15 at 15:23

Anonymous

The answer stands at +3, even though it says you can say someone with a good memory "has an eidetic memory"

Anonymous

I guess I never did downvote it

Anonymous

But that was because I had an answer posted (which I since deleted), and I didn't want to vote on someone else's answer

awe

@snailboat This one you actually are wrong. It is refered to the Great Lakes as a collection of lakes, and thus is singular because it is only one collection.

Anonymous

@awe I see, I see. I'll turn in my native speaker's badge at the door :-)

Anonymous

09:49

Still, I'll go on saying my wrong version, if I happen to want to talk about the Great Lakes that way. That's just how I talk.

awe

@snailboat I agree that this might not be a complete answer, but "good" could range from "above average" to "photographic/eidetic". My view would be that photographic/eidetic is a valid answer for the question, as the "top level" within the broad range of "good memory", but it still lacks examples for the lower levels within the range...

Anonymous

@awe Well, one might argue that since eidetic memories have never been demonstrated to exist, it applies to a rather narrow range of people with a good memory

Anonymous

Currently, the empty set, as far as we know

awe

@snailboat I have actually not heard it before, but I looked it up

Eidetic memory

Eidetic memory , commonly referred to as photographic memory or total recall, is the ability to recall images, sounds or objects in memory with great precision, and is not acquired through mnemonics. The word eidetic, comes from the Greek word (, eidos, "seen"). Overview The ability to recall images in great detail for several minutes is often found in early childhood (between 2% and 10% of that age group) and is unconnected with the person's intelligence level. Like other memories, they are often subject to unintended alterations. The ability usually begins to fade after the age of si...

StoneyB

@snailboat What I admire about your answers is that you do provide the technical context, defined, and thereby make the answers generalizable. You provide not only an answer to the immediate question but an answer to the situation, so the reader has an answer the next time the situation arises. It's a model for all of us.

Anonymous

09:57

@StoneyB Well, thank you! I try, though I'm afraid I don't always manage to do so :-)

awe

It says "great precision". Not "absolute precision"...

Anonymous

@awe You may also be interested in the section on the page you linked to titled "Skeptical views"

StoneyB

@awe Well, you certainly did on the 'carve away at' thing. I love that answer - and it taught me a new way of using corpora.

awe

@snailboat We can't be perfect all the time! I looked at some of your top rated questions, and I would say that you have many good quality answers.

Anonymous

@StoneyB Ah, yes, that's one of the reasons I like the corpora on BYU over the Google Ngram Viewer. Although there's less data, the interface lets you do a lot of interesting things with it

awe

10:01

@snailboat Yes, I just read the introduction to be able to answer you... ;-)

Anonymous

Also, unlike many corpora, COCA is not solely a corpus of written English. It includes transcribed spoken material

Anonymous

You can limit your searches to include only spoken material (or only fiction, only periodicals, and so on), or to exclude it

Anonymous

I find that to be pretty handy

awe

But my point stands that both photographic and eidetic memory are examples of words that describes states of good memory.

Anonymous

@awe Yes, I have no choice but to agree with that!

awe

10:03

Although it's a very narrow part of "good"

Anonymous

It might also be worth pointing out that we also talk about fictional people, and fictional characters have a surprisingly high rate of total recall

StoneyB

@snailboat I envy your mastery of the QL there - I can never make it work for me. ... I'm not so happy as you, though, with the 'spoken' component of the corpora, which is largely the speech of practised speakers and includes a good deal of scripted material. But that's true of most available corpora.

awe

@snailboat At the end I want to say that your comment is in place. But the answer has also it's place in it's current form. This is what is good about SE. You can have multiple answers that all have relevance, and comments to point out that some answers not might be right on spot (but they still have relevance).

Anonymous

@StoneyB Well, there are plenty of corpora of spontaneous speech, but they're unfortunately not open access (as far as I'm aware). Are you familiar with the speech accent archive?

awe

10:18

What do you mean by "corpora"? I'm not familiar with that term...

Anonymous

@awe It's the plural of corpus, Latin for body. In linguistics, a corpus is a body of text.

Anonymous

They're really useful for researching how language is actually used.

Anonymous

Whenever people use the Google Ngrams Viewer to make charts, they're querying the Google Books corpus

Anonymous

And there are a number of corpora freely available at corpus.byu.edu

awe

@snailboat So the "corpus" in this case was refering to my link to Wikipedia that was shown directly here in chat?

Anonymous

10:26

@awe No, StoneyB and I were discussing one of the corpora on BYU, called COCA (The Corpus of Contemporary American English)

Anonymous

I used it to write my latest answer

awe

@snailboat Ah. I was set off by him answering me "Well, you certainly did on the 'carve away at' thing. I love that answer - and it taught me a new way of using corpora."

Anonymous

@awe Oh, I didn't notice that the message was directed at you. I'm fairly certain the message was intended for me

awe

@snailboat I'm not sure what he meant though... It might actually be that it was meant for you, only he linked to my message...

StoneyB