When I was in school they had no foreign language requirement like they do now.
I wish that they would have as they teach Spanish in elementary school which is a good thing
I do remember my 6th grade teacher saying over and over that we all needed to learn this new fangled metric system because it was the future.
I guess there is at least one country that never got on board with it other than in track everything was converted from yards to meters
I am the pussy licker Let's have some fun. Not invisible. Snitches are pathetic little people!
Disclaimer. This post may not be in response to a post by Greybaby. So Greybaby doesn't need to cry about it. Rover has you pegged to a T
Agree totally key being learning the second language at an early age, seems to permit that part of the brain to function at a high level. My daughter speak both fluently, and I marvel at her, but her advantage was she was born in the US, so obviouly english is her mother language and the language she used when first attending school, but with her mother being Dominican, spanish she learned as well from birth, when her mother's family came over to visit or we went to visit them, the language that was spoken was spanish. When the in-laws came to visit, I would go into the basement, didn't understand the language nor did I have any desire to learn it back then. I kick myself in the ass for not putting in the effort back then, when I realize how much better I would be today if I just tried a bit. Didn't take it up seriously until I moved into the capital and it became a bit of a neccesity. Even when I lived in Sosua my first year didn't need it much.
Although I am passable now, I know I will never truly be fluent, learned at too advanced an age. Comprehension is the hardest part especially dealing with the slang, and the speed in which native Dominicans speak. For the most part I can communicate my ideas well enough because I am able to use my own vocabulary, words I am familar with to express myself, probably vocabulary on a 3rd grade level, which for the most part is good enough. But when dealing with technical subject matters, I am often lost, ie. Medical or auto mechanical themes. If my daughter is with me, I often get lazy and tell her to translate, that way I don't have to think.
Last edited by yayow; 08-26-2018 at 10:58 AM.
Why should I limit myself to only one woman when I can have as many women as I want?
George Gershwin
It was mandatory for me. I actually got all the way to AP Latin and continued for 2 years in college. I am a history nerd and it helped with the SAT verbal with derivatives and such. Yeah, that SAT verbal score impacts my daily life greatly..... Funny the shit you think is so important when you are young and stupid. Thanks for all the great posts here, some great advice and insight.
True. Every study that has made made shows that the more languages you know, the easier it is to learn further ones. One might think the opposite is true, that your brain would get overloaded and confused, but that is not so.
My Haitian partner for eight years banned her kids from speaking Kreyól even when it cropped up naturally talking with family and friends. She meant well as she thought they should concentrate on acquiring a "Dominican" Spanish accent for their own safety and security here, but it was a bad move educationally and psychologically.
The first thing I learned in spanish was Jugo de pinga. A lot of folks got a big laugh at my expense out of that one.
The second thing I learned was "Bargame, Dios" To this day, I don't know what it means.
The third thing I learned was "Como se dice" (How do you say) followed by pointing at something. I made it a point to learn a new word every day.
After that, it was simple phrases: Donde esta, Dame un, and such, followed by the one of the words I was learning every day. Within a month I was pretty much capable of holding a conversation.
As easy as that was, I have failed miserably at learning Kreole the same way. Ditto for German and French.
If you think it's love try not paying in the morning..
"Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many."
I just pulled out my class workbook that has been collecting dust for years. I thought about starting a new novel, but it's time to put my nose to the grindstone and take my Spanish up a notch.
Its funny though. When I first made the move I would hear others speak to the locals after several years here, and I thought I'd never catch on. Like I said earlier it's maybe third grade level, but what a difference in just a few years.
Vida es buena....
Awwww ... that's such a sweet word-picture.
But it IS true -- throughout most of the world, if you at least TRY to speak a little of the local language, the locals appreciate your effort!
(Not so much the French, though ... nor the Yanks who expect everyone in the world to speak English....)
I'm still "Just A Lurker."
The Chinese virus infected the Western world with Chinese-style totalitarian politics. - Gladiator
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. – H. L. Mencken
"SI units of measure" means "Système international (d'unités)" -- i.e. metres for length, kilograms for weight, litres for volume, and Celsius for temperatures ... as opposed to "the English system" of inches/feet/miles, ounces/pounds, quarts/gallons, and temperatures in Fahrenheit, as we're used to using in the USA. In many cases, the measures and calculations are SO much simpler and more efficient in "SI" that it's really worth making the switch to metric ... and sometimes it seems like a shame that we didn't!
I've got a "special case" of this, as regards my 'special hobby' of scuba-diving, and especially in the matter of air-consumption -- which could be a life-or-death matter, for someone involved with the ragged edge of technical cave-diving ... but not for me, because I stay the hell out of that environment! But all the same, I had to track my air consumption as part of my advanced courses, like deep diving and self-reliant diving; and this would become very much more important, if I go on to "tech diving," i.e. deep dives with planned decompression stops.
Air-consumption calculations are FAR easier, using SI units, than they are using feet for depth and cubic feet (and PSI) for tank capacity.
The industry-standard "Aluminum 80" tank, as seen in the USA, contains about 80 cubic feet of sea-level air at its rated fill capacity of 3000 PSI. Outside the USA, it's called an 11-litre tank, and its pressure is measured in "bar" (1 bar = 100 kPa (kilo-Pascals), or just a smidgen less than average atmospheric pressure at sea level.) The scuba-shops generally fill them to 200 bar, which equates to 2200 litres of sea-level-pressure air (at a little less than 3000 PSI).
Another convenience, for a scuba diver who's doing his figures in metres rather than feet, is that every 10 meters' depth in sea water equals 1 bar, 1 atmosphere, of pressure -- we're all at 1.0 bar at the surface, at sea-level, but each meter of depth is equivalent to 0.1 bar of pressure. If I'm 10 meters deep (33 feet), I'm at 2 bar pressure (29.4 PSI) ... That "29.4 PSI" ought to be enough, with "80 cubic feet" and "14.7 psi sea-level pressure," to make it perfectly plain why I've replaced my PSI air-gauges with "bar" gauges (SI), and set my dive-computer to "meters" (SI) depth!
It's just plain easier, diving "in metric" ...
Pardon the thread-jack, and my 'dissing' of feet/miles/ounces/gallons/Fahrenheit....
here is a good one I got today...."Estoy yes Gando"
There are currently 4 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 4 guests)
Bookmarks