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[DrPhibes]

Meh, thats so easy as a dutch person you wouldn't confuse the "They" - Zij and the "She" Zij.

Zij zei dat het weer stom was!
Zij zeiden dat het weer stom was!
(translated)
They/She said the weather was stupid!

Guess which one is the plural!

[Lines]

Zeiden? I'm guessing Dutch is pretty similar (and at the same time not at all) to German.

[Barmymoo]

Do you have any verbs which conjugate identically in the single and plural? There must be some. But then again you get the same confusion in English when he told him that he didn't like him.

[LTK]

Meh, thats so easy as a dutch person you wouldn't confuse the "They" - Zij and the "She" Zij.

Of course I wouldn't, but it's still a fun fact!

Do you have any verbs which conjugate identically in the single and plural? There must be some. But then again you get the same confusion in English when he told him that he didn't like him.

Nope, can't think of any. The difference between single and plural verbs is very simple; plural is usually the same as single, only with -en or -n at the end. I fall down. You fall down. We fallen down.

[pwhodges]

he told him that he didn't like him.

Or in the genderless version:  they told them that they didn't like them.

[Welu]

Finally got into a groove for working on an assignment that I keep putting off because it's about music and I'm really not musically inclined and someone else comes into the room and whacks on the TV, turns it up stupidly loud and now my groove is totally messed up and I'm struggling to form a sentence now.

[Akima]

If the words for "they" are gender-specific, how do you indicate a group of mixed gender?

You use the male form, which you're supposed to use in any context where gender is "unknown or irrelevant", a characterisation that is of course massively freighted with sexist assumptions about relevance. Is it irrelevant to refer generically to engineers, doctors, political leaders etc. as if they were all male?

Do you have any verbs which conjugate identically in the single and plural? There must be some. But then again you get the same confusion in English when he told him that he didn't like him.

In Chinese, verbs don't conjugate at all, or change tense. It makes learning European languages challenging.
 

[Barmymoo]

Goodness. I think I did know that somewhere in the back of my mind but I'd forgotten. How do you communicate the nuances of meaning? Do you know if it's the same in Korean? That might explain my student's difficulty with conjugation!

[Zingoleb]

My friend was explaining that bit about verb conjugation/tense in Chinese a few weeks ago - he's this bloody genius who picks up language by just being around it, and knows five or six languages already. If he wasn't such a sweetheart I may have to strangle him. Apparently, no, that doesn't carry over into Korean.

I've been learning sign language lately and there's no gendered pronouns in it. You just point to someone or in general to mean she/he/it/they/them/you/I.

Also, Welu, what is your assignment about? I'm willing to help!

[DrPhibes]

If you had a cool set of playing songs as a band... you know how i feel now... but it might sound weird im a DJ and not a band :X

I feel awesome! Played from 11:00 till 00:15 and from 01:10 till 3:30 almost all blipblop 8-bit and shit or general rock/metal/nu-metal!
Wooooooo

[Carl-E]

I'd ask for a translation of that, but I'm afraid of what the result would be...   

Welu - go back and whack the TV again for them, only this time with a small sledgehammer.   

[Barmymoo]

We could all write a sentence each of Welu's assignment! It'd be done in no time!

[Welu]

I would love that.

Amazingly I don't have a copy of the assignment brief because I was never given one and there's no copy of it on the college site so that's a big reason it's causing me so much trouble! In short it's about the music production process. How to set up microphones for recording a band in a studio, which I've done. Then it's about actually processing the song, the software and mix desk. That's the main bit I'm struggling with since the class spent some weeks in a studio and as the guy said, mixing the song is about getting an instrument to sound right but mostly about preference. That meant I was just guessing what a drum is meant to sound like through a speaker. Most other people in the class are in bands so that bit came easy to most people.
The last bit is to analyse a song. That's the task, "Analyse a song." Not what to analyse about it, or why we like/dislike it or how it was made. That was the bit I was working on last night because I'm good at just bullcrapping vague tasks.

[LTK]

Goodness. I think I did know that somewhere in the back of my mind but I'd forgotten. How do you communicate the nuances of meaning? Do you know if it's the same in Korean? That might explain my student's difficulty with conjugation!

What nuances of meaning? A verb doesn't change depending on who's doing it. It doesn't matter if I eat, you eat, he eat, she eat, we eat or they eat.

[pwhodges]

It matters if we have eaten or will eat, though.

Bloggery:
I just spent two hours on the phone to Dell to correct the configuration of an iSCSI RAID array that went wrong when the building's core switch stack went down - one of the controller boards had been refusing to talk iSCSI at all, even though the internal status was shown as "optimal" and "Online"; now I have full redundancy back.  I love being able to move live running virtual servers from one host machine to another in seconds without anyone noticing.

[LTK]

Neither of which absolutely require a conjugation of 'eat'!

[bainidhe_dub]

What about eat/eating/ate? Presumably (but not necessarily) a language would have some way to discern between tense, even if the verb doesn't change based on time or who's doing it.

[Barmymoo]

That's what I meant - do you sort of string words together to indicate the specifics (for example in the way sign language works, to my knowledge, as in saying "I eat yesterday with other people") or is it inferred from the context?

[Zingoleb]

Goodness. I think I did know that somewhere in the back of my mind but I'd forgotten. How do you communicate the nuances of meaning? Do you know if it's the same in Korean? That might explain my student's difficulty with conjugation!

What nuances of meaning? A verb doesn't change depending on who's doing it. It doesn't matter if I eat, you eat, he eat, she eat, we eat or they eat.

Wait, that's also not right. He eats. She eats.

[LTK]

My point being, the extra -s does nothing to change the meaning of 'eat'.

I'd wager that the Chinese past tense, like the English perfect and future tenses, uses an extra verb to indicate it happened in the past.

[Barmymoo]

In my mind, that would be a form of conjugation, but I may be misunderstanding.

[Carl-E]

Blog:  My mother gets out of the rehab center tomorrow.  A week in a nursing home (de rigeur), and then she'll be back in her home wth some home nursing support.  She seems to remember everything except what happened that day.  Her motor control's a little off (hence the rehab center), but she was only there three weeks, and they say they can't do more for her. 


Fuckin' miracle. 

[LTK]

That's amazing, Carl-E!

[DrPhibes]

Going out drinking and playing some pool with the Irish students here in Holland from 22:00 till 00:00. Might not be a long time but it's always good to talk and all those little things. I almost forgot the turkish girl who was also there, she is so bad in English she doesn't talk much

[Lines]

Carl, that's great!

[Akima]

Fuckin' miracle. 

I am so happy, for you and for her.

That's what I meant - do you sort of string words together to indicate the specifics (for example in the way sign language works, to my knowledge, as in saying "I eat yesterday with other people") or is it inferred from the context?

Both.   So called "time expressions" are used instead of verb tense, and because they are so important, they go at the beginning of the sentence. Chinese sentence structure is different from English (big surprise, right?). The (very) basic structure of a simple sentence in Chinese is <subject><time><place><prepositional><verb><object>. NB: Not every sentence contains all parts, <time> can be placed before the subject, there is considerable flexibility in where <object> can be placed.

So, instead of writing "Akima ate lunch with May in Oxford yesterday" as you might in English, the Chinese sentence would run something like "Akima yesterday in Oxford with May eat lunch". Obviously replacing "yesterday" with "tomorrow" would place the action in the future instead of the past but the verb would not change. This is very elementary, and in addition there are "aspect particles" that indicate things like "an action that is complete" or "an action that is still continuing" and "auxiliary verbs", that distinguish, for example, between an intention to do something and a confident prediction of it (so that a basic sentence "I go to Beijing" becomes "I will go to Beijing" (someday) or "I am going to Beijing" (next week and I've bought my ticket) depending on the auxiliary placed before the main verb "go").

A phrase that every CSL student learns to dread is "it's understood". A lot of things are left to be inferred from the context, and Chinese people tend to drop words from sentences if they expect the meaning to be clear without them. From the Classical Chinese poets to commuters texting on their mobile phones, Chinese people like to pack a lot of meaning into a few characters.

[Omega Entity]

I love language discussions. It's interesting to see the similarities and differences between languages in different regions, and how they vary from others. Japanese, for example, the verb would change with the tense (the -shita suffix is usually added in place of the formal -masu or informal base root verb ending). The sentence structures are pretty similar, though the verb is more often than not clear to the end of the sentence in Japanese - so to use a simplified version of Akima's example (since my Japanese language skills are pretty rusty), "Yesterday Akita and May as for lunch ate." Again, little rusty, so I can't remember if lunch should be mentioned before or after Akita and May...

[Barmymoo]

That's really interesting, thanks guys German has similar rules about the order in which different speech elements come in a sentence. I've never properly considered what the English rules are, although teaching them to someone makes me have to conciously consider why something is wrong, rather than just know that it is.

[Barmymoo]

I'm so tired My whole body is aching with tiredness. It is 1.20pm. I have to cycle another 6-8 miles today and work for 2.5 hours and go out to dinner for a friend's birthday (socialising with strangers is pretty tiring) and read for another two hours and I'm just so tired.

[Welu]

Bought a new set of headphones which I YAY'd about in the Happy thread but now I'm wondering if they're too tight, which would be odd because usually over the ear headphones and headgear in general is way too big on me. I can't tell if they're too tight or this is what properly fitted headphones should feel like.

[LTK]

Last year my dad gave me the headphones he bought new for himself to me because they were too tight for him. It doesn't bother me as much, but these things do put more pressure on my head, even though it's not really my ears they're pressing against. Anyway, I've found that my ears start hurting when wearing any kind of headphone for a long time. I think it's best if the headphones don't press your ears to your head too much.

[lepetitfromage]

I think I have an abnormally small head....I've never had a pair of headphones too small- they always fall to the back of my head even if they're as tight as they can be. I've even found that most ear buds are too big for me too- they're either painful to have in or so big that they constantly fall out. I have to get the kind that comes with multiple rubber thingies and use the smallest set.

Welu- if they are just a snug fit, they should be ok. I imagine that they would only be considered too small if they actually hurt your head after a few minutes of wearing them.

May- I know you are always ridiculously busy, but would it be possible for you to squeeze in a half hour nap? Some people find that napping is useless and just makes them more tired but I find that even a quick one rejuvenates me enough on my most draining days that I can manage to get in a few extra hours of productivity.

[DrPhibes]

Making Ice-Coffee, or just really good cold coffee for yourself is pretty difficult!

I've tried just doing coffee (hot) with two spoons of sugar mixed in the frige in a 0,5 litre pepsi plastic bottle, it was pretty good, but needed more, or different sugars.
I've than tried freezing the coffee, this results in making the essence of coffee, or a very very cold espresso. I've unfrozen the rest and mixed it with the rest so it's drinkable now. What happened was that the iceformations start in the water and leaves out the coffeeparticles, so they move to the sides of the bottle that get frozen latest. They unfreeze the first, making the first drops of unfrozen coffee ultra strong.

I havent tried unfreezing and putting it in a mixer to crush the ice and make it more of slushie. both above were liquids, not slushie-like

[LTK]

I think I have an abnormally small head....I've never had a pair of headphones too small- they always fall to the back of my head even if they're as tight as they can be. I've even found that most ear buds are too big for me too- they're either painful to have in or so big that they constantly fall out. I have to get the kind that comes with multiple rubber thingies and use the smallest set.

Have you tried earphones that go around the back of the head? I've been using these as portables for quite a while now. They won't fall out of your ears, ever. Plus, you can take the earbuds out without having to remove the headphone from your ears. Though you'd have to try them out first for size, I know a girl whose head and ears are also very small, and she can't possibly wear these normally. She carries around a big pair of over-the-ear headphones; I'll ask her what model they are.

[Welu]

I think I have an abnormally small head....I've never had a pair of headphones too small- they always fall to the back of my head even if they're as tight as they can be. I've even found that most ear buds are too big for me too- they're either painful to have in or so big that they constantly fall out. I have to get the kind that comes with multiple rubber thingies and use the smallest set.

Welu- if they are just a snug fit, they should be ok. I imagine that they would only be considered too small if they actually hurt your head after a few minutes of wearing them.

I think my head is abnormally small too. Makes buying hats quite hard. Maybe it's just cause they're new and I'm not used to them. The hurt a tiny bit after I wore them for an hour on my temples and I realized they were pushing on my glasses, although I have pretty thick frames. Headphones are grand without though. This is the pair I bought today.

[DrPhibes]

I dunno where to put this. I am not sober at the present but I can't put this at that topic! this is way more personal and influential.

Tonight I was drinking a few brews at a house-warming party. At 00:00 I went into the city. At about 02:00, I was properly drunk and when I'm at that stage, I like to get myself a cigarette. So I got one from some guy, smoked it and off I went. At 03:00, one hour later, I needed another. Mind you, I that's the second smoke in about a month. So I saw my friend Hugo light one up and asked one from him. He said he gave his pack to Bart. Bart said he hadn't got a pack of cigarettes so I was going back to Hugo. Anyway, he hadn't one, so I was left out. I kept asking everyone in that group where the cigarettes were... no one knew! At that time, I got frustrated. A bit about the fact I didn't get to smoke, more about the idea that stuck in my head they were hiding the smokes and leaving me out. So I asked some more and in return got more frustrated because they all didn't honestly know where the fags where gone!  At about 15 minutes later i got seriously frustrated and I thought they were fucking with me, just because I normally don't smoke they'd leave me out. At that time, every time I asked, people started snickering or laughing, not in a hurtful way but just to give me the feeling I was right about the thought they were fucking with me. I told Bart about this feeling and he didn't really understand me... Not a minute later Hugo found the pack in his shirt (the top compartment of his shirt, he didn't realise). During his discovery a girl I know walked by asking me if I'd like a cigarette. I said of course, I was dying after all the frustration and anger at my mates for fucking me over, not realising they didn't do that intentionally! She asked me for one, I said I didn't have a pack with me, so I was at that time in a better mood for not having and some person asking for it. Then Hugo realised and I just got the pack from him and light up a cigarette. That was good.

Then I realised where all the frustration and anger came from. It was from when I was 14-15 years old and my friends in middle/high school fucked me over all the time with stuff I liked and would like to have. They did the same thing I thought was going on, hiding the thing I want and fucking me over with it. I got frustrated because it happened before and I got angry because of the idea that they were fucking me over with it for their own amusement. This happened at that time and it did happen a bit now. After realising this resemblance I apologised to Hugo and Bart for my irrational behaviour. Hugo told me these things just are part of friendship and that little part of fucking with each other are a part of that. I never experienced as that, and in reality, it never happened like that during those years when I was seriously fucked with.

Today I Learned things from your past can seriously haunt you in the present. And now I'm crying about that. I feel better writing this down though <3

[Barmymoo]

May- I know you are always ridiculously busy, but would it be possible for you to squeeze in a half hour nap? Some people find that napping is useless and just makes them more tired but I find that even a quick one rejuvenates me enough on my most draining days that I can manage to get in a few extra hours of productivity.

You're right - I have 20 minute power naps and it helps. I think I actually had one just after I'd said that, and I managed to get through the day Then I slept for nearly 12 hours last night so I'm feeling better.

DrPhibes, it's weird how things that upset us as children can come back and make problems as adults. I am always a bit worried that people are laughing at me if I see someone laughing, even though rationally I know that they aren't. Sounds like you realised what was going on in time not to cause problems, though. I think people sometimes forget that growing up is a process, we're not automatically Grown Ups _TM just because we hit 18 or 21 or whatever.

Yesterday I did my first shift volunteering at the hospital. It was only two hours and it went quite fast, I was helping to serve meals and drinks to the patients on the ward. It is an oncology ward and I found it a little difficult at first to know how to talk to people - I cannot imagine being in the amount of pain some of them were, and I realised that at some subconcious level I was believing that they were all terminally ill. The woman who is my supervisor explained to me that the ward mostly houses people who are having transplants and that they are often in remission shortly after, so this isn't the case at all, but it did colour my feelings at first. I hope I didn't communicate that feeling to anyone through my behaviour, and I think next time it will be a little easier. After all they are all people, they are not an illness.

[pwhodges]

Oncology - yes, people get better from cancer, some with a great deal of trouble on the way.  Some with less - I had a cancer over twenty years ago, and had surgery and radiotherapy.

Growing up - can't remember where I picked this up (here, even?):

[Welu]

I've spent a lot of this night being an asshole on the internet to stop myself from doing something else much more stupid.

[Zingoleb]

I'm so frustrated at the work that's dried up. The money from camming was so inconsistent that it wasn't worth the massive amounts of stress, the modelling gigs are few and far between, and I've only gotten one phone call back from any jobs in the last six months. I can't even get someone to pay me to rake their goddamn lawn any more.

I'm not sure what to do. I really don't have much of anything worth selling off any more. It's really hard being a bit borderline homeless (I'm staying in an awesome commune, but to be honest, it's illegal for any of us to be here, so while I have a place to sleep and be warm*, I don't have an address), 'cause I'm at a total loss on how to get mail or fill out job applications or any forms asking for my address.

I'm not depressed like I was before. So there's that. Just a little bewildered. You don't ever expect to be in this sort of situation.

*There's no heat in this place; it turns out 11 people crammed into a small space is enough body heat to keep it a liveable temperature.

[Zingoleb]

But I mean on the other hand, I'm surrounding myself with awesome queers and artists and I genuinely love the people in my life. I'm seeing a girl in Seattle who makes me feel so intimidated because she's so smart and devoted and driven. I mean, christ, she started the Seattle SlutWalk and is going to be one of the main organizers for this year's SlutWalk as well. She asked me out on our first date, which is this Friday, at a drag club.

Sure, my life sucks, but that doesn't mean my life can't be awesome.

[Carl-E]

PO boxes work as addresses for employment purposes, taxes, etc. 

Of course, a PO box also costs money.  But maybe several of you can go in on one. 


Good to hear you're feeling better, though.  Getting out of  a toxic situation has its benefits! 

[Zingoleb]

Yeah a PO Box is something like $45 for six months.

[Welu]

Finally set off my already very late Music Production task! At 1am! Other than one assignment, which I have in scraps form but not essay form, I'm caught up with everything it seems.

I always end up at a point where I have everything pretty much one paragraph from done and find it very hard to motivate myself to finish "because it'll take no time to finish it later". I've finally wrote all those final paragraphs. Other than the scraps one because it'll take no time to finish it later.

Felt cool today because a tutor lost some work of students and now she's lost track of what she got and lost and what people still need to do and sent an email telling people what they need to have ready to hand in tomorrow. My list is all stuff I actually have done so got to panic for a minute that I had nothing done but feel an awesome relief right after when I remembered I got all her stuff done back when I was super motivated at the start of the college year.

[bainidhe_dub]

Yeah a PO Box is something like $45 for six months.

Yeah but check other post offices - you can search by zip code. In my area the same size box ranges fro $22 to $60 for 6 months, depending on which office it's at.

[Barmymoo]

I am currently in the process of actively looking for a housemate for next year, instead of just moaning about how I can't afford to rent a place on my own. I've also emailed off to an estate agent asking whether their rather vaguely-worded description meant that if you rented the flat as a one-bedroom with a sitting room, it was £119 pppw (i.e. £119 in total) or whether actually what they meant was £238 per week whether or not there are two of you. I'm guessing it's the latter but I can but hope. If it's the former, I will snap that shit up because a year at that price is cheaper than 39 weeks at college rent, and I would have my own flat! For a whole year!

[schimmy]

Holey moley! £119pppw? How on earth is it so expensive? Provided you don't live in a ridiculously expensive house/area, I'd never expect to pay more than half that around here. Who can justify charging that?

[Jace]

That is crazy expensive. I pay £~31 per week for just rent. Of course I pay it in USD and monthly too, but that is what it works out to weekly and in your currency.

[lepetitfromage]

What the hell? Man.....it's expensive where I live. We pay $1,005 per month. There are two of us, so that definitely helps. But sheesh. And the sad part is that we're actually getting a decent deal....we used to pay $975 for a total shit hole that had mice chewing through the ceiling tiles. Now, for $30 more we have a pool. haha

[Zingoleb]

$800/month between 11 people comes out to $72. I don't pay in money, though, I just help with dumpster diving and buy food.