re: snarls

[dorkboysayswhat]

the unwashed proles? seriously? social darwinism, white man's burden, eugenics, man, you've got it all. good thing your chinese is so freaking sweet you can read a book when all the "plebian masses" get sick of listening to you

Comments

[sugarimp]

Are you on the rag? I get rage issues when I'm on the rag, but only once a month.

[dorkboysayswhat]

I have an anger towel. When I sit on it, I get furious. It has a little picture of a lion on it.

[benlehman]

Textbook Chinese is a pretty decent place to start. Is it a real language? No. Why does that matter? Can you learn a real language with an hour a day? No.

yrs--
--Ben

[dorkboysayswhat]

A decent place to start they are. A decent place to continue, to delve into the nether realms of the beast and feast upon its still beating heart, no.

[aliceandsex]

You're one of the few that follows my train of thought. I actually was doing this until I made the silly mistake of deciding to take a Chinese course for easy credit. The Internet has a tremendous amount of pirated literature in Chinese (as opposed to Japanese). I was having fun going through Marquez and James Joyce. I definitely had enough of an allergic reaction to drop the class due to the mundane BS I had to go through. I never fully recovered and dove immediately to Japanese. I'm slowly going through Steve Pinker's How the Mind Works and Jared Diamond's Collapse. In fact, my first 500 sentences on the SRS were directly from the Bible (the only easy though long bilingual book I could find at the time). I never fully looked at the big picture since reading is something I naturally enjoy anyway. But to be honest, people get bored when you tell them just how simple and straightforward language learning is. So I just tell them I met a homeless Korean in D.C. who taught me most of the basics.