ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
About half of US deployable air power is ready for Iran boogaloo 2.0.
Since we had people having trouble telling if Trump is trolling about Greenland, Canada, or running for a third term, I just want to pre-register that this is clearly not-trolling, and how to tell the difference between the two is obvious.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
It just seems awfully coincidental that a second person with the same bee in his bonnet over age gaps should pop out of nowhere
Sure, in isolation that's a fair thing to base your, but when you can click his profile and see things like "joined 2022 September 08", and "452 comments" that should put the suspicion to rest.
Am I? How nice of you to keep track for me, I feel so seen, cherished, and valued that you spend precious time and energy on worrying about what I'm doing!
Oh, I can do better. I think you're an indispensable part of this forum's folklore, and I'm happy that you're still posting here. I'm just pointing out that someone's throwing stones in glass houses.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
Is this you, baby? Back under a fake name?
- You could at least check someone's profile, before making an accusation. He's been here for a while.
- Aren't you on you third or fourth alt, that you set up specifically to get around a permaban?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
That's fair enough, I think I went too far by restricting it to natives. But check his other comment, apparently these schools put hardly any pressure on the students at all, no wonder they don't work!
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
I learned that I was the only making grade 12 students read; everyone else had them “read along”
That's deranged...
Shout my name when the angry mobs come for the teachers, I'll try to tell everyone you were one of the good ones.
You might chalk this up to the education system’s usual ineptitude, but if immersion works then the French-rich environment should be inculcating French despite whatever the teacher is doing.
What? No....
The children do not even learn the language like children. Immersion doesn’t work.
Well, depending on what you mean by the former, I might agree. Children don't learn just by passively absorbing things spoken in their environment. They figure it out because it lets them get what they want from their parents, interact with their peers, etc. Every such activity is an exercise, that's how they get better at it. Later, when they go to school, they're forced to exercise even more, by reading, writing, and interacting with the teacher and each other.
When you tell me there's an "French immersion school", I assume this is a school that forces all the school activities to be done in French (minus, maybe, student interactions). An "immersion school" that doesn't make you do that defeats the purpose!
And if you're wondering what's the difference between what I consider immersion, and just studying a language, it's that you don't try to teach people by taking the language apart, feeding them it's rules, and hoping they'll be able to reconstruct it from that, you force them to do stuff using thr language, correct any mistakes they make, and otherwise make them figure it out on their own.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
"Tend to", sure, but my experience of the middle class (I only had very rare and short brushes with the upper strata) is that they rarely can actually use a third language. They certainly study them, but push comes to shove, they wouldn't even be able to ask for directions.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13hr ago
Let's not get into the details of where I'm at, but yeah, I spent some time there too. Sure, I agree this probably varies by country, and I haven't seen the entirety of Europe yet.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13hr ago
I just disagree on the facts. I'd cut your numbers by half. That might be above your threshold, but not by much.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13hr ago
I don't get it. Even though I'm in the same situation as you - my friends tend to know 2 foreign languages - that's still "almost no one".
When I say "as a child", I mean in the critical period. I don't mean as a twelve year old.
I started picking it up when I was 5, or something. Then, when I was 7, Cartoon Network made a sudden appearance on the TV, and the people who were rebroadcasting it didn't have the resources to translate it, so my English really picked up at the time. All the vidya I was playing since I was old enough to hold a controller was also untranslated. It helped a bit with reading.
It's simply a fact that language rules are an emergent phenomenon determined by the, let's say, ummah made up of speakers of each language or dialect
Yeah, every category is. Transcription errors exist even on a biomolecular level, and we can tell they're errors because we can trace what they're meant to be transcribing.
Sometimes, it's harmless enough. Sometimes it's even adaptive, and you get evolution, but the descriptivist approach is akin to saying "cancer is, like, just another way of being, man".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14hr ago
Perhaps this is a class thing? Me and most of my friends can at least make our way in countries speaking our third language and understand media in it.
Yeah, me too, but all my friends are IT guys that moved to another country, so that lines up perfectly with what he said. Either way, it being a class thing throws a wrench into the "generally expected to" idea.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14hr ago
A native speaker is one who learned a language as a child
That's way too loose of a definition. I learned English as a child, and while I consider myself fluent, I'm definitely not a native speaker.
People have been able to tell if kids are speaking grammatically since long before there were grammar books, so the relevance is not clear to me.
My point is just that the kind of deconstruction games that are used to argue against prescriptivism can be used to argue against descriptivism as well. I think each of those frameworks has a grain of truth to it, trying to make sense of the world with just one of them will lead to absurd results.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14hr ago
French immersion students know all the different words for binders, folders, duotangs, etc, but that isn't very useful on les rues.
Is this just kindergarden / early elementary level? Otherwise I'd expect them to pick up some vocabulary related to math, science, history, art... the stuff they're supposed to be learning while at school. Reading classical literature and writing essays about it in French should help too.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15hr ago
Therefore you can’t get “immersion” from reading if you’re reading at home
Eh... I feel like this is way too strict. Arguably this would make immersion impossible these days, because the gateway to your native language is right there in your pocket, whether you live in a foreign country or not.
What do you guys mean by immersion?
Learning by interacting with the natives, in any form. It can be talking to them, it can be reading books, or consuming their media. The more you do it, the more "immersed" you are.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15hr ago
One thing I'd add here is that while I understand the US focus in this discussion, a quick glance north of the border, or across the Atlantic, will show that we already have regimes that will directly penalize political speech, without relying on proxies like guns, or fig leafs like "hostile work environment".
Even if everyone originally involved in this conversation is from the US, I think "I'm worried the US will become like Europe" is inherently less sneerworthy than worrying the US will implement restrictions that are seen as beyond the pale in the West in general.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16hr ago
What even is a native speaker? Children have to learn their language too.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16hr ago
So? You can do immersion with reading the same way you do it with listening.
No. You might say they are expected to learn English, and even then the variance you'll see in the population is going to be pretty big. They definitely aren't expected to learn a third language, and in the case where they studied one, they're usually unable to actually use it.
In that case we can also say beginner-level students don't make mistakes, they just speak in beginner dialect.
I'm definitely not picturing students being able to "read along" with the teacher. I can believe this is a national issue, I just don't think it's an issue with the methodology as much as it is a simple case of low standards.
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