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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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I think you should stop taking this guy so seriously. He has good advice in some areas of life (financial independence, internet use), but he is a hack in many other areas. For example, he claims that you don't need to learn a ton of vocabulary to be fluent in language and also that he is fluent in Spanish and French just from learning Latin. The first of these is not true, and he should know better as a someone who claims to be a linguist. The second seems to be really improbable: I'd have to hear him speak Spanish to believe it. I'm sure this is true with other areas of his "expertise" that I have less experience with.

I speak Spanish, French, and Latin. It’s just barely plausible that he can understand Spanish spoken deliberately slowly that way but French? Come on.

It’s also a cheat. Assuming he’d learned Spanish including the grammar before learning French and Latin, they’re related languages. It’s like learning Danish, then memorizing words in Norse or Swedish — they’re close enough that it works. Do the same trick with Spanish and Korean and German and it doesn’t work.

I did not find French 'easier' by knowing Latin and Spanish. I suppose they made it easier to learn each other, but French is pretty different from the other Romance languages grammatically and in pronunciation.

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