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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3400 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 2, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist. It has been on the backlog for a while as an influential book, but a careless thought has finally given me a reason to be interested: I wonder what impact wokeness has had on highly successful minorities.

Paper I'm reading: Thiele's Things Fall Apart: Integrity and Visibility in Democratic Liberal Education.

'Teach Yourself French' by Sir John Adams and Norman Scarlyn Wilson. It was published in 1938 and so is quite different to modern textbooks, there is very little filler, there are no games or illustrations. The whole thing is self-contained such that if you have completed the earlier exercises and understood the previous chapter you will (they promise) be able to progress through the current one without consulting outside sources. Unlike the book Brighter French, the author promises that I do not even need to be 'particularly bright' to find this book useful.

I used a book from the same series to learn Spanish and helped me quite a lot. In this series there are 3 books, I'm starting on the more grammar focused one and will work through the 'Everyday French' (probably quite out of date by now) and then on to the 'French Reader' translating excerpts of novels and poems.

Is reading textbooks even a good way to learn the language? Spoken French certainly sounds very different to me than what a naive appraisal of the written form would suggest.

Listening before speaking. Reading before writing. Best way to learn a language is by listening, but there needs to be some context to what you're hearing, similar to how we learned language as infants. Audiobook + physical book + translation dictionary is your best bet. Lots of illiterate people can speak a language. Lots of jazz musicians couldn't read sheet music.

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