Language is the greatest technology ever invented

https://conjuguemos.com/

"secure" is used in this context to mean, roughly, "work with adversarial input"

Example of when "proprietary" is not an antonym of "open source".

Obnoxious.

As someone recently pointed out on HN, it's very common nowadays to encounter the no-one-knows-else-what-they're-doing-here refrain as cover—I don't have to feel insecure about not understanding this because not only am I not alone, nobody else understands it either.

Secondly, if your code is hard to understand regarding its use of this, then your code his hard to understand. this isn't super easy, but it's also not hard. Your code (or the code you're being made to wade into) probably just sucks. The this confusion is making you confront it, though, instead of letting it otherwise fly under the radar.* So fix it and stop going in for the low-effort, this-centric clapter.

* Not claiming here that this is unique; there are allowed to be other things that work as the same sort of indicator.

Ozernov-Palchik, O., Olson, H., Arechiga, X., Kentala, H., Solorio-Fielder1, J. L., Wang, K. L., Torres, Y. C., Gardino, N. D., Dieffenbach, J. R., & Gabrieli, J. (2021). Implementing Remote Developmental Research: A Case Study of an RCT Language Intervention During COVID-19. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/k9632

Holford, D. L., Juanchich, M., & Sirota, M. (2021). Ambiguity and unintended inferences about risk messages for COVID - 19. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/w5rd6

Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791222.

https://lingo.360.cymru/lingo-newydd/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language

Ah! This remark highlights a fundamental difference in understanding between two camps, which I have been (painfully) aware of, but the source of this confusion has eluded me until only just right now. (Really, this is a source of frustration going back years.)

In one camp, the advice "don't use global variables" is a way of attacking a bunch of things endemic to their use, most notably unnecessary coupling to spooky state. In another camp "no global variables" is understood to mean literally that and taken no further—so you can have as much spookiness as you like, and so long as the value is not directly accessible (visible) from, say, another given piece of code appearing at the top-level ("global") context, as with the way i is bound to the activation record in this example but is not accessible outside the scope of getGetNext, then you're good.

That is, there are two aspects to variables: visibility and extent, and the first interpretation seeks to avoid the negative effects on both dimensions, while the second is satisfied by narrowly prohibiting direct visibility across boundaries.

I find the latter interpretation bizarre and completely at odds with the spirit of the exhortation for avoiding globals in the first place.

(What's worse is the the second interpretation usually goes hand in hand with the practice of making extensive use of closures, which because they are propped up as being closely associated with functions, then leads people to regretfully refer to this style as functional programming. This is a grave error—and, to repeat, totally at odds with the spirit of the thing.)

https://maggieappleton.com/joining-ought

This is an excellent property. It's not a weakness.

• https://www.object-oriented-security.org/lets-argue/singletons
• https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/62084.62095
• https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2008/02/cutting-out-static.html
• http://www.erights.org/

What even is a locked wiki insofar as the ways it differs from traditional (pre-wiki) content publishing pipelines? Where's the wiki part of it?

!- definition : nonviolent communication, language of life * a method of communication that does not prioritize social programming over an individual's right to articulate and own their own speech.

See algorithmic languages.

.c1

What the re-education around REST needs is a catchy label for what people call REST that works well as a light pejorative. Two-Bit History gave it a shot, coining the ad hoc acronym "FIOH", but it doesn't have the desired properties.

Another key point:

Language is the tool we use for introspection and as Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti hold, are empty of intrinsic nature. All inner cognitive states that we introspect are attained only through linguistic conceptual imputation so can only exist conventionally and not intrinsically.

This underscores the importance of the symbolosphere, of symbols and language.

Interleaving (aka mixed practice or varied practice) is a learning strategy that involves mixing different topics, ideas, or forms of practice to improve outcomes as well as overall productivity. Its opposite and less effective strategy is blocking (or block study or specific practice) which focuses instead on working on limited topics or single forms of practice at the same time.

This may be one of the values of of the Say Something In Welsh method which interleaves various new nouns and verbs as well as verb tenses in focused practice.

Compare this with the block form which would instead focus on lists of nouns in a single session and then at a later time lists of verbs in a more rote fashion. Integrating things together in a broader variety requires more work, but is also much more productive in the long run.

misinterpreted-effort hypothesis: the amount of effort one puts into studying is inversely proportional to how much one feels they learn.

Is this why the Says Something In Welsh system works so well? Because it requires so much mental work and effort in short spans of time? Particularly in relation to Duolingo which seems easier?

Because we're "social beings in a social world", we need to think about the psychology and sociology of the environments we design to help improve learning.

Link this to: - Design of spaces like Stonehenge for learning in Indigenous cultures, particularly the "stage", acoustics (recall the ditch), and intimacy of the presentation. - research that children need face-to-face interactions for language acquisition

So we are currently testing the hypothesis tool on our own website, and the first annotation goes to the problematic terminology such as "vulnerable"

infant word learning

visual objects are encoded into memory over a long period of time until it becomes familiar. When a word is spoken when the memory trace associated with the visual object is reactivated, connection between word and visual object is made rapidly.

Being journey 3 Linguistic BEing journey - filling in missing letters in incomplete sentence is based on our past experience with specific sentences that have those letters. This becomes compelling when we can demonstrate with multiple languages, including ones we are not familiar with. Those people in the other cultures will fill in missing letters in their words in their language that we would be completely clueless about.

Matrix multiplication as table lookup

Based on some beyond the average knowledge of Indigenous cultures, I'm reading some additional context into this statement that is unlikely to be seen or understood by those with Western-only cultural backgrounds who view things from an ownership and capitalistic perspective.

There's a stronger sense of identity and ownership of language and knowledge within oral traditions than can be understood by Westerners who didn't grow up with it.

He obviously feels like we're stealing from him all over again. We need better rules and shared definitions between Indigenous peoples and non before embarking on these sorts of projects.

Similar to the way that bi-lingual/dual immersion language students may temporarily fall behind their peers in 3rd and 4th grade, but rocket ahead later in high school, those interested in interdisciplinary work may seem to lag, but later outpace their lesser specializing peers.

What is the underlying mechanism for providing the acceleration boosts in these models? Are they really the same or is this effect just a coincidence?

Is there something about the dual stock and double experience or even diversity of thought that provides the acceleration? Is there anything in the pedagogy or productivity research space to explain it?

This is part of the reason why I advocate for language skins for comparatively esoteric languages like Ada.

Memory usage is a concern? wat

It's a problem, sure, if you're programming the way NPMers do. So don't do that.

This is a huge problem I've noticed when it comes to people programming in JS—even, bizarrely, people coming from other languages like Java or C# and where you'd expect them to at least try to continue to do things in JS just like they're comfortable doing in their own language. Just because it's there (i.e. possible in the language, e.g. dynamic language features) doesn't mean you have to use it...

(Relevant: How (and why) developers use the dynamic features of programming languages https://users.dcc.uchile.cl/~rrobbes/p/EMSE-features.pdf)

The really annoying thing is that the NPM style isn't even idiomatic for the language! So much of what the NodeJS camp does is so clearly done in frustration and the byproduct of a desire to work against the language. Case in point: the absolutely nonsensical attitude about always using triple equals (as if to ward off some evil spirits) and the undeniable contempt that so many have for this.

This is really only a problem in languages that make the unfortunate mistake of allowing references to unqualified names that get fixed up as if the programmer had written this.mPoint or Foo.point. Even if you're writing in a language where that's possible, just don't write code like that! Just because you can doesn't mean you have to.

The only real exception is distinguishing locals from parameters. Keep your procedures short and it's less of a problem.

List of Italian language learning resources from language learning forum.

https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/what-language-s-are-you-studying/73190

I've been studying Welsh on and off now for just over a year.

I've been using a mix of Duolingo for it's easy user interface and it's built in spaced repetition. I like the way that it integrates vocabulary and grammar in a holistic way which focuses on both reading, writing, and listening.

However, I've also been using the fantastic platform Say Something in Welsh. This uses an older method of listening and producing based teaching which actually makes my brain feel a bit tired after practice. The focus here is solely on listening and speaking and forces the student to verbally produce the language. It's a dramatically different formula than most high school and college based courses I've seen and used over the years having taken 3 years of Spanish, 2 of French, and 2 of Latin.

The set up consists of the introduction of a few words which are then used in a variety of combinations to create full sentences. The instructors say a sentence in English and the listener is encouraged in just a few seconds to attempt to produce it in the target language (Welsh, in my case), then the instructor says the sentence in Welsh with a pause for the student to repeat it properly, another instructor says it in Welsh with a pause for a third repeat. This goes on for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. The end result is that the learner gets into the language much more quickly and can begin both understanding the spoken language as well as produce it much more rapidly than older school based methods (at least in my experience, though I have known some college language labs to use a much more limited version of a similar technique). Each lesson adds new material, but also reviews over older material in a spaced repetition format as well so you're always getting something new mixed in with the old to make new and interesting sentences for conversation.

SSiW also has modules for Manx, Cornish, Dutch, and Spanish.

I find that the two done hand in hand has helped me produce much faster results in language acquisition in an immersive manner than I have done previously and with much less effort.

To manage this new capacity, we switched from ad-hoc project lengths to repeating cycles. (It took some experimentation to find the right cycle length: six weeks. More on that later.)

We formalized our pitching and betting processes.

My role shifted again, from design and product management to product strategy.

I needed new language, like the word "shaping", to describe the up-front design work we did to set boudaries and reduce risks on projects before we committed them to teams.

We needed language to describe what we were doing and more structure to keep doing it at our new scale.

Were parens taken?

Interesting paper to read. I was interested an Indian point of view thinking that - Does a language being monopolized by the elite, to produce their scholarship, but not the language of the commoners - such as Sanskrit, Persian and now English in India, prevent it from being a surviving eventually?

Is it broadly true that the first person and cognates are the last acquisitions of children and among the first losses of aphasiacs?

The speaker uses descriptive imagery of how the victim feels when treated indifferently and why indifference hurts others more than we think. This is the author using pathos to get the audience feeling pity and guilt for these children and victims. This creates a critical tone because his words are harsh about what happened to the victims.

He ends his speech dramatically using an oxymoron to tug at the audiences extreme opposite feelings. Mr. Wiesel does this to make a lasting impression, prompting the audience to take action.

Mr. Wiesel uses a hyperbole here to show that it was a very memorable moment that will be stuck in his memory for a long time.

He asks more rhetorical questions to make the audience question whether or not they were indifferent.

He asks rhetorical questions that get the audience to think about their countries actions and why they were indifferent to begin with.

He uses imagery here to describe how great Roosevelt was, but it creates a heartbreaking and sad tone.

Repetition is used here to show the desperation the children had in being saved. He shows this by repeating "just" twice to create a sense of hopelessness and desperation.

Mr. Wiesel uses personification, suggesting the surroundings are strangers or people the prisoners don't know. This means the prisoners were in a state of confusion and isolation.

Mr. Wiesel uses a hyperbole here to show how devastated people feel when seeing children in pain or abandoned because adults were indifferent to them. This helps him relate to the audience more by using pathos.

More rhetorical questions are used to raise even more doubt about whether or not the audience has truly learned from there mistakes and are willing to do better in the future. This creates a critical tone that's a little harsh at times.

The personification of the world being silent represents everyone on the world not speaking against indifference. This implies that everyone needs to stand up and choose not to be indifferent.

He uses repetition here to show there are many people who suffer from indifference.

Mr. Wiesel uses imagery to show many examples of indifference in other places because of the US government. This is to create a tone of guilt and it also creates pathos, which helps the audience realize what mistakes they made and how they were accidently indifferent to others.

Mr. Wiesel uses Repetition here to show how important Roosevelts image is and how his image is flawed in Jewish history.

Rhetorical question that means God is wherever we are even in suffering, helping us realize someone is always watching over us and staying with us.

Mr. Wiesel uses a hyperbole here to show that being indifferent makes you a monster, or someone who doesn't care as much as the average human does.

A hyperbole exaggerating how the prisoners were. This creates pathos because the audience feels sad for the prisoners and maybe guilty for not helping them.

Vivid Imagery of why people are indifferent, which creates a critical and wise tone.

A hyperbole stating people who are being treated indifferently have no value. Everyone has value and are meaningful, but Mr. Wiesel states this to show how the person feels when being treated terribly.

Mr. Wiesel uses imagery here to explain to the audience what indifference is in his point of view. This is to help the audience better understand what he will be implying about indifference later.

A metaphor is used here comparing the many failures to some large object that casts a dark shadow. The meaning of this is that the failures are difficult to understand, they block the light from humanity, and it effects everyone. This creates a gloomy tone

Rhetorical questions asking what the future generations will think of them, and how will they be remembered. Will they have a legacy of being indifferent or helping others.

Hyperbole, he is not actually filled with gratitude, Mr. Wiesel just has a lot of it.

EDUCAUSE Inclusive Language Guide

Manuela Macedonia's research indicates that online learners who enact specific gestures as they learn words learn better and have longer retention versus simply hearing words. Students who mimic these gestures also learn better than those who only see the gestures and don't use them themselves.

How might this sort of teacher/avatar gesturing be integrated into online methods? How would students be encouraged to follow along?

Could these be integrated into different background settings as well to take advantage of visual memory?

Anecdotally, I remember some Welsh phrases from having watched Aran Jones interact with his cat outside on video or his lip syncing in the empty spaces requiring student responses. Watching the teachers lips while learning can be highly helpful as well.

Manuela Macedonia and co-authors found that pairing new foreign words with gestures created activity in the motor cortex which helped to improve the associative memory for the words and the movements. Using images of the words did not create the same motor cortex involvement.

It's not clear which method of association is better, at least as written in The Extended Mind. Was one better than the other? Were they tested separately, together, and in a control group without either? Surely one would suspect that using both methods together would be most beneficial.

Manuela Macedonia wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the use of gestures to enhance verbal memory for language acquisition.

Most foreign language leaners spend all their time in classrooms or at home sitting down, listening, reading, and writing. This is antithetical to how children acquire language in more natural settings where they're able to move around, interact, taste, touch, smell, etc. as they learn new words in their language. These additional sensory mnemonic techniques add an incredible amount of information and associative hooks to help them remember new words and grammatical structures.

There are two potential axes for gestures: spontaneous and intentional. Intentional gestures include examples like sign language, memetic pantomimes, and dance or related animal mimicry gestures used by indigenous cultures for communicating the movement and behavior of animals.

Intentional gestures can also be specifically designed for pedagogical purposes as well as for mnemonic purposes.

cross reference to Lynne Kelly example about movement/gesture in indigenous cultures.

Can gesturing during (second) language learning help dramatically improve the speed and facility of the second language acquisition by adult learners?

Evidence in language acquisition in children quoted previously in The Extended Mind would indicate yes.

link this related research

Evidence indicates that those who are have experience or fluency in sign language (both hearing and non-hearing) have increased visual-spatial intelligence and reasoning. Practice using gesturing directly improves spatial thinking.

Studies show the importance of gesturing in developing children as a precursor to language. Adults who gesture more have children who gesture more as well. There also seems to be a direct correlation to the gestural vocabulary of children at 14 months and their verbal vocabulary at 4 and 1/2 years of age.

Many children are also able to begin using sign language for their needs prior to being able to use spoken language as well.

John Nagle is fond of making the observation that there are three fundamental and recurring questions that dominate one's concerns when programming in C.

More broadly (speaking of software development generally), one of the two big frustrations I have when dealing with a foreign codebase is the simple question, "Where the hell does this type/function come from?" (esp. in C and, unfortunately, in Go, too, since the team didn't take the opportunity to fix it there when they could have...). There's something to be said for Intellisense-like smarts in IDEs, but I think the criticism of IDEs is justified. I shouldn't need an IDE just to be able to make sense of what I'm reading.

The other big frustration I often have is "Where does the program really start?" Gilad Bracha seems to really get this, from what I've understood of his descriptions about how module definitions work in Newspeak. Even though it's reviled, I think Java was really shrewd about its decisions here (and on the previous problem, too, for that matter—don't know exactly where FooBar comes from? welp, at least you can be reasonably sure that it's in a file called FooBar.java somewhere, so you can do a simple (and cheap) search across file names instead of a (slow, more expensive) full-text search). Except for static initializers, Java classes are just definitions. You don't get to have live code in the top-level scope the way you can with JS or Python or Go. As cumbersome as Java's design decision might feel like it's getting in your way when you're working on your own projects and no matter how much you hate it for making you pay the boilerplate tax, when it comes to diving in to a foreign codebase, it's great when modules are "inert". They don't get to do anything, save for changing the visibility of some symbol (e.g. the FooBar of FooBar.java). If you want to know how a program works, then you can trace the whole thing, in theory, starting from main. That's really convenient when it means you don't have to think about how something might be dependent on a loop in an arbitrary file that immediately executes on import, or any other top-level diddling (i.e. critical functionality obscured by some esoteric global mutable state).

(reputed)

Alternate translation: “To speak another language is to possess another soul.”

Argument that popular modern dictionaries are taking the wrong approach by defining words as plainly as possible. That makes it no fun to use them except for definitions.

For writing at least, using something like the original Websters dictionary is a great help to improve your style.

Dan Freedman, DO. (2022, February 19). No, the CDC did not quietly revise language development guidelines to hide mask induced delays. This is misinformation. The change is based on a 15 year update on the 2004 recs & a lit review performed in 2019 with the explicit goal of identifying higher risk kids. 1/ https://t.co/TlV76bIb7n [Tweet]. @dfreedman7. https://twitter.com/dfreedman7/status/1494846691752751104

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

https://www.unige.ch/callector/lara

example: https://www.issco.unige.ch/en/research/projects/callector/le_petit_prince_abc2vocabpages/hyperlinked_text.html

Stephen Krashen's Theory of Input indicates that language learning is most successful when learners are presented with interesting and comprehensible material in low-anxiety situations.

https://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash-english.html

This is a pretty cool looking project for language learning.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Manny Rayner </span> in Manny Rayner’s review of Abécédaire le petit prince | Goodreads (<time class='dt-published'>02/18/2022 11:40:10</time>)</cite></small>

We have been doing some work recently to make LARA support picture-based texts, and this is our first real example: a multimodal French alphabet book based on Le petit prince. If you're a fan of the book and beginner level in French, you might find it fun! Start Chrome or Firefox and go here.

There's a set of 26 pages, one for each letter, and each page comes in three versions. In the Semantic version, you can click on the picture and hear the word spoken in French; hovering gives you a translation. In the Phonetic version, you can hover over the word and spell though it one letter group at a time. Clicking on a letter group will play the sound and show you other words where that sound occurs. In the Examples version, you'll see a French sentence from Le petit prince which uses the word, annotated with audio and translations both for the individual words and for the sentence as a whole.

The screenshot above illustrates. The D word is dessins ("drawings"). This is the Phonetic version: I've just clicked on the letter group in, and it's played the sound /ɛ̃/, the nasalised vowel that this letter group usually represents in French, and shown me that the same sound also occurs in invisible ("invisible") and jardin ("garden"). If you go to the Examples version, you see the sentence Mon dessin ne représentait pas un chapeau. ("My drawing wasn't supposed to be a hat") from the first chapter of the book.

Comments will be very welcome! We're thinking of doing more of these and want to know where we can improve things.

https://thelatinlibrary.com/

https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/marie-kondo-tokimeku-spark-joy-translation-266496

on the translation of tokimeku, or ときめく, as "spark joy"

https://thejollyteapot.com/2022/01/5/ben-smith-s-new-media-venture-could-be-the-one-i-ve-been-looking-for

Learning and mastering an alien language takes a tremendous amount of work, taxing one's imagination attempting to come to terms with similarly alien cultural concepts.

A domain-specific language for encoding legal interpretations.

This metaphor unfolds how powerful the speaker is as it acts as a symbol of energy and immensity while hinting at the color of her skin. Comparing herself to a compelling force of nature, she portrays herself as strong and majestic going with the highs and lows of the "tide" or society's challenges.

The alliteration in this line - in which the words begin with the consonant "d" - make the line easy to read and flow nicely, thus suggesting that the speaker dances with joy and content. The simile conveys that she embraces herself, her body, and culture and that she will not change to fit a societal mold.

Symbols of wealth are spread throughout the poem: gold mines, diamonds, and oil wells. This suggests that Angelou feels wealthy when surrounded by the elements of her community. She does not have an abundance of financial wealth and society does not view her or her community as wealthy and also restricts them from gaining wealth. s

This simile portrays Angelou's success with her previous poetry collections as she recognizes herself as an accomplished female black writer. Oil wells are a symbol of prosperity; the richest countries in the world were selling oil. Thus when reading this line, the reader should picture a wealthy girl with their head held high.

1. Simile

This simile contrasts that of the symbol in the line above. Using the symbol of dirt to convey the unvalued and downtrodden significance of the African Americans to society, she counters this with the simile of dust. She implies that, similar to dust which rises from the ground when stepped on by a heavy foot, her community will rise up and fight against this oppression.

1. Irony

This set of two lines at the end of this first stanza address direct oppression and demonstrate irony. She explains that in an attempt to try and oppress her, the oppressors are giving her strength and determination to survive. With the intention to stop her from moving forward by stomping her into the dirt, it has an opposing effect. She is able to rise higher. The presence of oppression strengthens her resolve, and followed by "I'll rise" emphasizes her resistance to give in. Typically a negative and dirty image, Angelou is able to twist dust into a positive and strong image to show her community's desire for equality.

Dirt represents how the black community was treated. They were constantly being pushed down or insulted. The community was not accepted as a true part of society as they were seen as a low, disrespected class.

"History's shame" could be interpreted as an understatement. Slavery generated extensive suffering through tearing apart families, destroying the spirits of African people, and many died. The effects still present today - seen with some still prevalent racist beliefs - demonstrate that slavery changed the course of American history.

To view more about the history during this time period and how Maya Angelou impacted this crucial era of American history, view the Historical Context page note.

The repetition of "I rise" at the end of the poem drives home her desire to work together with the African American community to rise and face the adversity and hardships that society imposes. It not only creates rhythm, but also reinforces the persistence and strength of the speaker.

When talking about her ancestors, Angelou is referring to her great grandmother who was a slave (and passed away in 1942). By saying she is the dream, Angelou is attempting to set an example for others of her race in regards to rising above hard situations. Her goal with her work is to inspire change. She is demanding that society leave behind the negative effects of slavery and history of oppression with intent to rise above.

Shown through her later works, Angelou's great success with not only poetry, but other aspects of American culture. being a poet of presidents, civil rights activist, filmmaker, actor, dancer, and above all educator. She was the first of many special experiences for the African American community; for instance, she served as the first black female street car driver in San Francisco, she wrote the first script by a black woman to be made into a Hollywood film, and her best-selling, award-winning autobiographical book (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) was one of the first ever written by an African American woman to generate widespread readership. Overall successful in her rise above the deep-rooted racist American beliefs as she played a major role in the civil rights movement.

This line contrasts that of the dark images portrayed in the line above regarding nights of "terror and fear." This juxtaposition highlights the bright future ahead with her hopes for the civil rights movement by using the images of night and day.

Alliteration from repeating the consonant "h" creates a line with a heavy sound as she refers to the history of slavery. Even though her people have been. oppressed in the past they have overcome these challenges and will continue this movement.

Alliteration is used in this line as the consonant "s" is repeated, making the line taunting. The repeated rhetorical questions place society on trial for the harm and injustice pitted against the African American community. While incriminating them, she reveals incredible self-confidence despite the hardships.

Air in the simile illustrates that the speaker will continue to rise above the challenges set forth, no matter the harm that someone tries to inflict upon her.

The oppression is brought to the climax in this stanza as Angelou compares the hate to death. Saying that the oppressor's hate might kill her spirit, she continues in the next line ensuring the reader that she will rise above. Overall from this stanza, the dark and grim connotation emphasize the aggression towards the African American community. In these lines she is referring to more deep emotional pain rather than physical hurt; however, she uses these tangible, violent objects to show her message. One's words and looks can destroy another person's emotional spirit and one's hatred can kill caused by certain societal rejections.

This metaphorical weapon refers to the violence of a gun comparing it to the cruel looks of the oppressor. The looks are so hurtful and agonizing in the regard that they are sharp and cutting, like a knife.

Angelou uses metaphorical weapons in this stanza to emphasize the pain of the oppression. Referring to the violence of shooting a gun, the metaphor demonstrates the pain of the oppressor's hateful language.

By comparing gold mines to her laugh, she portraying that she laughs with the confidence of someone who is wealthy, like she had gold has been discovered in her backyard. She may not be wealthy in a financial sense; however, she has a great wealth of hope and spirit. This simile can also be interpreted as describing the richness of Angelou's culture. The traditions and ties to the culture and "backyard" shows she is close and involved in her community.

Another set of rhetorical questions, Angelou is painting a picture of defeat. Being direct and pertinent, she is accusing the oppressor for their actions. She is aware that her success is received with bitterness by the racist society. A few interpretations can be drawn from this stanza. This may literally be a picture of a slave who was abused and she is referring to a broken person. But it can also be taken as a person with a broken spirit as this poem is an autobiography. When Angelou was a young child, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and informed of his death after he was murdered soon after; the traumatic series of events led her to be almost completely mute for several years. This interpretation can be of her broken heart and broken spirit from those traumatic childhood experiences. Finally, a general interpretation applies this brokenness and defeat from challenge as an experience that everyone can undergo throughout their life - making it relatable and applicable to the general public, or someone who is experiencing similar despair.

This simile shows the impact of societal conditions on her and the black community - that she is working towards fixing. The speaker refers to being upset and distraught to the point that one's shoulder collapse or sink down, just as tears fall off of one's cheek.

This simile stresses her point about maintaining high hopes and confidence during this time of oppression.

In this simile, Angelou is comparing her resilience to the rising sun and moon in how she will continue to live her life even after people insult and ridicule her. It is her nature to stand against oppression just like the nature of the tides to respond to the moon. The word "certainty" is significant in this line because it emphasizes that no matter how difficult the challenge, she will rise above it with certainty and confidence.

These first two stanzas contain rhetorical questions that notice society is upset with her success as a writer. Seeing as her work mostly dealt with speaking out against inequality, when Angelou's activist efforts became popular, she received backlash for being an African American woman. In this poem, she is questioning those who would try to deny her the right to succeed and become an accepted part of society. Throughout the poem, she refers to this "you," or the antagonist. Interrogating them, she holds the antagonist accountable for the painful events that her community has been subjected to for countless years.

Double meaning: The author's lover swears an 'oath' to them of love, a promise, but since that promise is false, according to the final line of the stanza, it also resembles a curse.

The author implies falseness in their lover, since she appears as a lily, but masks herself in another flower's coloring.

In calling their (female) lover a 'lecher', the author not only implies a gross unchasteness, they imply a masculinity, since lecher was most frequently applied to men.

"Knell" refers to a bell that rings to announce a death or a funeral. Poe uses a simile to compare the sound of wedding vows to the sound of a death knell. This comparison introduces the concept of death, a major characteristic of gothic literature, into the poem, and it also shows the bride's mixed emotions towards her wedding.

Another way of saying that the use of V8 means that JS isn't actually an "interpreted language" (not that that's even a real thing).

Sloman, S. A. (2021). How Do We Believe? Topics in Cognitive Science, 0(2021), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12580

http://nihongo.monash.edu/japanese.html Huge corpus of online Japanese resources

http://countryoftheblind.blogspot.com/2011/10/product-review-remembering-traditional.html

Review of Remembering Traditional Hanzi, by James W. Heisig and Timothy W. Richardson which is related to Heisig's similar Japanese book.

While Heisig's book in Japanese is interesting, it's interesting and feels less useful than a similar and more contextualized book by Kenneth Henshall.

http://countryoftheblind.blogspot.com/2012/01/mnemonics-for-pronouncing-chinese.html

The Marilyn method is a means of creating associated characters and places to sounds/tones in Chinese for memorizing kanji.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Lynne Kelly</span> in Foreign Languages – a call for opinions – Lynne Kelly (<time class='dt-published'>11/22/2021 12:44:51</time>)</cite></small>

Learning radicals in languages like Chinese and the related Japanese can not only help vocabulary and literacy, but build cultural understanding of the language and culture.

This has been roughly my experience with Japanese, but I've yet to see an incredibly good method for doing this in a structured way.

Over the years in academic settings I've picked up pieces of Spanish, French, Latin and a few odd and ends of other languages.

Six years ago we put our daughter into a dual immersion Japanese program (in the United States) and it has changed some of my view of how we teach and learn languages, a process which is also affected by my slowly picking up conversational Welsh using the method at https://www.saysomethingin.com/ over the past year and change, a hobby which I wish I had more targeted time for.

Children learn language through a process of contextual use and osmosis which is much more difficult for adults. I've found that the slowly guided method used by SSiW is fairly close to this method, but is much more targeted. They'll say a few words in the target language and give their English equivalents, then they'll provide phrases and eventually sentences in English and give you a few seconds to form them into the target language with the expectation that you try to say at least something, or pause the program to do your best. It's okay if you mess up even repeatedly, they'll say the correct phrase/sentence two times after which you'll repeat it again thus giving you three tries at it. They'll also repeat bits from one lesson to the next, so you'll eventually get it, the key is not to worry too much about perfection.

Things slowly build using this method, but in even about 10 thirty minute lessons, you'll have a pretty strong grasp of fluent conversational Welsh equivalent to a year or two of college level coursework. Your work on this is best supplemented with interacting with native speakers and/or watching television or reading in the target language as much as you're able to.

For those who haven't experienced it before I'd recommend trying out the method at https://www.saysomethingin.com/welsh/course1/intro to hear it firsthand.

The experience will give your brain a heavy work out and you'll feel mentally tired after thirty minutes of work, but it does seem to be incredibly effective. A side benefit is that over time you'll also build up a "gut feeling" about what to say and how without realizing it. This is something that's incredibly hard to get in most university-based or book-based language courses.

This method will give you quicker grammar acquisition and you'll speak more like a native, but your vocabulary acquisition will tend to be slower and you don't get any writing or spelling practice. This can be offset with targeted memory techniques and spaced repetition/flashcards or apps like Duolingo that may help supplement one's work.

I like some of the suggestions made in Lynne's post as I've been pecking away at bits of Japanese over time myself. There's definitely an interesting structure to what's going on, especially with respect to the kana and there are many similarities to what is happening in Japanese to the Chinese that she's studying. I'm also approaching it from a more traditional university/book-based perspective, but if folks have seen or heard of a SSiW repetition method, I'd love to hear about it.

Hopefully helpful by comparison, I'll mention a few resources I've found for Japanese that I've researched on setting out a similar path that Lynne seems to be moving.

Japanese has two different, but related alphabets and using an app like Duolingo with regular practice over less than a week will give one enough experience that trying to use traditional memory techniques may end up wasting more time than saving, especially if one expects to be practicing regularly in both the near and the long term. If you're learning without the expectation of actively speaking, writing, or practicing the language from time to time, then wholesale mnemotechniques may be the easier path, but who really wants to learn a language like this?

The tougher portion of Japanese may come in memorizing the thousands of kanji which can have subtly different meanings. It helps to know that there are a limited set of specific radicals with a reasonably delineable structure of increasing complexity of strokes and stroke order.

The best visualization I've found for this fact is the Complete Listing of the 214 Radicals and Major Variations from An Introduction to Japanese Kanji Calligraphy by Kunii Takezaki (Tuttle, 2005) which I copy below:

(Feel free to right click and view the image in another tab or download it and view it full size to see more detail.)

I've not seen such a chart in any of the dozens of other books I've come across. The numbered structure of increasing complexity of strokes here would certainly suggest an easier to build memory palace or songline.

I love this particular text as it provides an excellent overview of what is structurally happening in Japanese with lots of tidbits that are otherwise much harder won in reading other books.

There are many kanji books with various forms of what I would call very low level mnemonic aids. I've not found one written or structured by what I would consider a professional mnemonist. One of the best structured ones I've seen is A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters by Kenneth G. Henshall (Tuttle, 1988). It's got some great introductory material and then a numbered list of kanji which would suggest the creation of a quite long memory palace/journey/songline.

Each numbered Kanji has most of the relevant data and readings, but provides some description about how the kanji relates or links to other words of similar shapes/meanings and provides a mnemonic hint to make placing it in one's palace a bit easier. Below is an example of the sixth which will give an idea as to the overall structure.

I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but I'd found an online app called WaniKani for Japanese that has some mnemonic suggestions and built-in spaced repetition that looks incredibly promising for taking small radicals and building them up into more easily remembered complex kanji.

I suspect that there are likely similar sources for these couple of books and apps for Chinese that may help provide a logical overall structuring which will make it easier to apply or adapt one's favorite mnemotechniques to make the bulk vocabulary memorization easier.

The last thing I'll mention I've found, that's good for practicing writing by hand as well as spaced repetition is a Kanji notebook frequently used by native Japanese speaking children as they're learning the levels of kanji in each grade. It's non-obvious to the English speaker, and took me a bit to puzzle out and track down a commercially printed one, even with a child in a classroom that was using a handmade version. The notebook (left to right and top to bottom) has sections for writing a big example of the learned kanji; spaces for the "Kun" and "On" readings; spaces for the number of strokes and the radical pieces; a section for writing out the stroke order as it builds up gradually; practice boxes for repeated practice of writing the whole kanji; examples of how to use the kanji in context; and finally space for the student to compose their own practice sentences using the new kanji.

Regular use and practice with these can be quite helpful for moving toward mastery.

I also can't emphasize enough that regularly and actively watching, listening, reading, and speaking in the target language with materials that one finds interesting is incredibly valuable. As an example, one of the first things I did for Welsh was to find a streaming television and radio that I want to to watch/listen to on a regular basis has been helpful. Regular motivation and encouragement is key.

I won't go into them in depth and will leave them to speak for themselves, but two of the more intriguing videos I've watched on language acquisition which resonate with some of my experiences are:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox6MdRTc0yE