Sorry to be a curmudgeon but I get tired of all these claims about how well young children speak second languages.
A young child saying "Vanilla ice cream please!" often sounds more like "Ganiwa ishe! cweam! pweese!".
A typical 4-year-old speaking English substitutes many sounds for another because they developmentally aren't able to make the right sounds yet. Their intonation is also all over the place.
If an adult had their accent it would be barely intelligible (and in fact many small children are hard to understand by people who don't spend a lot of time with them).
It is amazing to watch how fast small children grow and develop but we also (rightfully) grade them on a curve. It is when we compare them to adults that somehow we forget the curve being applied.
Just a thought from someone who speaks English and a smattering of Spanish.
If the child can correctly express the idea/intent they want and be understood then arguably they have learned that part of the language. Sure it might not sound how an adult would be likewise they probably don’t in their native language either right?
I doubt anyone is saying that kids learn to speak the language perfectly but clearly there is a pattern where by they are able to understand and express themselves faster than adults - even if they sound childish still.
The person you're responding to said that children are graded on a curve. Your response is that children should be graded on a curve. Fine, but only being understood by your mother when near an ice cream shop is not the goal for adults learning a second language.
I would actually argue that if a child and an adult spent the same amount of time engaged in language learning and were graded on the same metrics the adult would get farther. I don't think there's a magical cutoff where we suddenly can't learn languages anymore.
Rather, I think it is partly because we grade them on a curve that children are said to be amazing linguists
Children have many other advantages that also help them:
* More free time
* Fewer internal distractions (Did I lock the door? What am I making for dinner? etc.)
* Not being afraid to make mistakes
I've observed my kiddo when he was a toddler and I think there might be an inflection point when they are very young and don't speak so well, when they might be able to learn any language with ease, precisely because they don't recognize let alone speak even their own so well. I recall my kid was watching TV and all and at some point while eating he pointed to a drawing on a cocoa box and said "monkey!" in English, and indeed it was a monkey. Must have picked it up from cartoons or something.
But then there's a point of no return when they learn enough native language from which point on any attempt at a foreign one becomes deliberate practice that requires effort. And this point of no return follows very early from the point when they start to speak.
My example above was of a 5 year old. At that age, she already spoke her own language fluently so that anyone understood her well (of course, they still have a smaller vocabulary at this age as they haven't been able to talk about all sorts of topics yet). Do you think a normal 5yo normally still speaks blurry?? Or a 6yo? At this age, and even up to perhaps 12yo, as far as I can tell, they're able to absorb another language quite easily, and it only becomes harder around age 14 or so... though of course I haven't run an experiment or anything. I expect your learning curve becomes worse gradually between the ages of 14 and 30, maybe very slowly up to mid 40's.
If a non-native English speaking 5 year old said "I goed to school today" people would say they are native level. (Even though they used the non-word "goed" as the past tense of "to go" instead of "went")
If a non-native English speaking 15 year old said "I goed to school today" people wouldn't say, "wow, they are a native speaker" nor would they say "wow, they are natively speaking like a 5-year-old" - they would say they still needed practice.
That's my point - speaking like a 5 year old as an adult wouldn't be considered native by anyone but a 5 year old. As you get older the standard is higher: speaking like a 10 year old is much harder than speaking like a 5 year old.
So for a 10 year old just learning a new language it may take longer than the 5 year old to get to their age level. That doesn't necessarily mean the 10 year old is worse at learning languages though since they have so much more to learn to be considered "native".
My children went to kindergarten (barnehage) in Norway when they were about three and a half and speaking English well. Well with a year they were indistinguishable from the native children.
Either their fee is wrong and they should both have to stop charging it and pay a settlement or the fee is totally fine and Verizon should pay nothing.
Yes, almost always. But it's important to point out the edge cases.
Where I'm from the largest power plant in the country is also insanely polluting - Bełchatow power plant burns lignite for electricity and the CO2 emissions are just bananas. The official number is around 1.7kg(!!!!!!!) Of CO2 for every kWh of electricity produced[1]. If you run your electric car using energy from that power plant then yes, it pollutes more than almost any petrol/diesel vehicle bar some sports cars and large trucks.
But that's a curiosity, an edge case, and if anything it proves that Bełchatow should be closed down immediately and not that EVs are a bad thing.
Electric fueled by coal produces less CO2 than gasoline. It's not cleaner by a long shot. The pollution produced by a coal plant, especially a brown coal plant, is insane even when they don't have an ash pond breach that kills more wildlife than a tactical nuclear explosion.
"You glide silently out of the Tesla (TSLA.O) showroom in your sleek new electric Model 3, satisfied you're looking great and doing your bit for the planet. But keep going - you'll have to drive another 13,500 miles (21,725 km) before you're doing less harm to the environment than a gas-guzzling saloon."[0]
Appreciate this may be desperately off-message here, but here's the rub: what we change in Europe and North America isn't going to fix anything unless we take China, India, and all the rest of the world with us.
"Most of the electricity in China comes from coal, which accounted for 62% of the electricity generation mix in 2021"[1]
"China permits two new coal power plants per week in 2022"[2]
"China ramps up coal power despite carbon neutral pledges. Local governments approved more coal power in first three months of 2023 than all of 2021."[3]
If we really care about fixing the planet, China and India are where we should be looking. Teslas in California are an irrelevance.
This isn't very clear what it is demonstrating and the explanation doesn't help.
If I lived on a small sphere and saw a pole in the ground, tied a rope to it, and walked all the way around the sphere I would see the same pole and I could tie the other end of the rope to it. I wouldn't see dozens of poles floating in the sky.
So why would I see duplicate copies of the same pole if I lived on a donut-shaped planet instead?
In this example, you're not living on the surface of a donut shaped planet, you're living in a 3D space (not a surface!) that is the 3D equivalent of a donut.
Pacman lives on the surface of an actual 2D donut, when he goes to the left side of the screen, he pops out on the right side, and when he goes to the topmost part of the screen, he comes out from the bottom. (Not convinced this is the same as a donut? Imagine the surface was made of a stretchy film and bend the lefthand side to meet the righthand side, forming a cylinder. Now, to make the topmost side meet the bottom side, you fold the cylinder into a donut shape!)
This is the 3D version of the "Pacman universe", where if you go up enough, you come back around the bottom, and the same for all the cardinal directions.
For a sphere, the location of where you land when you go off the screen is a continuous function of where you started from. If two Pac-Men exit the screen next to each other, they will re-enter the screen next to each other.
The real Pac-Man game is a donut because it's discontinuous at the corners. If two Pac-Men are right next to each other near the top-left corner, and one exits via the top and the other exits via the left, they will end up on opposite sides of the map.
There's a mathematical formalization of this, where the thing you look at is closed paths of Pac-Man leaving a point, traveling around, and returning back to that same point. You group such circuits by whether they can be continuously deformed into each other. The discontinuity at the corners makes two distinct families of circuits, which correspond to traveling on a donut around the circumference vs going through the hole.
A donut is a way to embed a two-dimensional torus in our three-dimensional space. What we have here is different. It's a visualisation of a three-dimensional torus. On a two-dimensional donut, there are two directions which loop around. In the space shown here, the only difference is that there are three directions.
A three-dimensional sphere also loops around, but it's not quite the same. One way to get the three-dimensional sphere would be to glue each points at the cube boundary to every other point on the boundary. One way to show that this three-dimensional sphere is not the same as the three-dimensional torus is that in the three-dimensional sphere, you could gather up any tied rope by passing it around the cube boundary.
I'm sorry my explanation wasn't clear. The reason why duplicate copies are seen in is because the light can loop around space multiple times before reaching your eyes. If you launch a long rope to a distant cylinder, look at what you see in the bottom left miniature. That's an indication of the looping path that the light is taking from that cylinder to reach your eyes. Launch a rope at different cylinders to see what some of the different paths are.
As a side note, if you lived in a small three-dimensional sphere, you would be able to see an object located at the antipodal point smeared out in every direction, because following a geodesic in each direction leads to the antipode.
I've seen this visualised in the video game Hyperbolica.
This is one of the techniques I use for my depression and it does help me "deal with it".
In my case "deal with it" doesn't mean "make me not depressed": I'm still depressed but it does help me turn some some of my bad, hard-to-do-anything days into ok or even occasionally productive ones. And having something useful come out of a day I thought I would be useless is also helpful in fighting depressive thought loops about being a useless/lazy/bad person generally speaking.
Pressure would remain the same just as eating a single grape would not abate a person's hunger: NYC has millions of existing housing units. To make a significant dent in the rent would require building hundreds of thousands of new apartments.
This feels a bit like complaining that a tank is badly designed because nobody drives them on the highway...
My understanding is that Rust was designed to be a safe(er) language to write low-level system code than C/C++, not to compete with Python/Ruby/Java for web development applications.
I'm not complaining about Rust. It's a very good language.
I'm complaining about everybody on programming forums, including HN, seeing Rust as the replacement for most, if not all languages. My opinion is that Rust's ideal problem space is much narrower than people think.
Bingo, it's a true systems language. That said, the fact that people can and do write web applications(for practical reasons) with it kind of says something about it's breadth.
The eruv (string around the neighborhood) is to get around the prohibition on carrying things between a "public" domain and a "private" domain. This prohibition is very broad - having your house keys in your pants pocket as you leave your house counts as "carrying" as does pushing a stroller. The eruv allows the whole neighborhood to be considered a "private" area and sidesteps this prohibition.
However there are definitely Jewish communities that don't have an eruv or wouldn't make use of it if there is one in the neighborhood.
IQ tests are probably the most reliable tests in psychology. IQ is generally stable from the age of 6. Hundreds of studies have demonstrated a 15 point or 1 standard deviation difference between the intelligence test scores of African Americans and White Americans.
Several of those goals are still subject to the whims of factors outside of your control.
E.g. "lead engineering on a project that has at least one other engineer." What if no project comes about? What if you start such a project and it gets canceled by strategic re-alignment? What if management keeps re-assigning the other engineer out from under you? What if executive leadership decides a larger project is priority #1 and demands 100% of your time? What if your division re-organizes how it assigns work and changes what it means to "lead" a team?
Not attaching goals to specific projects is certainly step number 1, and insulates you from some measure of change. But all of your goals are still subject to varying degrees of being de-valued or re-defined after a year's time.
A young child saying "Vanilla ice cream please!" often sounds more like "Ganiwa ishe! cweam! pweese!".
A typical 4-year-old speaking English substitutes many sounds for another because they developmentally aren't able to make the right sounds yet. Their intonation is also all over the place.
If an adult had their accent it would be barely intelligible (and in fact many small children are hard to understand by people who don't spend a lot of time with them).
Here's one speech sound development guide for English: https://childdevelopment.com.au/resources/child-development-...
It is amazing to watch how fast small children grow and develop but we also (rightfully) grade them on a curve. It is when we compare them to adults that somehow we forget the curve being applied.