quixotic120

no but there are plenty of of resources much more knowledgeable than I am

Recommend genki if you’re good with a book

If you just want to get started like today duolingo isn’t horrible but I would suggest going into setting as soon as possible and turning off romaji (the English pronunciation guide written over the hiragana). It will make it significantly harder initially but using romaji will stop you from learning the characters. You won’t read the hiragana, you’ll read the alphabet you already know.

That said I did duolingo to brush up a bit and I really dislike that they don’t explain much when you make errors. Given it’s an app they have the ability to bring up so much information for errorless learning. I guess they want to make it “easy” and prevent information overload but it tends to be that they present you with a screen when a concept is introduced then that screen is gone forever. So then if you make the error you just have to kind of figure out the grammatical rules behind what you’re doing wrong

In the beginning it’s not so bad but eventually you’ll get very confused, why does は (wa, kind of like “is”) sometimes go here and sometimes go there? Why is it sometimes は and sometimes が (ga)? Duolingo never really clearly explains particles, wa marks the topic and ga marks the subject. Duolingo just throws dozens of examples at you until you consistently get it correct without necessarily knowing why unless you dig through the app or research independently

It bothers me because I am in mental health by trade and my research interests and background is in human behavior and more specifically learning and skill acquisition. This is an inefficient model for skill acquisition. Allowing the learner to make this many errors as part of your model slows learning, potentially significantly, and allows the learner to learn bad habits and mistakes. So as you’re doing it and mistranslating you may ingrain that (bolding wa/は)

それらはわたしのあかいコートですか (sore wa watashi no akai koto desu ka) are those my red coats?

Should be

それらわたしのあかいコートはですか

(sore watashi no akai koto wa desu ka) which is grammatically incorrect and makes you sound like a goddamn fool

But when you’re learning concepts like doko/どこ and soko/そこ (where, there, basically) you learn that “wa” goes towards the end of your phrase like whatever wa doko desu ka similar to the incorrect example above

Sore/それ and kore/これ are demonstrative (this and that, basically, though the above example again shows how contextually this falls apart and it becomes “those”) and are typically introduced shortly before doko/soko

But again when you get this wrong duolingo will just say “you got it wrong, here’s what it should have been.” To be fair a book has the same limitation, it’s just with an app, especially a mature well funded app like duolingo they have the opportunity to easily be like you got it wrong and here’s why! And that would accelerate learning by quite a bit, at least theoretically

Fun times! Remember these are real basic examples and I am also real dumb

And yet feeding it Japanese it usually gives the worst outcomes even if you do this and deepL gives much better ones even if you don’t. I don’t know what magic deepL does to make that happen but when I scanlate manga deepL almost always gives the best result even when I do what you’re doing or feed ChatGPT the images directly

I never know what to tell people like you. DeepL is the best one at translating Japanese and it still is mixed

Japanese is a contextual language. It is difficult for machines to translate because it is not a language where a word simply means this or that.

Take a very short sentence:

がくせいです - gakusei desu

Gakusei is “student”

A literal translation of this would be “am student” or “is student”

But if I say this to you you will infer things based on context and です/desu takes on a different role. If I am clearly referring to myself then gakusei desu in this context becomes “I’m a student” (though to be fair I would probably have said it with a first person pronoun and particle like わたしはわ (watashi wa)

But if I’m referring to another singular person in the room this would be inferred through context, eg “he’s a student.” But this is where it starts getting confusing, the copula (desu) doesn’t differentiate singular or plural, so context is also used to derive plural forms, eg “they are students”.

This copula also applies to other situations outside of he/she like “it” eg コンビニです, konbini desu, konbini being “convenience store”, “its a convenience store”

This is a very very basic idea of why. It gets more complex obviously once you move past these extremely basic examples but honestly someone more knowledgeable at Japanese should explain at that point, I’m self taught and mediocre (thus my use of 0 kanji, I’m pretty sure at a minimum there’s kanji for gakusei and watashi but I suuuuck at kanji. I at least know meat. 肉肉肉 although that’s mostly thanks to anime and the local Asian grocer lmao).

I think AI can probably do it eventually but it will need to be able to do much better job of understanding what the source material is actually talking about and that’s the challenge to overcome. And that’s why it will probably never be able to really accurately translate a paragraph copy pasted into it

As to the sanitation that’s a separate issue about corporate control of AI. If they don’t want their translation services to sound “vulgar” that’s their prerogative I suppose but it also means they sound less human and realistic because people are gross and ugly when they speak. Vernacular is ugly and lexicon adapts quickly in ways that people don’t always love. But to be clear I don’t mean it’s just about slurs and bad words, I mean it’s about slang in general. Words that are generally inoffensive but not considered proper. English equivalents would be what we consider zoomer speak, hella sus yeah bruh type shit (I’m not good at this part)

Oh shit this is great, thanks

I don’t even care about flirting with women I just want a free app where I can practice speaking my second language with actual people and not some sanitized AI that doesn’t understand context or slang instead of watching cringe youtubers

Like Duolingo/genki or google translate doesn’t really capture おっす. Duolingo probably doesn’t bother with that kind of informal speech. Google just translates it as “hey”, which isn’t wrong, but it’s not really right either. Even deepl just translates it as yo!, which is much closer but still kind of not really it. It’s more like a sup brah kind of thing. Like a really masculine youthful colloquial greeting I guess is the best way to explain it.

But not discord, fuck discord

Fetterman is a mirrored pair of oakleys away from going full on trump. I expect if democrats regain any power he will become an obstructionist

https://archive.org/details/battleforflorida0000unse/page/n9/mode/2up

P37-42

You have to log in to borrow it, sorry. The norc data is also freely available via most university libraries if you have access to one though

Anon wants to play as Micah

These actually had distinction:

Defectives was generally the term prior to like 1845, which is when Howe published “on the causes of idiocy”. That led to more classification

Idiot was what we could call severe intellectual disability. Requiring 24 hour care but some muscular control, cognitive, and speech capabilities. Use was phased out in the late 19th century because it had become pejorative

Fool was a subcategory of idiot with more significant impairment of reasoning and speech skills. This became pejorative and was phased out.

Simpleton was moderate intellectual disability. Some degree of functioning, capacity for speech, motor and reasoning skills, but required assistance with tasks. This also become pejorative and was phased out (see a pattern). This was replaced with several terms, including feeble minded, imbecile, and moron, which were also in turn phased out.

at one point in the 19th century there was a distinction when symptoms of dementia set in. If you got what we would now call early onset dementia, it was called “amentia”. By the early 20th century “ament” was kind of a catch all for “idiots, imbeciles, and feeble minded”

There was also “cretin” which was originally supposed to be a kindness for all intellectually disabled people as it means “Christian” in French or something, but it also became pejorative

Another super racist one was mongoloid/mongolism which was specifically for Down’s syndrome. This is because, no joke, John Down thought people with down syndrome looked like Mongolians. His reward for his racism was the condition bears his name forever, apparently. This was only changed because Mongolia had to petition the WHO to change it because it was offensive

Imo instead of policing language we should maybe recognize that the intentionality behind the use of these terms is what the problem is.

Saying the word “retarded” does not have to be inherently offensive. Describing something that is slowed or hindered as retarded is accurate. Using retarded as a pejorative term makes you a dick, sure. But if I go through all the effort to change “retarded” to “intellectually disabled” guess what happens? The same thing that has happened for the past 175+ years. The people who have used the terms in the pejorative sense will quickly adapt, making your efforts to police language pointless unless you intended to enrich their lexicon.

If you consider actions that could actually be meaningful for the individual it would be something that would address the harm caused by pejorative use. That’s a challenging road to go down (imagine criminal penalties: middle schools would be ghost towns!). we want to feel like we do something though so we instead do this, which is pointless.

That said if the disorder was named by an old racist based on his racism then by all means change it up but maybe don’t memorialize him when you do it. That doesn’t come up as much anymore, thankfully

This honestly makes so much more sense from an environmental standpoint. Why waste so much in terms of resources shipping hundreds of millions of pounds of sugar water every month so picky babies that refuse to drink water will pump more money into the coca cola empire so they can get type 2 diabetes as fast as possible. Instead just ship this little cup thing at 1/18th the weight and save so much gasoline, road wear and tear, etc.

Who am I kidding, they’ll just put this into plastic bottled water that’s been shipped from 3 states over

Sad to hear, my og one still runs fine but it’s old at this point from like 2014 or so

The polyscience is definitely a workhorse but it’s wild overkill for 99% of users. I will again point to I have a chinese no name one I’ve had for like 8 years now that has held up fine and was $13 from AliExpress because I wanted a backup. I have used it quite a bit for whenever I host a large meal and need to cook 2-3 baths at once

And honestly for what the polyscience costs you don’t get the value, imo. I have read people who have had them fail on the Chefsteps forums, it does happen. I don’t hold this against polyscience of course, failure is inevitable, but frankly for $1200 you should get a significant warranty period. You don’t get that, it’s like 12 or 24 months. If and when it breaks you’re hosed and on the hook for (very expensive, given brevilles track record) repairs

What you’re buying with polyscience is very strong power and a high degree of precision. The first point is why restaurants use them; if you’re preparing 30+ portions at once you need a circulator that can heat a significant amount of water. And to this point a lot of commercial kitchens doing this now use external heaters on the bath like this so that the circulator doesn’t need to be as powerful. The other thing polyscience does (or at least did) is higher precision on the thermocouple but this is unnecessary for culinary applications. It was necessary for laboratory circulators that they were making before this was popularized but with culinary applications you really just need accuracy within .1 degree C, which is not all that precise

This is simply not true

Modern meat is generally pretty safe and chicken tartare is definitely a thing. Is it something you should do if you are immunocompromised, a child, or elderly? Probably not. Is it something you should do if you are unsure of how the meat was handled? Probably not

But if you buy quality chicken from a trusted butcher, freeze the surface, blanch it for a few seconds, you can pretty safely eat it raw assuming you’ve done a good job keeping your surfaces and hands clean. You could probably do it with grocery store chicken tbh but the risks are much greater because you have no clue if the $12/hr kid packing chicken breasts properly washed their hands (handling is overwhelmingly where foodborne illness is going to come from in this scenario)

Is it going to be safe 100% of the time? No, of course not. But neither is eating medium rare steak, or eggs with runny yolks. But could you do this every day for a year with issue? Probably.

Although I wouldn’t necessarily consider this the same over the next 4 years of american deregulation

Raw chicken is kind of like scallops btw