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comment by rjw
rjw  ·  2665 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are your goals for 2017?

Visit: USA, Hong Kong, Japan.

Read more books. Spend less time 'reading' things online. I'm going to make a list.

Cook my own food more often (my current kitchen is not pleasant to cook in, but I'm working on it).

Learn about a new area of computing (distributed computing looks interesting and possibly applicable to my current work and definitely applicable to future work).

Continue to make music. Actually release something.

Do politics. Not sure how. Damn.

Study languages more often (I am at the eternal intermediate stage in German and I would also like to learn Spanish and either Japanese or Mandarin).

(realises that I always put the same goals on these kind of threads - I need to make these more concrete or they're never going to happen)

added a thread for German speakers/students:



galen  ·  2664 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ich bin auch in der Zwischenstufe des Lernens der deutschen Sprache (aber hoffentlich nicht ewig!)

Ich erinnere mich das einige andere Hubskiers können oder lernen Deutsch… vielleicht sollen wir einen Verein formen :)

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rjw  ·  2664 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ich soll einen Beitrag für Deutschlerner machen.

EDIT:

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veen  ·  2664 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I get my groceries often from the Lidl (which is cheap like the Aldi but unlike the Aldi the food is edible) and my cashew nut bag had a Wiederverschluss-Streifen on it. Sometimes German can have beautiful words like that.

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rjw  ·  2664 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I love compound words in German. It's satisfying when you can use your existing knowledge to deduce the meaning of a new word. It's like solving a puzzle. I saw the word "zeitgenössisch" on a sign last week, I knew that "Zeit" meant time and "Genosse" meant comrade (from studying the Cold War at high school) so I figured "genössisch" must mean "same" (it means 'common'). So given the context (art), "zeitgenössich", or time-same must mean "contemporary".

How prevalent are compound words in Dutch?

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veen  ·  2664 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Not as common to string a whole bunch of words together as Germans love to do, but we have some great long words. The longest in the dictionary is meervoudigepersoonlijkheidsstoornissen, meaning multiple (meervoudige, literally more-folded) personality (persoonlijkheid, where lijkheid is the -ality part), s (possesive), disorder (stoornis).

A unique thing about Dutch is that we use a lot of diminutives. Pretty much any noun can be appended with -je or -tje: fiets becomes fietsje, brood becomes broodje. Similar to how the suffix -let changes the meaning of book to booklet (to something smaller) but for almost every word. It's often used for talking about cute things, small things or insignificant things and it's perfect for when you want to sound really patronizing.

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rjw  ·  2664 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ooh German has -chen which must be related to the Dutch -tje. Same diminutive effect, although I've only seen it used to transform certain words that are recognised by the dictionary (e.g. Mädchen - girl, Ampelmännchen). I'm sure that anyone could use it for patronising/comic effect, however. A nice (or annoying) benefit of this diminutive is that it changes the gender of the word to neuter. So Mädchen has neuter gender even though it is obviously describing something feminine. That really bugs beginners, but the tendency for endings to dictate gender is on the whole a useful one because the language doesn't really give you any other cues.

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