French, Philosophy, Linux

[tcpip]

Completed my second Duolingo owl on Saturday in French. I had set myself a rather optimistic goal of finishing it by the end of April, and with a rather Herculean effort on Saturday (starting at 7.30am, finishing just after midnight), I completed some 23 skills and probably around 90 lessons on that day. It was quite exhausting and the following day I froze when chatting to a fellow Esperanto speaker - by brain was full of French! In the coming month I am intending to complete as much as I can with German - not my strongest language and I suspect that I'll not finish that until the end of June.

On Sunday was a meeting of The Philosophy Forum with Rohan presenting on Leonardo Di Vinci, Tertiary Education, and Genius. The presentation needed some work but there was some good discussion. I neglected to mention last month's meeting which had Tim Harding speak on Determinism, Free Will and Compatibilism, which had a massive follow-up discussion on Facebook. I had to pen a few words myself on the subject, much to my annoyance as I find the partisanship on the subject when our knowledge is limited to be far too rude.

Today's work consisted on giving another course on high performance computing at UniMelb, along with Martin P., contributing with the use of the NeCTAR cloud. Tonight I'm working on a presentation tomorrow night for Linux Users of Victoria on UNUMS - computation without error.

Comments

[helvetica]

Wow good for you! I can't believe you spent the whole day working on it like that, that's very impressive and dedicated

[tcpip]

I have a crazy capacity to cram, always have. If one had the endurance, I suspect it would be just possible to complete an entire Duolingo language in a week. Of course that would require doing 16 hours a day. :)

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

Très bien!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Merci mon ami!

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

Close, but you missed an e at the end :)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Oh la la! Un petit problème, non?

(I really don't like gendered articles in languages.. Heck, there's even a good argument - e.g., Russian - for not having articles at all)

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

There's some merit in that argument, however having the masculine form as default for everything has its own problems. But here the issue was the gendered noun, not the article/possessive pronoun which for ami/amie is 'mon' for both since it starts with a vowel.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Have you done any German? Six definite articles, six indefinite articles, then the six (three definite, three indefinite) datives.... Of course Spanish and Italian have partitive articles as well.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I find the partisanship on the subject when our knowledge is limited to be far too rude.

But... we're on the Internet! Forming sharply antagonistic tribes over highly complex topics that we've barely even identified properly is just what we do!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Given the discussion on the Facebook post had hundreds of replies there is a lot of effort being spent on things we don't understand.

I have enough trouble working on things that I do understand...