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One experience coming a surprise to me: To a few of my native English speaking friends, the famous English is tough stuff[^] caused no problems whatsoever. They could read it out loud without stumbling, at the first try.
For both of them (all others had problems!), it turned out that they had gone to schools teaching words before teaching letters, learning words as integral units, to be understood in a context. Breaking the words into separate syllables and sounds, relating them to the individual letters, came much later.
These people had also, as kids, learned various conjugations and relationships to then roots of the words. So they could relate terms they knew to words they didn't yet know, but by structure, form or sound.
When you state "One way in which alphabetical languages are superior to ideogrammatic languages is the ease of learning", I am thinking: Yes. but in a very superficial way. When you teach a programming apprentice, you must teach him the difference between 0 and 1, between true and false (in the logical sense, not the moral one). And then: What now?
So you learn the bits and bytes/letters. Fair enough. But no wise man's knowledge has been limited to his familiarity with ASCII encoding. At which point on the ladder of enlightenment is that alphabet understanding that you strive for?
If a Far-East child must learn five thousand concepts/ideas (/ideographs) to read a newspaper, but here, in Western communities, you conclude that learning 26 character symbols is good enough to read and comprehend a similar newspaper...
Of course not! Any reader knowing only the bit or byte encodings, but haven't learned the semantics of the higher level symbols cannot make use of them for a higher understanding. In our culture, understanding characters as a basic block for the way we represent information, as words, but characters combined into words is not the only possible way of representing it.
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I have a friend from China that's a professor in microbiology.
She cannot read a thesis in her own subject if it would be written in Chinese.
Whenever she encounters a new logogram that she has never seen before, there is no easy way to know what it means. Nor does she have a clue how it's pronounced.
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That is certainly no different from word based languages!
I frequently encounter word symbols completely unknown to me. Often, I have no clue how the term is pronounced (read out loud English is tough stuff[^] if you don't get my point!).
In the academic, English-speaking society, you are expected to master a huge vocabulary of several ten thousands of words - or, if you like: word symbols. If you master several ten thousands of ideogram symbols, you will probably be able to get far in your professional field, regardless of culture.
I can easily imagine Chinese propagandists ridiculing Westeners for not knowing the meaning and/or pronounciation of some professional term. You have to learn the terminology to read it. There is no principal difference between character/word based terminology or ideogram based terminology.
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Oh so you have met my daughters boyfriend!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Have you been on the Internet lately, especially any of the social media sites?
Software Zen: delete this;
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So ... a Spice girls song then? 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I love you, you love me,
Now we have a melody
Mircea
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In my youth, popular music was ridiculed for these primitivistic 'love, love, love' repetitions.
Maybe Norwegian culture was early in pointing out that endless repetitions of 'Glory, glory, glory' or 'Holy, holy, holy' (and several other mantras) were fully recognized in numerous musical works touted as Elevated Cultural Expressions.
I seriously suspect that in essential parts of Western Culture, even today it would be inappropriate to draw parallels between 'love, love, love' and 'Glory, glory, glory'.
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aren't you already there?
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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y'know, I know how you feel.
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Much as is listening to people who cannot construct a sentence without adding 'like' every third word.
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Chris Maunder wrote: It's driving me insane.
Count 'em. After the meeting/presentation, hand them your count and leave.
I found that it works better than interrupting them and pointing it out 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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At Microsoft in the old times whenever they had a meeting with Bill Gates, they assigned one person to be the f*** counter.
The less f***s the better the presentation went.
My First BillG Review – Joel on Software[^]
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Those are filler words; when I took English classes in school I used a lot of them.
It is not something conscious and it may annoy the f*ck out of of your audience, like y'know. It may hurt their cause.
..true story; learned what filler is as a kid in school, interrupted anyone explaining so. It's better to just count and give a note after the session. Shows you been distracted, without being too rude. It's still rude, but less.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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"Y'know what I'm sayin'?" At the end of the majority of someone's sentences wears on my patience.
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I can't stand webinars as such.
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Y'know, uhm... like, there are a few good ones out there, I hear. Y'know what I'm sayin'?
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Uhhhhmmmmmmmm.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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Having been a professor at one time (long, long ago), I remember doing a teacher training course where part of the emphasis was on being able to speak on a subject without saying "um" or "er" at all. For some on the course it was very difficult to get out of the habit. Today, there are many people who cannot get through a single sentence without using the "f" word or other things as emphasis or filler, Y'know?
My sympathy with your having to listen to something you actually wanted to learn about but being distracted by sloppy presentation. Education generally is poorer these days, not because of subject matter, but because of the quality of basic teaching skill is so low.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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� Forogar � wrote: Education generally is poorer these days
So, why did you stop being a prof then?
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1. A real job paid much better!
2. At that time (early 80's) the nationally prescribed syllabus surprisingly didn't change much so it got boring teaching the same stuff year after year.
Reason #1 is the main one.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Sounds like a generic reason to why our education is supposedly worse nowadays.
So, how come tuition is so much more expensive today?
It is isn't it?
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Like, that, it's like a real bummer.
(current use of "like's" makes me nostalgic for the old ways)
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Some old masters, which may have a lot of valuable historical information to contribute, could improve their presentation tremendously simply by dropping every single 'I remember when ...'
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Wasn't there a term to describe this style of speaking only in these empty buzz terms, y'know was only one of them. I think others were 'like', 'say', 'think of'...
Hey, think of, like you know, say something like, what do you think, really?
Years ago, I had links to sound files of people who could go on that way for several minutes without interruption. But I have lost the links (they would probably be invalid today), and I have forgotten the term used to refer to that specific kind of gibberish.
Could anyone help me to the right Google search term? It is certainly not that I 'need' it for anything, it is just for the fun of it. Nevertheless I would like to have a few links to some great samples of this vocabulatory art. I think of it that way - sort of today's follow-up to scat singing.
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