Hi, James!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

JB>  I do Linux, but very poorly.  I estimate, I've been a
JB>  new user for eight years. Of course, I'm smarter in it
JB>  than I used to be, but I couldn't advise anybody but the
JB>  greenest user.


          And the greener users may be very thankful for that!  Years ago
people often asked me questions like "What's Fidonet?" or
"How do you quote what others have said?"  I guess they felt
intimidated by the real techies.  :-)



JB>  Double up the consonant, when adding the suffix, except
JB>  when the vowel before is a double, and it rains on a
JB>  Thursday...


          Wow... that's a great insight!  In Vancouver it almost always
rains on a Thursday, or any other day of the week you'd care to name.  As a
result I tend to prefer double consonants wherever the dictionary offers me
a choice....  :-))



JB>  I remember the day Mrs. Simpson taught us this, and I
JB>  figured right there that I had little interest or talent
JB>  for following this mess, and further, who in their right
JB>  mind...


          Perhaps Mrs. Simpson didn't think the way you do.  I had much the
same difficulty when I was growing up, hence my interest in reasoning
styles.  I know what she probably meant because I just ran a few examples
through my head.  If I hadn't learned spelling intuitively, however, I
would be equally confused.  As a university student I sweated blood because
we were told to memorize fingerings & slide positions for all the brass
instruments.  After flunking a mid-term exam I realized that if the valves
& slides operate in a consistent pattern, and if the notes are based on
the harmonic series... why didn't somebody tell me that??  It would have
saved me a lot of grief.  But as an NT I'm in the minority... (sigh).



JB>  They were soon teaching me Pythagoras in grade school.


          As I said earlier... we all have our talents!  Apparently you
have the same knack for geometry that I have for spelling & grammar.  I
can really relate to Marya, the young woman in WAR AND PEACE whose father
has been trying to teach her about geometry.  He feels frustrated because
she doesn't catch on right away
... she feels frustrated because she can't do it as long as he is breathing
down her neck.  The most important lesson I personally learned from
geometry was that if I was too stubborn to give up & if I hung in there
long enough I could figure out almost anything.  I aced the homework... but
I didn't do very well on exams.



AH>  I gave up on German when I got to lesson nine, which
AH>  consisted of twenty-five prepositions using three
AH>  different cases.  ;-)

JB>  Ya... That doesn't look like my idea of fun either.


          Now, here's the irony!  You speak of those who have been
"edumucated". I know two people who have been to Germany as
tourists.  Neither of them had any trouble learning the language.  One of
them didn't even believe there were cases in German until I hauled out my
old textbook & showed him.  They learned the way children do, where the
fine points of grammar are introduced a lot later.  I ran across a note
recently about something Nora said when she was little... "Cat has big
hungry."  While it may not be technically correct, it is
functional....  ;-)



JB>  [re the cousin who has ample opportunity to practise a second
JB>  language & how such an opportunity might make it seem easier]


          Agreed.  I overheard a conversation recently in which a woman
asserted that Chinese is easier than English.  A Chinese friend had said
so, and then she repeated her friend's opinion as gospel truth without
considering that a lot may depend on what one is used to.  SJ's are like
that.  I was amused already, since I wasn't personally involved, but the
supporting evidence was even more amusing. Her friend was confused by
homophones such as "by" and "buy".  Many years ago, I
heard basically the same story from a different point of view.  A
missionary who was a native speaker of English carefully memorized the
Lord's Prayer in Chinese & recited it at a church service.  He could
see that the congregation was trying very hard not to laugh out loud, so he
asked somebody about it later.  What he'd missed was that the Chinese
languages use homophones as well.  The difference is conveyed orally by the
pitch.  What he had actually said came across as nonsense to a Chinese
audience, although they realized what he was trying to say....  :-)




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+