How would I write that in Japanese Characters? (working on a Christmas Present!)

 I've been using the "Integrated Chinese" series to learn Mandarin with relative success and I'm finishing up Level 1 Part 2 in the second (older) edition. I want to purchase Level 2, so should I get the older 2nd edition or the newer 3rd edition (Level 2 Part 1)? Which one is a better resource?

what is the meaning of "nothing ever promised tomorrow today"?
it's from kanye west song, heard them say.
thank you in advance

Hello everyone,

I discovered Josef Hader a few days ago (well, a friend introduced me), and although I'm german I'm really having trouble with his austrian accent. Can anyone help me?



( Here's what I got so far )

Danke schön!

I have a very picayune question, though potentially important:

How much freedom of movement would a military chaplain have had in a British division in the Korean war? Would an officer in the division have the power to say to him, "You're going to X company," and would he then have to stay there? Or would that be decided by someone with rank over both of them? If no one with superior rank had given an express order, would he have some liberty to travel from one division to another (wherever need is greatest, that kind of thing)?

Another way of framing the question is, what would be the chain of command directing a chaplain's movements, would he have any ability to decide himself about his comings and goings, and who ranks him. (Wikipedia says that the lowest rank of a British military chaplain is equivalent to a captaincy.)

American viewers will probably think of Father Mulcahy who was ALWAYS with the 4077th, but that might not have been realistic unless the chaplain was specifically assigned to that station and told to stay--some of them seem to have traveled around a lot in their own jeeps.

The character in question has got caught up in the Battle of the Imjin, and I have him as an itinerant pastor in a jeep. He ends up with the Northumberland Fusiliers through his own choice. Not with the Glosters, because in the first place the bravery of the Glosters' Rev. Davies was such that I don't want to take anything away from that, and in the second place it appears that past a certain point it was impossible to escape being taken prisoner by the Chinese if you were with the Glosters (though the jury is still out as to whether the pastor could have visited the Glosters at some point--which would again require being able to leave). But the Fusiliers was a dangerous enough assignment. I intended to have the pastor's witnessing the (very bloody) Imjin fighting be something of an accident of fate, because his jeep got fried in a minor collision outside Uijeongbu.

Thanks in advance. (I have "To the Last Round" by Andrew Salmon and it is a magnificent resource for anything to do with the Battle of the Imjin, but these questions are outside its scope.)

Hello lovely linguaphiles!

A friend of mind is moving to China and since we met in Spanish class I've decided to make him a little (mostly joking) phrase guide for his new travels! Can you guys help me out with the gaps? I need Mandarin help especially. Please forgive my lack of accents with the spanish.

hola - hello - nee how
adios - goodbye - ?
por favor - please - ?
gracias - thank you - ?
me gustas tu - I like you - ?
? - you're hot - ?
? - what's your number? - ?
? - one tequila, please - ?

Thanks so much!

 It took me a while to figure out how to formulate this question, and it might still seem rather unclear, but nonetheless - in what ways is music (both heard and written) like a language, and how is it unlike one? I can look at sheet music as if it were a page of text, and play it on an instrument as if I were reading it out loud, and in the same way that a speaker can transform a text's meaning by intonation and manner of presentation, I can communicate a certain feeling by the way I play the piece. And if someone is playing, I can follow along and notice idiosyncrasies in the performance based on the text that is in front of me.

In these regards, music is very much like a language, but what distinguishes it from, say, French, Yoruba, or Bengali?

I hope someone can help me with this, because I can't find this information anywhere. I'm writing a Harry Potter fanfic and Harry is going to go back into the muggle world after his 7th year to become a pilot in the RAF. But, he hasn't been to muggle school since he was 10. So, here are my questions:

1. The RAF requires 2 A-levels and 5 GCSE's higher than a C, including English language and math. Does that mean that the two A-levels are the same as 2 of the GCSE's and what subjects (beside English language and math) would be good picks for this career track?

2. Since he hasn't been to school since he was 10, what is the best way to get caught up?

3. How long would it take him to get these qualifications if he takes as short a time as possible, but still be realistic?

I've searched on the internet already, but the closest I could get to this kind of info was this page: http://www.ahomeeducation.co.uk/ and that's really not what I was looking for. So I hope someone here can help me.

An employee of the local bank here where I live asked me to do a translation for him from German into English. It's a summary (he told me that it didn't get graded) he needs to hand in with his diploma thesis, around 5 to 7 pages. The lovely topic: sustainable equity funds (i. e. specific vocabulary). How much should I charge him per line (in €)? I'm not officially a translator yet - happily working on it, though :D -, therefore I wouldn't know.

I've already tried googling this stuff, but I'm not finding the answer I'm looking for. If I wanted to say something along the lines of "May you suffer forever" or "I hope you suffer forever" in Spanish, can it be said like "Que sufras para siempre"? Or can you not start it with "que"? Also, (and I hope I'm not breaking any rules by doing this) I've got a quick question for a sentence in English. Is a comma required after the word "least" in the sentence "At least that's what she'd let him believe"? Or if it was a sentence like "At least not to her knowledge." Yes, I am a bit nitpicky, but knowing for future reference can never hurt. Thanks. :)

ok - i can't search for this one because i don't even have a beginning spot...

What sort of animal/creature would fill the job of Birds in an ecosystem that otherwise, had "earth-like" stand ins? Larger than us "humans" - beasts of burden, small and large game, fish, the "normal" amount of bugs (while this is a worldwide environment, we're largely on something vaguely analogous to the US west coast - somewhere between San Fran and Seattle latitude, on the coast).

There are no birds - so what would fill that ecological niche?

Any ideas?

EDIT: WOW - some GREAT answers - flying lizards (that just never evolved feathers), flying mammals, flying fish - bats and leaping geckos and lungfish everywhere!

FWIW: this was a "never evolved birds" situation - but there are flowering plants, so I needed to figure out how to a) keep down the bug population and b) move seeds. Lots of mammals for both - but the "distance" thing was flumoxing me. Bats and lizard equivalents make a lot of sense.

Thanks all!!!

Searched terms: Medieval medical education, becoming a doctor in the middle ages, Wikipedia's pages on the Bubonic plague and the Universities of Salerno and Bologna (as they're the two that came to mind while thinking of 'medicine').

Setting: Plague-ridden Florence, some time from 1348-1350. Location-wise, it's actually fairly open, so long as it's within Italy but time-wise, I'd like it to be during the height of the plague's intensity.

Quandary: I have a character who is a doctor during this period. While I've gotten a good deal of information on the universities/educational systems themselves, I'm not sure exactly how long his education would have lasted - in other words, I'm trying to find a reasonable age for him to (in modern terms, at least) graduate and go on to practice medicine. Any suggestions?

Thank you!

I've been made aware that this was posted a few days ago. ( But in case you missed it... )

Sort of reminds me of Aserejé.

I'm sorry, this relates to a homework problem that I can't figure out in a baaaaaad way.

I know Korean does not have /t/ as an underlying representation, and I have four words (face 'nat', field
'pat', sickle 'nat', and day 'nat') which end with a /t/ but I canNOT figure out what the underlying representation is, because the changes they make in other forms is so strange (sometimes a č, sometimes aspirated sometimes not, and aspirated t, etc.). I can't find any sort of pattern at all.

I was just wondering if anyone here is at all familiar with Korean underlying representations and can point me in the right direction. No, I do not have the time to type up all of the examples I have, so I know this post is pretty meaningless unless you already know something about underlying representations in Korean.

TIA

One of my friends was recently compiling a list of how you say Merry Christmas in a bunch of different languages, and I noticed "Crazanian" on the list. My immediate reaction was "Hmm, that doesn't sound like a real language, and it's not in Ethnologue anyway - so maybe it's a constructed language!", but I could only find it in Google in "How you say Merry Christmas" lists.

This makes me think that it's not a human language *or* a constructed language - instead it's one of those fake things that people put in their publications to make copyright enforcement easier to prove in court. After some Googling, we found out that one word for this type of thing is mountweazel, which is now just about my favorite word ever. (Redirects to "Fictitious entry.")

Have any of you heard of the language Crazanian before? Are there any other linguistic mountweazels lurking around your worlds?

---

I should note that I don't see it in this Ominglot list, ref. this post. :-)

Scenario: It's the late 1970s, a snowy midwinter day. Two guys are driving in a rural area, somewhere within a day's drive of New York, in an American car that's not more than a few years old (doesn't matter what model, as long as it's an American car). They either hear something go wrong with the car and pull over, or they pull over to get something out of the trunk or change drivers and the car refuses to restart. One of said guys knows a bit about cars, changes his own oil and the like and could easily diagnose commonplace problems; he pops the hood and takes a look, but can't figure out what's wrong with the car. Shortly afterward, a professional mechanic drives by (in his own car; he can be carrying his tools if neccessary). He notices the car with its hood up and pulls over to help; he is able to diagnose and fix the problem in a few minutes, or at least get the car to a point where they can safely drive it to a repair shop some miles away, and the guys drive off.

What could go wrong with the car that would be annoying aand hard to diagnose, but easy to fix? It can't be a battery problem, since they could push-start the car; it can't be lack of gas, because they'd have started walking, and I want them still sitting there arguing when the mechanic shows up. It's too new to have fan belt problems. Is there something that could come loose that wouldn't be obvious looking under the hood? A similar question on the comm ages ago mentioned a PCV joint coming loose, but I got the impression that anyone who knew about cars would be able to spot it.

Hello,

I encountered a peculiar phrase:

If this were all there were to it, ...

which grammar I don't fully understand. I guess, its meaning is: "if this were all that is essential in it". The first "were" is subjunctive mood. But the second "were" looks a little obscure to me. What is the role of it? Why is present tense not used here?

Is this expression called somehow in linguistics?

Hi, my sister collects teaspoons, and she recently bought some during a visit to London. She is intrigued about one of them. Can anybody read what it says? Here is a picture of the back of the spoon handle.

( Picture behind the cut )

Salut tout le monde!

I have a quick question for all of you francophones! :) My French is pretty good, but I've never been able to grasp the difference between using the future tense and using aller+infinitive. Can they be used interchangeably, or are there subtle differences?

To clarify:

"Je vais essayer d'y aller."
"J'essayerai d'y aller."

Is there a difference? Or,

"Je vais manger, et puis j'irai chez mon ami."

Can you use both forms in the same sentence, or is it weird?


Thanks in advance for your input! :)

Cheers,
Rissa

Evening all,

Are there any fluent Turkish speakers hereabouts who can give me a translation of the sentence hemen hemen beni tutacaktı? More specifically, I'm looking to find out very precisely what hemen hemen means here (I know the remainder is something like "he would have caught me"). It's the Turkish gloss Tevfik Esenç gave for the Ubykh noun phrase wɜnɜqʲɜmɜɕɜ; I'm trying to work out what the specific nuance is so that I can properly gloss it in English, and unfortunately my Turkish isn't nearly good enough.

Teşekkürler / wɜn ɕʷɨʃʷɜq’ɨnɜχ!

 Hello.  I have an inquiry. 

I've been learning German for the past 5 years, and recently I've began my journey into the world of other Germanic languages. At the moment, I have begun my study of Swedish;  I find it to be an extremely interesting language, and very pleasing to the ear.

I was actually wondering if anyone had a list of universities/colleges, in the United States, that have Scandinavian departments (offering Swedish or Norwegian). Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Also.

I've tried Google, and it's not very helpful.

I fell in love with the concept of Esperanto and was wondering what everyone else thought about it. Does it seem like a good idea? Have you even heard of it? :3

Hello! I have just discovered this wonderful community, and am positively squirming with delight at the chance to talk to others interested in language. However, my first question (probably the first of many) is about a Russian word.
Don't worry, I know that this isn't a community for translators, but I read the community rules, and it said that questions related to a single language were okay, so I hope this isn't breaking a rule. It is a bit of an obscure question, and I have also paid a visit to a Russian-learners community, but am waiting to find out if they will actually let me join first!

( I'll put the question under this cut, as I fear I have rambled. )

I don't recall seeing it posted here before, so I thought I'd put it up and see what everyone thinks.





Personally, I think it's quite accurate, though only for a certain value of "Americans" because it reduces all possible accents down to one.
Still, it's interesting.
See what you think.

If a teenage boy (about 15) was presented to a psychiatrist with infantile behavior like wanting to be carried, curling up and hiding, screaming at nothing, refusing to speak in appropriate situations, what would the doctor's first instinct as far as a diagnosis be?

This character's family is walking on eggshells to keep from setting him off, when he does get "set off" by trivial things he refuses to speak and shuts down into a catatonic state. He explodes with rage on himself and other people if his buttons get pushed. He is able to self-care and he's otherwise intellectually appropriate for his age. The problem has been there since childhood, but it's getting worse and he's no longer able to be in school.

Where would a doctor's instinct lead? I don't really need the name of a specific disorder, just a direction the doctor would start looking in first? Spectrum disorders? What avenues would a psychiatrist explore to try and find out the problem, especially if the teen was unwilling to speak or ignored her completely?

I've googled and wikied "pervasive developmental disorders" "mutism in teens" "selective mutism" "teen refusing to speak" "autism spectrum disorders" "horses not zebras, psychiatry" "PDD-NOS" "intermittent explosive disorder" "How do psychiatrists diagnose" "psychiatric method" and about five thousand variations on "DSM IV free online"

I'm currently reading with growing enthusiasm Skeat's Etymological Dictionary and, being a fan of Ariosto, was thrilled to find this word:

RODOMONTADE, vain boasting. (F.-Ital.) 'Crites. And most terribly he comes off, like your rodomontado;' Ben Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, Act v. sc. 2. 'And triumph'd our whole nation In his rodomant fashion;' id., Masque of Owls, Owl 5. - F. rodomontade, 'a brag, boast;' Cot. - Ital. rodomontada, 'a boaste, brag;' Florio. A proverbial expression, due to the boastful character of Rodomonte, in the Orlando furioso of Ariosto, bk. xiv; called Rodamonte by Bojardo, Orlando Innamorato, ii. 1. 56. Said to be coined from Lombard rodare (= Ital. rotare), to turn about, and monte, a mountain. See Rotary and Mount (1).

Question: Is this a word people actually use or is it very recherché? Would it be understood by people who are not into Ariosto?

Zusatzfrage: Wie ist das mit dem deutschen Äquivalent "bramarbasieren"? Verständlich oder sehr gesucht?

The Band: Bizi (Or Bizii) (Peas in Hungarian)?


Heya everybody!

This is a really obscure question about a really obscure band. I wish to know if there is someone who can translate the Hungarian webpage, second link down, into simple text for me; that is, also click on one of the song links and go to the webpage it directs you to, and translate that for me. (OR) I want to know if anyone can find me some music by the band Bizi(i), specifically a song called Tokyo dreams. The thing is impossible to find, and my girlfriend really likes the band, and I kinda want to get it for her as a Christmas present. Any help, or none, is appreciated regardless. I'm supplying links to help out any those who know the band.

This Cd in particular is a pain: Bizi - Boom Boom Room (Promo)

http://www.musicstack.com/my/item.cgi?item=8985071&seller=1805&media=12&next=600&date=10%2F15%2F2008

http://mcrack.fw.hu/

Hi all,

I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions for online resources (or offline books) for learning Malay/Bahasa Malaysia/Bahasa Melayu. The only free website I've found so far is this one, which I haven't poked through fully enough to really come to a conclusion about it, but, regardless, I like to have multiple sources so I can compare things.

Thanks!

Setting - modern day, real world
Searches tried - wikipedia and google on variants on 'english rose'

In my story, one of the characters is described as 'an English Rose' which I have described in one particular way (am not revealing this as I don't want to bias the answers). Trouble is, I am not sure I am remembering what the term actually means. I have a vague memory of what I remember thinking it meant - what physical characteristics a woman who has the 'English rose' look would actually have - hair, eyes, skin etc. but I am not sure if this is correct. Searches in various places seem to turn up different answers and so make me even more confused.

I got cold feet about this description early on but decided to leave it in to see what the critters said about it. None of them even mentioned it but I am not sure if this is because they believed it is correct or they simply missed it. So, can anyone please help me?

This is just such a little thing, but I want to get it right. What time did bars close in New York City around 1970? I found through Googling that now it's 4am, but was that the case then? I tried searching the archives of the NYT for the few years around 1970 and found a few stories that (from the snippet I could see without paying) seem to suggest it was 3am, but also that there were after-hours clubs and the like. Basically my question is if someone wanted a drink in the wee hours of the morning, at what time would they be out of luck?

Bonjour! A mission team from my church is very involved with some projects in Haiti, and they would like to be able to post their mission statement in English and French. They sent me the English version and the start of a French version, but they say it's very rough. My French is not up to this speed yet to check word choice and details of grammar, so I was wondering if anyone here could help? Merci beaucoup!

( English Text )

Current research: I've googled and bing.com'd every combination of 'courtship' 'edwardian' 'turn of the century' 'world war one' 'boarding school' 'mourning customs' 'history' '1900s' and 'early 20th century' I could think of. I've wiki'ed and googled to my limit, and can find nothing that is what I need. I've also gone through the tags in this community & askahistorian (thanks all!) and found a good half of my questions already answered. I have a short list of books on these topics that I plan to get from my local library ASAP, but any suggestions for books, especially a good, broad overview of life in 1900-1920 Europe, would be greatly appreciated.

I'm writing a story based on Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden." It takes place six or seven years after the novel, appx. 1916 or 1917 England, so WWI is taking place, men 18+ are being conscripted, and food, clothing, & raw materials are being rationed.

At what age would children--male and female--of wealthy, upper-class families be sent to boarding school? How long would this schooling last before university? What would young women who were not going to university do after their schooling was over, but before they married?

How long would a woman of the upper class (or upper middle class) be courted before an engagement? How long would the engagement last? How old would the young man and woman in question be, on average, when they did marry? If they were significantly younger than that, what would society say? Would the ongoing war make young marriages more, or less, acceptable?

What were the social customs concerning war widows? How long would a young woman be required to wear black and publicly mourn her husband? If she were, say, 200 miles away from her in-laws, would it be talked about publicly if she decided to wear other dark colors, like navy, etc., instead of straight black? If the pair had been married less than a year at his demise, would that change things? All the research I've done said that a widow was expected to wait two years to remarry; would the war have changed that? Alternately, if they were not married, but only engaged, how would the mourning period change?

Thank you all in advance, little_details. I know this post is long, but I appreciate any help you can give me, or any books or websites you can point my way.

Hi!

The character in my story is a nurse at St. Vincent's hospital in Manhattan in December 1999 (one of the scenes takes place over New Year). He's an occasional smoker - during a particularly rough day he decides to have a cigarette (he has smokes/lighter with him). Where would he go? Could he smoke on the street outside or would he have to get farther away from the hospital? Which exit would he use? Is it likely he'd go up to the roof to do it?

Also, I understand that smoking areas in hospitals - especially in NYC - were shut down some time around 2000. I've tried googling but haven't come up with anything concrete - if anyone has any idea when exactly smoking areas were shut down at St. Vincent's that'd help as well :)

Thank you!

googled: smoking st vincent's manhattan, smoking st vincent's manhattan area

One of the main characters in my sci-fi novel is a nine year old girl with a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy. I'm gearing into heavy research mode, and I'm looking for reading material--books, especially, but also articles that might be available online. (What I wouldn't give to be back in college and have J-STOR at my fingertips--alas.) I'm having trouble tracking down stuff myself because . . . well, I was a humanities major. I just don't know where to start with science.

I've read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (on the recommendation from someone in my last post about this), and it was IMMENSELY helpful. But, now, I'm looking more for details of what epilepsy (specifically temporal lobe, but anything would be helpful) is like as a disease--treatment, prognosis, and day to day living.

I've been googling things like "temporal lobe epilepsy children", but most of what I'm getting is either general overviews (I think already I have a pretty good grasp of what TLE is in a very general sense) or abstracts of articles I can't access.

And, as long as I'm asking for book recommendations, I could also use more books about social work and foster care, specifically in response to medical conditions. (The family can't/won't seek medical care for the kid in the book, so the government gets involved. It's not set on Earth, but I figure finding out how other governments handle it would be helpful.) I probably can't beat The Spirit Catches You and You Fall down for sheer relevance, but more is always better.

Quick question!

What online or electronic dictionaries (multilingual or monolingual) do you like the most, and what features of them do you like? What features do you wish dictionaries had? Feel free to drop links, or links to previous posts on the topic if you remember any that were particularly enlightening... :)

Edit: Additional question, does anyone who uses dictionaries that have forums or discussion tools actually use those tools? What do you think of them, if so?

This might be a long shot but is anybody here taking (or has taken or knows somebody who has taken or is taking) the long-distance MA course in Translation either at the University of the West of England or the University of Portsmouth? Any thoughts?
( Read more... )

I want to research this for my thesis (I'm majoring in Japanese).

Basically, the problem i want to research is:
In the textbook, we are taught the function of a hyougen (expression). For example:

How to use the expression of "toka", use it when you want to give an example.

Why don't we teach people:

How to use the expression of "toka", use it when you don't feel really sure about what you're saying, and you have the feeling of...blahblahblah

(btw I haven't really research this, so I don't know what's the feeling of toka. Please don't discuss this toka, it's just an example)

When I asked about this idea with my teacher, she said "Is there any book or theory about it?"
And I don't know the answer to that.
I thought it is about semantic? isn't it?

I got this idea because first i had trouble to differ one expression with another, second because I read a book by Edward T Hall that said Japanese is a language of high-context. Then it kinda passed my mind, why don't we learn Japanese through its feeling?

So my questions are:
1) Can this idea be researched scientifically enough to be a thesis?
2) Is there any related book/article? (because if there is not any, I'M GOING TO MAKE ONE! ... at least just for fun of it)

Help me, please?

I'm currently working on a novel populated by several characters with Ancient Greek names. I assumed when I started that I knew how to pronounce Ancient Greek well enough to tackle the names I chose, and even did some reading to make sure I was getting vowels right. Of course my confidence was foolish, because I have never studied the language and as far as I can tell there are about fourteen different ways to pronounce it.

Currently I'm concerned about syllable stress. I've been pronouncing the two most important names, Ariston and Kallias, with antepenultimate stress. I'm fairly certain this first one is correct, but in the case of Kallias, one of my test readers wanted to give the name penultimate stress, and just about ten minutes ago it dawned on me that based on what I can remember from my phonology class, this might actually be correct. Needless to say this would be an extremely alienating discovery!

So would anyone like to give me a crash course in how stress works in Ancient Greek, as it applies to names of this type? I'm not interested in any particular dialect/time period, since the novel itself is set in the present.

ETA: So it turns out that Wiktionary is awesome and has pronunciations even for obscurish Ancient Greek names. This is what I turned up:

Ἀρίστων
Classical: [arístɔːn]
Koine: [arˈisto̞ːn]
Byzantine: [arˈiston]

Καλλίας
Classical: [kallíaːs]
Koine: [kallˈiaːs]
Byzantine: [kallˈias]

(There are accents over the iotas in both, but they're not showing up on my screen for mysterious font-related reasons.)

So if I'm going to be correct-ish, it's penultimate stress for both? Unless I go with Latin pronunciation, in which case I'd be inclined to go with antepenultimate....

This obviously isn't my real journal, but I need to protect my identity as this question pertains to my Yuletide fic. Hence, yuletidesock.

I need to know what the topography is like driving into Memphis, TN from the west (in 1987, if that matters). I'm really hoping there's a crest or ridge my characters could drive over and suddenly there's Memphis in the night all lit up--is this possible? Obviously there are probably suburbs and such but I'm hoping that the view, even from a bit far away, is one that will work.

Googled: Memphis topography, driving into Memphis, Memphis from west, and variations on these.

So I did a few google searches and little_details tags and struggling to find the proper keyword to get what I want: Jaw torn off, jaw trauma, jaw ripped off, mandible trauma, lower half of face gone

( Read more... )
Thanks for any and all help!

Does anyone remember the details of an occasion a few years ago where the leading (male?) singer in a prestigious opera performance was unable to go on and the management asked whether anyone in the audience knew the part and would be prepared to take over? IIRC someone came forward who was a student of opera and knew the role, albeit in a different language, and had to play the part in ordinary evening clothes, but they managed to put together a perfectly reasonable performance and the guy was told that he would definitely have a career to look forward to when he had finished his studies??? I suspect this happened in either Italy or New York where you could pretty well guarantee that you had an audience of the right sort of calibre!

I'm planning a story in a fantasy world with Victorian era steampunk technology levels, and one of the locations is a city-state ruled by necromancers. All the unkilled labour is done by zombies, and to increase their "lifespan" (and for hygiene issues), they're all embalmed before being animated. I've tried searching "embalming methods", "embalming side-effects", and "how flexible is an embalmed corpse", but can't find any information on whether an embalmed corpse would be able to move its joints and muscles. Can anyone help?

Hello linguaphiles!

I am looking to learn Swedish!

Long story short I've fallen in love with a Swedish exchange student and will follow him back to Sweden in the fall for an exchange. According to the exchange details, I don't actually have to know Swedish to do the exchange, but I think it is so ignorant to not try to learn the language where you are living! Also not all of his family speaks English well (or at all), so basically I'm looking to know enough to get by with basic communication (but not expecting to be completely fluent). Also I only have a few months to learn!

So, what's a good way to learn basic Swedish communication in a short amount of time?

As a note, he lives close to Stockholm, I'd rather be learning that accent than other regions

Thanks!

Hello Linguaphiles!

Please help!

I have some difficulties to understand the following passage;

The Time Traveler (for so i t will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.

Please tell me what does this 'for so' mean in this context.

Thank you so much in advance!

Was doing a translation today, and had need of an adequate translation of "The Great Firewall of China" into Japanese. The dictionary produced 金盾, and another option could just be to go with 中国のファイアーウォール, but I was wondering if there was anything in current use in Japan that captures a bit of the play on words in the English original.

And, just to generalize it a bit more, if you want to post translations of the phrase into other languages, have at it!

Does anyone know if late 18th century (circa 1795) English medicine had anything to say on what we currently think of as adrenaline? My character is sitting on the ground following a fist fight and he's shaking. My knowledge tells me he's shaking from the adrenaline rush and the abrupt end to the fight (they got caught by the steward of the estate) that left it with nowhere to go. The word 'adrenaline' wasn't coined until 1901, however, so I can't say it in those terms.

My usual resource for Georgian medicine (Google Book search with "return content published between" set to no later than 1815--fantastic resource for looking at period medical books BTW) is failing me because I can't think of what to search for.

This is a really small detail, but I think it would add to the texture of the story if I could address this in period authentic terms. Anyone have any ideas?

Wow.

Although I'd lost interest in Esperanto and the whole Esperanto movement eons ago, I thought this was rather cool.

Setting: A character from the early 60s is injured in a setting with medical technology slightly more advanced than modern Earth. He's not a heavy smoker - maybe a couple packs a week - but he's been without them for a bit and shouldn't smoke for another month or so because his lung was punctured 4 times. Given the technology he's familiar with, he doesn't know about things like nicotine gum or patches to help his mood.

On top of that, he's on strong painkillers (someone I talked to said hydromorphone, but specifics on that aren't too important) and I'm not too sure if that would affect the irritability from stopping smoking in some way or not. I'm not sure how I'd go about Googling this, and I'm mostly looking for anecdotes if anyone's been in a situation similar, so any help would be great!

Okay, I'm just starting a story about a young theater actor who gets cast in a modern, fairly successful British TV show. Unfortunately, I know very little about how TV show auditions usually go. The actor hears about the auditions from a friends who has already been cast, but when he shows up to the audition, would he have to sign in with somebody? Would they expect him to have prepared something to show, or would they want him to read from a script? If script, would they give him a few minutes to look over it before his turn, or would they just hand it to him and have him read it cold? What is the likely hood that the director would have the other actors there, to see how my actor works with them?
I realize the process is probably different for every show and every director, but just some generals would be really helpful. Also, the story is set in modern times and its a medium budget family TV show. How many people would you expect to turn up to an audition, if most of the parts have been cast, a few dozen? A hundred? A few hundred?
And for any Brits, is there a specific place where things like auditions happen in England (like English Hollywood)? I just assumed London, but I could be totally wrong. If London, in what area?
I already tried searching things about casting, but all I'm getting is the casting to particular shows, speculation about future casting and unhelpful things like that.

    Heya all,

    I've been thinking about making a game to help people who want to begin to learn Korean. For most Korean children (including myself) my first formal educational experience was learning to read and write in the Korean script, and perhaps for this reason, a lot of educational material that teaches Korean usually begins with how to read and write the Korean script.

    But I've also had some success with learning French, German and Russian using Pimsleur, which has no writing at all. Looking back on how I started to learn Japanese, it began with mimicking quotes from a show I liked or mumbling along with a song. By the time I was studying how to write in Japanese I already knew a few sentences I could write.

    For Korean, it doesn't romanticize nicely, so I can see why a lot of learning sites want to show people how to read and write in Korean first. But I think this can come off as being really overwhelming, and that showing the gamer how to say some basic phrases (This is x. What is x? Who is that? Where are you?) or how to think in terms of Korean grammar (SOV not SVO like in English) would be a bit more relevant/engaging.

    I'd love to read any comments about how you acquired your first or second or other languages, or any experience you have with the Korean language.