Linguistics education in your country

[teo123]

Well, @Red, how about me offering you a few suggestions on how to become better at English?

1. Acknowledge that English is a bad language to be used as a lingua franca. It's an interesting language, but the things that make it interesting also make it hard to learn. It's not designed to be easy to learn by foreigners (like Esperanto is), it just happens to be used that way because of politics. If you ask me, even Latin is a better language for that (though I may be biased since Latin grammar is a lot more similar to Croatian grammar than English grammar is). I guarantee you 95% of Croatians speak English even worse than I do. And if you put some effort to learn it, people are not praising your effort. Accepting those facts, rather than denying them, is a key to understanding English well.

2. Read things IN CONTEXT. If I say "I've put a lot of effort studying linguistics.", and then mention "sound laws" in the next sentence, you should probably assume "sound law" is something related to linguistics, rather than something related to lawyers.

3. If something doesn't make sense to you, consider the possibility you've misunderstood it. Quite often, that turns out to be the case. If somebody appears to talk about falsifiable laws, perhaps he or she means something different by that.

4. Use a dictionary. One of the few good things about English is that there are quite a few on-line dictionaries to look up words and phrases in, or, if your Internet connection is bad, to download them and use them off-line. Don't try to guess the meanings of unknown words and phrases yourself, you will be wrong quite a few times. On an Internet forum, you don't hear and see the person you are speaking to, so there is nothing preventing radical mistranslations from happening. Similarly, if you think about using some rare word, make sure (using a dictionary) that it actually means what you think it means. I often get surprised to learn what the words I would use actually mean.

Does that sound reasonable?

[brimstoneSalad]

Teo, you need to drop this feud with red and stop spreading it all over the forum.

And, @brimstoneSalad, why do you think English is a bad language for teaching linguistics?

Not what I said.

English speakers have less reason to learn linguistics in part because they have less reason to learn other languages, and while English may contain many good examples, the irregularity of spelling (the thing that seems to benefit most from linguistics education with respect to your native tongue) makes that more complicated than it might be with a smaller set of roots from a single language family. I'm sure it could still help, but it may not be enough superior to brute forcing spelling memorization to justify the added expense of teaching it.

I think it's an excellent language for teaching linguistics, you can see regular sound laws just by comparing the way words are spelled with the way they are pronounced. It's also easy to find materials for studying languages closely related to English (German...), to see how relationships betweeen languages work. Speakers of English also tend to be very good at pronouncing sounds that are rare across languages (good luck explaining to a Croatian how to pronounce the 'th' sound or the 'a' sound as in 'cat', I struggle with those even after studying English for 12 years).

No idea how you could have missed the point this much.
Anyway, this isn't really a topic that interests me. Please just stop trying to start things with red.

[Red]

Well, @Red, how about me offering you a few suggestions on how to become better at English?

How'd you learn your first language?

2. Read things IN CONTEXT. If I say "I've put a lot of effort studying linguistics.", and then mention "sound laws" in the next sentence, you should probably assume "sound law" is something related to linguistics, rather than something related to lawyers.

Fuck you. I am not explaining myself again.

3. If something doesn't make sense to you, consider the possibility you've misunderstood it. Quite often, that turns out to be the case. If somebody appears to talk about falsifiable laws, perhaps he or she means something different by that.

The projection here is leagues beyond anything else you've ever said.

On an Internet forum, you don't hear and see the person you are speaking to, so there is nothing preventing radical mistranslations from happening.

Take your own advice asshole.

[teo123]

I am not explaining myself again.

And your explanation for your "mistake" is... that you happened to be thinking about politics while reading what I've written. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
And it makes perfect sense for a moderator to lock a thread and continue to "discuss" the topic in other threads.

[Red]

And your explanation for your "mistake" is... that you happened to be thinking about politics while reading what I've written. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Are you trolling, or are you just an asshole? Consider Hanlon's Razor.

And it makes perfect sense for a moderator to lock a thread and continue to "discuss" the topic in other threads.

I locked it because it was becoming a shitstorm on account of your dumbass.