Viewing profile — bluquark

According to this paper https://www.lingref.com/cpp/decemb/5/paper1617.pdf the natural linguistic evolution towards compounds in Chinese was well under way by the time of Middle Ch…

One interesting thing about gikun is the widely different forms it can take according to the stylistic purposes of the text. - Most of the time it's simply a pragmatic way to intro…

Dan's point about being aware of the different levels of inequality in the world is something I strongly agree with, but that should also include the middle-income countries, espec…

For what it's worth I've gone the opposite direction (one language, 70k Anki reps). For me, carefully adding context has largely felt like time wasted at card creation time (which …

Anki FSRS moves closer to being a "just-in-time" algorithm based only on user-provided inputs. And although its data structures aren't strictly modular, they come as close as pract…

I unfortunately can't find it right now, but I remember seeing a semi-famous quote from the 1950s/60s? calling out variable-speed windshield wipers as an absurd consumerist luxury …

10x over 75 years is a ~3% risk-free annual return. It looks like ordinary government long-term bonds (like 30-year treasuries) were yielding around 4% in 2008, making this look at…

Brooks' definition of a silver bullet was "an order of magnitude improvement" and certainly none of those innovations individually come anywhere close. But I agree it's plausible t…

Well, "need" is subjective. But subpixel rendering has diminishing returns as DPI goes up and (as the article describes) it causes several performance and interoperability problems…

PPP is for comparing consumer lifestyles. World-tradeable goods like military hardware are precisely the kind of situation where PPP adjustments should not be made. Of course the s…

One problem of scale here is that unless a tooling investment has made literally 100% of the work easy, most of a developer's workweek almost by definition winds up spent on the re…

Much of the Great Depression generation interpreted that as "only invest in bonds and CDs" and missed out on even larger gains. The stock market did very well the whole 20th centur…

Imagine a defense lawyer at a death penalty trial making an argument like this. "I implore you to consider the possibility that my client is sentient whereas the person he murdered…

When you hit diminishing returns on a walled-garden language-learning app, it's time to create a continuous intake of real-world media at your level that you enjoy, plus a suite of…

Thanks! > unless my textbook omits the kanji because of it being rarely used in the real world, as for some words I have found this usually proves to be a mistake, textbooks and di…

> Or rather, one of them, considering that [Duolingo] has all sorts of issues. Yep. I agree with measured criticisms of Anki even while feeling the app is really useful if you use …

I've noticed this too, I study with Anki J->E cards and it supercharges my reading skill, helps somewhat my listening skill, and basically does nothing at all for my speaking skill…

Using Anki for a 72-hour cram session is kind of missing the point though. For me, the main benefit of Anki is to escape the cram->forget cycle and learn things low-stress and for …

Personally, as an intermediate Japanese learner, I have been careful to choose the right input just as Krashen advocates, but I also find Anki indispensable. I found to my surprise…