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Ah, my mom keeps trying to make me talk on the phone to people and talk to people who work in stores >.<
She doesn't understand that I can't

Ah, I can too strongly understand that. Luckily, now I have a wife to be my phone/stranger/family member talker. It might take a while, but you'll find someone to do the same for you (or learn to overcome it, but that's too hard.. haha ).

Who knows who all is in Wintreath, actually?

Seriously though, you should expand your horizons...it's the best way to go about a life of pleasure.

I'm just saying that's my type, ya know?

I'm just saying that's my type, ya know?

Everyone has a type, but that isn't a reason not to indulge in a bit of variety once in awhile.

I'm just saying that's my type, ya know?

Everyone has a type, but that isn't a reason not to indulge in a bit of variety once in awhile.

Heh, fair enough

Let's see.

www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/marijuana-contains-alien-dna-from-outside-of-our-solar-system-nasa-confirms/all/

Quite enlightening. No, not that. The other thing.

Haha, that's awesome..quite enlightening indeed.

Touche Laurentus... IFL science isn't always the best, but that was a very enlightening article.

I found it to be rather dim, honestly.

The guys made quite a few points when it came to how all life originally developed from a single marijuana plant. That was definitely the high point of the article.

The guys made quite a few points when it came to how all life originally developed from a single marijuana plant. That was definitely the high point of the article.

Thank you folks, he'll be here all week.

EDIT: I remember being very confused when I learnt that the word "pronunciation" was actually pronounced, ironically, as "pronounciation." Do they realise how weird that sounds to someone who doesn't speak the language as their mother tongue?

Well, coming from French, English spelling isn't that challenging.

French spelling is basically the language as it was spoken 300 years ago + "etymological letters" inserted by grammarians just so people could tell from which Latin word the modern French word descended.

Like doigt, the -gt at the end is silent and only there to make a connection with Latin digitus. In other words, they're useless. Sometimes they're even wrong, ie. poids is from pensum, not pondus.

As for the "spoken 300 years ago" part, I mean that French is full of old grammatical rules that might have been pronounced that long ago, but that aren't today. For example, you don't need to worry about declining the past participle correctly when you're speaking. Brisé (masculine singular), brisée (feminine singular), brisés (masculine plural) and brisées (feminine plural) are all pronounced the same. But in writing it's actually one of the biggest problems you'll have because the rules are so retarded. For example, you'll write les dix kilomètres qu'il a couru (the 10 kilometers he ran) but les dangers qu'il a courus (the hazards he faced) because in the first example, courir is intransitive but in the second, it is transitive. Oh, by the way, you'll write il a couru tant de dangers (he faced so many hazards) because when the auxiliary verb is avoir, you never decline the past participle if the direct object is after the verb.

Why are these distinctions important? We all understand each other perfectly when speaking, so why must we write that way? No reason, really. We'll probably still write that way in 1000 years, even when the language then will be as different from modern French as it is now from Latin.

Compared to all that, a silent k in knight or knife or the -gh nonsense is pretty simple.

I do agree. I took a few French lessons, and quickly decided it wasn't for me. I cannot fathom all the silent letters, even though I don't struggle with them in English.

Regarding that though, I must say I can see the reasoning behind some of the silent letters in English. You might be able to tell which one is meant in context, but knight without the k would be a goddamn nightmare. In Afrikaans, we don't have this problem of so many words being spelt and pronounced the same, but meaning completely different things. Some examples exist, such as "vonds," as in a discovery (often with a negative connotation, as in a body that has been found), and "fonds," as in a fund, and they're both pronounced exactly the same.

We do have the advantage of speaking a relatively new language, so when we examined Dutch, German, English and French, we dumped most of the weird shit. No Der Fall, here. No sir. We also have only three tenses: past, present and future. Not all the weird ones like past perfect and whatever.

Examples:

Past tense
Ons het lekker gespeel
We had a great time playing/we had a lot of fun playing (there is no direct translation that makes sense)

Present tense
Ons speel lekker
We are having fun playing

Future tense
Ons gaan lekker speel
We will have a lot of fun playing

We also have the following advantage:

I am = ek is
you are = jy is
he/she/it is = hy/sy/dit is
they are = hulle is
we are = ons is

And so on. We don't have German's weird "die", "der" and "das" either. We simply use "die." And we don't have "an" and "a" either. We just use "'n," which is a shortened "een," meaning one.

We just write Afrikaans the same way we speak it, too.

EDIT: Just a little something for those interested in Afrikaans to read: http://wikihow.com/Learn-to-Speak-Afrikaans

Well, if you ever decide to give it another go, at least now you know a francophone.

I had often read that Afrikaans is an easy language but I never thought it'd be that easy. Are there any irregularities at all? For example I'm thinking about the past participle, like in German, infinitive is bringen but PP is gebracht.

French has a stupid amount of tenses, most of the distinctions they make could be left to context or periphrasis without any problem. There are even some we never use when speaking but that we must use when writing. By "never use" I mean what I say, there are tenses that nobody, no matter how snobbish or educated, would use in conversation.

Hell, I don't think I have used the pluperfect subjunctive once in my life, even when writing. What's the point? I swear that on some level, learning written French is almost like learning a second language even for a native speaker.

Is Afrikaans endangered or is it still transmitted to children? Like how many Afrikaners can't speak it and just speak English instead?

I think it's important to be proud of one's language and to transmit it to future generations. In Canada, French is dying outside of Quebec and some areas in New Brunswick. In Quebec you can still meet francophones who can't speak English at all (in New Brunswick this is much rarer). Outside of these areas, you'll meet a lot of Canadians with French surnames but they can't speak the language at all. They're completely assimilated. I think that's really sad, but as one of the unassimilated ones I suppose I'm a bit biased.

That's why I swore I'd transmit my language to any children of mine (back when I wanted them) no matter who their mother would be or where they would be born. Even if I had married, say, a Japanese girl and stayed in Japan and had children, they would have grown up speaking French and Japanese.

I think it's swell there's another linguistic minority on the forum.

I got a tiny bottle of hot sauce today, it's so little and cute ^o^

Boy the region has been slow the past couple of months.  What happened?