Football Match Map

by **QoH** on Thu Jul 07, 2011 1:57 pm

If you're American/British and think grammar/vocabulary/spelling your own language is hard, then you're just a plain dumb-ass. Or really really stupid.

I"m with DiM on this one. My Dad speaks Arabic/French fluently, and so I grew up hearing Arabic when he talked to his family overseas, and I grew up speaking french to them, since they didn't speak English. English isn't hard when you compare it to all sorts of tenses and verb forms even a common language like French or Spanish has. Then think of something like the Far East languages where intonation can make the same word mean 10 different things. Or even as DiM said, languages where you have to make clicking sounds to form words.

English, for americans at least, should be a piece of cake.

by **MrBenn** on Thu Jul 07, 2011 2:05 pm

DiM wrote:in german the numbers are always written together. 245 is not written two hundred and forty five but rather twohundredandfortyfive and wham bam you have a new word for each number.

It's actually zweihundertfünfundvierzig... but who's counting

by **DiM** on Thu Jul 07, 2011 2:11 pm

MrBenn wrote:
DiM wrote:in german the numbers are always written together. 245 is not written two hundred and forty five but rather twohundredandfortyfive and wham bam you have a new word for each number.

It's actually zweihundertfünfundvierzig... but who's counting

i initially wanted to post it in german but i was adraid i'd confuse 40kguy even more :roll:

by **Teflon Kris** on Fri Jul 08, 2011 7:15 pm

I reckon we need an experiment for this one:

Get a non-european language kid and teach them English, any latin language whatsoever (except Latin) and a germanic language (such as german), teachers of equal skill, and see which language they are closest-to-native in after, say, five years (including a few visits etc).

for example german language can create virtually an infinite number of compound words

Exactly, compound words are simple to understand.

by **DiM** on Fri Jul 08, 2011 7:26 pm

DJ Teflon wrote:I reckon we need an experiment for this one:

Get a non-european language kid and teach them English, any latin language whatsoever (except Latin) and a germanic language (such as german), teachers of equal skill, and see which language they are closest-to-native in after, say, five years (including a few visits etc).

wait a minute. now you're comparing only latin and germanic languages. what happened to the rest? we were talking about the hardest language on earth and from what i know latin and germanic languages aren't the only ones. also, why ask that kid to learn both english and a germanic language when in fact english really IS a germanic language?

do another experiment. take a newborn kid and try to teach him english, italian, japanese, arabic and xhsosa. let's see at what age he masters each of those languages.

DJ Teflon wrote:
DiM wrote:for example german language can create virtually an infinite number of compound words

Exactly, compound words are simple to understand.

i never said they're hard to understand, i was merely demonstrating you how english doesn't have the largest vocabulary in the world as you said.

by **natty dread** on Fri Jul 08, 2011 7:50 pm

DiM wrote:take a newborn kid and try to teach him

You know, the way learning languages works, it's very easy to teach newborns... they learn simply from hearing the language being used - I don't remember anyone ever teaching my native language to me, yet I speak it fine...

The same way if you have multilingual parents, you'll also learn to speak the same languages - which is kinda cool since you'll have multiple "native" languages.

English is still an easy language to learn though - which may partially be because of the abundance of learning material... no matter where you are, it's hard to turn on the tv or radio and not hear english (ok, unless you live in one of those crazy countries that insists on dubbing everything - but even then you still have the internet).

DiM wrote:english doesn't have the largest vocabulary in the world

The whole question of "largest vocabulary" is meaningless as such. It all depends on how you define "vocabulary size", for example, do you only count root words, or will you also count multiple forms of the same word... and if you also count compound words or numerals, then there are lots of languages that can be said to have an "infinite" vocabulary. Then there's the question if you should count loan words, and when exactly does a word stop being of one language and part of another?

by **Teflon Kris** on Fri Jul 08, 2011 7:56 pm

I'm just pedantically arguing against natty's point:

natty_dread wrote:English is actually one of the easiest languages to learn

My counter was that English os one of the most stupid and difficult to learn languages.

So yeah, English is a latin & germanic fusion. As its a messy random nonsense fusion then it is more stupid and dificult to learn than purer latin or germanic languages.

So, I think I'm right that English is one of the most difficult languages, and you have a point that there may be some other languages out there that are potentially harder to learn than English. I cannot possibly say otherwise when I'm lazy and can only be bothered to learn what's easiest for me.

by **Teflon Kris** on Fri Jul 08, 2011 7:58 pm

natty_dread wrote:it's very easy to teach newborns... they learn simply from hearing the language being used - I don't remember anyone ever teaching my native language to me, yet I speak it fine..

Yeah - but they cant spell.

take a trip round the US or Uk fourth world and you'll find lots of bad spellers. I bet Mexico City's Sao Paolo's shanty town dwellers can spell Spanish or Portuguese much better.

For example , they would have no trouble spelling 'Ingles' vut many english kids would spell Portuguese as Portyougeez.

by **Teflon Kris** on Fri Jul 08, 2011 8:02 pm

natty_dread wrote:no matter where you are, it's hard to turn on the tv or radio and not hear english (ok, unless you live in one of those crazy countries that insists on dubbing everything - but even then you still have the internet).

I have to conceed this point though.

by **Teflon Kris** on Fri Jul 08, 2011 8:02 pm

QoH wrote:If you're American/British and think grammar/vocabulary/spelling your own language is hard, then you're just a plain dumb-ass. Or really really stupid.

Intelligence is not equal to memory. Non-dumb-asses may be ok at spelling but to be great at spelling takes nothng nmore than boring memorising. Spelling accommodation, acommodation or whatever it is, and success or success, requires only rote-learning-memory. And what use is good spelling such as this - looking good to people who think it matters, i.e. the ruling classes.

Take a latin language and the spelling is easy when you hear a word, phonetics and spelling. Accents are aeasy as they relate to sounds, compared to our compund vowels which dont translate from sound to written letter (e.g. 'ou' - thought / though / bough / cough etc - what a joke)It is therefore not possible to create fake intelligence through the spelling myth in languages where spelling rules apply nearly always and can be learnt implicity. In English, one has to learn the exceptions individually rather than applying intelligencve to work them out.

English has the same tenses as Spanish, called soemthing different by boffins no doubt.

Grammar in one's own language is never hard, grammatical boffinitry probably is but is totally unnecessary. Grammar rules might be useful to learn an additional language past early infancy though.

And vocabulary. Dumb-asses and clever people alike really do not need to know trhe seventeen different ways in which Shakespeare describes people as 'dumbasses', unless you are into theatre. We just need the living language of our own worlds. English vocabulary is so vast that it means different socio-economic worlds have vastly different vocabulary, a tool to keep people out of the upper eschelons.

Interesting discussion which leads to the conclusion that the whole world would be a better place if everyone spoke Spanish (just imagine if the UN voted it tomorrow,, would be interesting).

Reason 1 for calling this map Futbol. So many of the people who play the sport call it this, especially those who rule the world.

Reason 2 is that is would not comfuse our United Statsian friends who (due to our shared illogical non-compund language) as they like to use the word football for a sport involving hands and egg shapes. If we called it Football, then, later on, the USians wanted to create a map for their national body armour sport, they'd be forced to differentiate. I'm sure they wouldn't want to call it 'Handegg'.

by **DiM** on Fri Jul 08, 2011 8:08 pm

natty_dread wrote:
DiM wrote:take a newborn kid and try to teach him

You know, the way learning languages works, it's very easy to teach newborns... they learn simply from hearing the language being used - I don't remember anyone ever teaching my native language to me, yet I speak it fine...

it's not just about speaking the language but also reading and writing

i still think they would learn some languages faster than others. but i'm not talking about basic conversational skills. as i said before mastering the language would be the goal.

one of my ex girlfriends was half romanian half chinese. she stayed in china until she was 12 then came here. until 12 the only romanian she learned was from her mother. by 18 she knew romanian much better than chinese. especially when it came to writing. she could write chinese using latin alphabet (pinyin) but she had trouble when it came to using traditional characters

by **DiM** on Fri Jul 08, 2011 8:11 pm

DJ Teflon wrote:Reason 1 for calling this map Futbol. So many of the people who play the sport call it this, especially those who rule the world.

Reason 2 is that is would not comfuse our United Statsian friends who (due to our shared illogical non-compund language) as they like to use the word football for a sport involving hands and egg shapes. If we called it Football, then, later on, the USians wanted to create a map for their national body armour sport, they'd be forced to differentiate. I'm sure they wouldn't want to call it 'Handegg'.

handegg.

you made my day. love it. =D>

by **natty dread** on Sat Jul 09, 2011 12:43 am

DiM wrote:it's not just about speaking the language but also reading and writing

Come to think of it, I don't remember anyone teaching me to read or write either... I just sort of spontaneously learned it when I was 4 or so, by reading the text on a carton of milk.

Also the american "foot" "ball" is not even egg-shaped, it's more like a stretched pointy ellipsoid... or a lemon. We should just call it handlemon.

by **40kguy** on Sat Jul 09, 2011 9:12 am

natty_dread wrote:Also the american "foot" "ball" is not even egg-shaped, it's more like a stretched pointy ellipsoid... or a lemon. We should just call it handlemon.

they dont even play with there feet :lol:

by **Teflon Kris** on Tue Aug 05, 2014 8:15 am

To score a goal, goal must be held for a round, gives the goalkeeper a chance to save the shot (bombard goal).

With new features:

Conditional business
Goals can only be scored when the full team is on the pitch (i.e. player controls all positions of the team).

Maybe the same with passes etc.

Still waiting for team starting positions xml feature for something like this to work in more than 1v1.