Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Viola Yee There are lots of languages where every single inanimate object is either a "he" or a "she". French and German, just for example.  Some of that leaked over into English, but most of it is gone now. The usage for ships doesn't jive well with modern English, but mariners refuse to give it up, saying that ships have feminine personalities.  Now it's a tradition. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

In English Grammar: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Anonymous It's a somewhat obsolete way of saying "Oh!  Thank you!"  It's more heavily associated with the 1950's and before, and is generally used self-consciously in a somewhat silly/flirtatious way.  If you got this response after asking someone out on a date, it's most likely a very good sign. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

In English Grammar: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Patrick Wallace Here it is being used as an interjection to express surprise (in this case, pleasant surprise I would think). Why people started using it this way, I have no idea. However, this usage of the expression is quite old. http://www.merriam-webster.com/d... See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

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In English Grammar: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Eric Pepke "Data" isn't a singular noun. It never was. It has become a mass noun. Mass nouns take singular verb forms but never the indefinite article. You can easily tell that people don't use "data" as singular, because nobody ever says "a data." I don't understand why other people don't seem to notice this; it seems pretty obvious and clear. Maybe it's because pedants used to go around saying "'Data' is plural, not singular," thus displaying their ignorance. Mass nouns refer to things that are measured by quantity, not number, either because it looks homogeneous or the numbers are too big to bother counting exactly. You say "a gigabyte of data" just like you say "a liter of water." You don't write out the exact number of bits or Avogadro's number. Back in the day, you had to write down every damn datum, and when you had them written down, they were data (plural). Look, there are 100 data, and boy does my hand hurt. Now you just... - Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Darrell Francis Probably the Frisian languages. Here is a video of Eddie Izzard speaking Old English with a Frisian farmer. http://www.youtube.com/watch...... See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

In The Netherlands: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Arnoud Blankenstein the Netherlands is the correct english name. Holland is in fact a region (two provinces called north and south Holland). In the past this was the most powerful region of the country. (And perhaps even today) The use of Holland is technically speaking wrong. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

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Meryn Stol added this answer. Meryn Stol Here's a nice chart showing lexical distance between European languages: Source: http://elms.wordpress.com/2008...... In the chart you can see English' close ties with other Germanic languages, as well as its ties with Welsh and French. One thing to keep in mind when looking at this chart is that the distances between languages probably don't mean anything. They're just a convenient way to show them. For example you can see that German (GER) is about as far away from English as French (FRE), but the lexical distance of French to English is bigger than that of German, as indicated by the type of line that connects the two languages. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol added this answer. Meryn Stol I suggest looking for a definition of any term you come across as you go. If you often find yourself in doubt of a term you know you've looked up earlier, make a cheat list of these terms, perhaps with an explanation in your own words. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

In Languages: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. David Rosson They are supposedly the descendant and codified versions of what used to be at the two ends of a dialect continuum. See also: Receptive multilingualism as a language mode in the Dutch-German border area Overview on Google Books Summary: PDF Link See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Andy Cheung The amount of thought that goes into the design of things. Perhaps it's the economizing of space in everything they do, but Design in this country is really intuitive. Everything from ticket kiosks, to train stations, to infographics around you, it's all very easy to understand. Example: Amsterdam Airport (aka Schiphol), is a massive, massive airport, but you never feel like it takes you that long to get in or out. They squeezed a train station right below the arrivals hall. From wheels-down to out of the airport is a matter of 30 minutes (including immigration). Its layout is so good, it serves as the blueprint for other airports around the world. Holland has given the world some great architects, such as Mies van der Rohe. Football (soccer) is so popular it's actually hard to find a pick-up game, because everyone who plays is already in a club. And the club has players of all ages - from little kids to men in their 50's. The dichotomy of... - Meryn Stol

In Dutch as a Foreign Language: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Jeannine van der Linden I am just going to keep beating this drum, I guess. Languages are not inherently more or less difficult to learn: the difficulty involved in learning a language as an adult has generally to do with the native language of the speaker, not the target language itself. Just as no place is the furthest away in the world without reference to where the trip begins, no language is the most difficult. Only monolingual people think this way. Similarly, no skill is inherently more difficult without reference to the learner. I find that people tend to either pick up conversational skills or literary skills easily; few people are strong in both when learning a foreign language. I have myself a bias towards spoken language. If you start with an adult native speaker of English, the most difficult initial problem is learning to hear. There are a number of sounds in Dutch not found in English and the adult native... - Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Joshua Engel The expression originally meant "I am being serious; this is the truth", dating at least back to the 1930s. It's a shortening of "no bullshit", and "bullshit" for something valueless or false is very old. The "that's obvious" use of it probably started in the 1960s (surprise surprise). It's a form of ironic exaggeration: if "no shit" means that something is the truth, then "no shit!" implies that it's obviously the truth. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

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Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Doug Rice For me, it always has to do with the rhythm of the sentence. If I want the last two elements in my list to run together, I avoid it, but if I want that final pause, I put it in. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

In Learning Languages: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Ligia Fleckenstein If you live in the United States, right now, the best language for your kids to learn is Spanish. But I agree with Mikael, if either you or your spouse have a foreign background, it would be a great reason for your kids to learn that language to be able to communicate well with that side of the family. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

In Learning Languages: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Curt Tigges Mandarin. Simply put, it has the greatest chance of opening doors. I would also consider Spanish and Russian. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

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Meryn Stol added this answer. Meryn Stol No, this is impossible with Preview. Also, I'm not aware of any Mac PDF reader that lets you do this. The font size is a fixed part of the PDF document, and so the PDF file needs to be altered in order to change the font size. OS X Preview does come with limited PDF editing capabilities (including annotation and highlighting), but changing the font size itself isn't possible. To change the font size you'd need to use a PDF editor or convert the PDF to a different format (such as Word or ePub, depending on your needs) first. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

In English (language): Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Thomas Tydal I am Swedish, and I found English very easy to learn since the two languages are so similar. There are a lot of Swedish words in English - old ones as well as new ones - and while Swedish has many English words we also share common influences like French and German. It's not just the vocubulary that is similar, also grammar and word order. The pronunciation is a bit different, but not really that much. I will show you what the word order looks like in the next paragraph. I wrote it in Swedish first and then translated it word by word into English, not changing the word order nor grammar. When it regards the pronunciation so would it actually work to say the english words on swedish. It would sound like a very peculiar accent but the message would go forward anyway. Fact is that you maybe already heard it on the news then our former state minister spoke english on that way. (The main difference is the prepositions and... - Meryn Stol

In English (language): Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Kaushal Hooda In one word : CHAOTIC It's got it's pros and cons like others. The vocabulary size is ridiculously huge, so there is always a word to fit what you want to say. Plus it's relatively easy to become familiar with. But mastering it is another thing. First off, the grammar is really complicated in weird ways if you get into the nitty-gritties of it and has so many exceptions that I've plain stopped caring about it. So long as what I say makes sense to me, I'm good.Then there's the pronounciation - it is literally impossible to tell by looking at a word how it should be pronounced. Especially to blame are the "silent" letters in word. As a non-native english speaker who has watched hundreds of hours of movies/tv and read over 300 english books, I am still sometimes stumped by the way people choose to pronounce a word. In contrast, in Hindi, my native tongue, every word is pronounced exactly as it is spelled.There's a... - Meryn Stol

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In Learning English: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Aaron Knight Depending on your level of advancement, here are some of the best: google.com/dictionary - Google's dictionary is very good. It's based on the Collins Cobuild learner's dictionary. phrasemix.com - For learning natural conversational English. (disclaimer: I'm the author of this site.) americancorpus.org/ - For advanced English learners, this is an amazing tool. Type in a word or phrase and find examples from natural sources. lang-8.com - Write a journal entry in English, and other English-speaking users will correct your writing in exchange for help in your native language. rhinospike.com - Post some English text, and English-speaking users will record themselves reading the text out loud. youtube.com - There are videos on every imaginable topic. You can also do a search specifically for videos that have English captions. At higher levels, reading and listening to authentic English is best. You can do this on sites that... - Meryn Stol

In Self-Improvement: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Jim Stone Get In Over Your Head. Work To Get Your Head Above Water. And Do It Over And Over Again. In other words, choose "anxiety-driven growth" over "boredom-driven growth". To explain what I mean, I'll use Jesse Schell's elaboration on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow diagram: For Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a magical zone between anxiety and boredom. The vertical axis represents the size of the challenges we are facing. The horizontal axis represents the power of our skills in relation to those challenges. When our challenges exceed our skills (in the upper left part of the diagram), we feel anxiety. When our skills exceed our challenge (in the lower right part of the diagram), we feel boredom. When our skills and challenges are closely matched (the diagonal zone from lower left to upper right), we are in a sweet spot where we feel neither too much anxiety nor too much boredom. Csikszentmihalyi calls this diagonal channel the “flow... - Meryn Stol

In Learning: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Tiana Clark This isn't anything new, but you could always come up with strategies to grasp and record your understanding of information. 1. Find a cloud storage or personal tracking app/program to record your learning. Whether it be Google Drive, Evernote, SugarSync, Dropbox or something else is your choice. I suggested a cloud storage device because I find it more convenient to access all of your learning (in a cloud) than stacks of journals to record your progress. 2. Use strategies to exercise your grasp of the information. One strategy you could use is a mind-map program to connect ideas and form new ones. You can use this when you read a book, watch a video, or receive information in any way. Five Best Mind Mapping Tools http://www.youtube.com/watch...... The second strategy you could use is called ''Explain it to a Five-Year old''. This is an exercise to simplify difficult ideas to basic concepts for easier understanding. Pretend... - Meryn Stol