Meryn Stol

In Tips and Hacks for Everyday Life: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Leo Peo It will take 15 minutes but will be worth it source-http://9gag.com/gag/3968335 See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Laura Sabio Manzano To understand others. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Judith Meyer You do adjust the pronunciation, just not the spelling. In accurate English pronunciation, the "the" in "the book" is pronounced "thuh" and in "the apple" it's pronounced "thee". See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

In Writing Advice: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Joshua Engel "Has been" is present perfect. It means that, from the point of view of right now, the action is completed. "Had been" is past perfect. It means that, from the point of view of some time in the past, the action was completed. That is, you could say, "By 1998, X had acquired Y". But you can't say, "By 1998, X has acquired Y". The past perfect is used to describe events in the farther past from the point of view of the nearer past. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

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In Computer Programming: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Robert J. Kolker Suppose a function f returned two values for x,  say v1 and v2.  If you substitute f(x) in another expression to get a result  which value did you substite? v1 or v2? The ambiguity makes a conclusion impossible.  So a function has to return exactly  one value from its co-domain. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

In Languages: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Anonymous Read books depending upon your level. Books help a lot in improving English no matter what age you are. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

In Languages: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Lisa Biskup My favorite approach is to listen - a lot. I wrote a post on it recently on my blog: Are You Afraid to Speak? Fluency comes with time and use. The best way to become fluent is to have a reason to become fluent. Do you have a good reason? Are you motivated? Do you have a chance to use English regularly? The answers to these questions will help guide your actions. If you don't have a good reason and you aren't motivated, and you don't have a chance to use English, then it will be very difficult and it will feel like hard work. On the other hand, if you know your reason, you are motivated and committed to using English, then it will just be a fun process, and in time, you will be fluent. People do it all the time! See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

In Languages: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Charles Mattrick Why is h silent in some English words? There are two main reasons that an h is not pronounced in an English word. Derivative. This happens when a word derives from a language in which h is silenced. e.g. include “honor” from French “honneur” /ɔnœʁ/, “messiah” from Hebrew “משיח” /maˈʃiax/. Note: there are a lot of exceptions to this rule because as time changes, people forgot the original pronunciation of the word. Words like “horrible” and “hospital” are pronounced with the h sound.Elision. This happens when sounds run together so close that the h sound is omitted to facilitate the pronunciation. e.g. “shepherd” and “exhaust”. Source: Oxford Dictionaries: Why do such words as hour and honest have a silent h? But why do British people pronounce them but Americans don't? It is because of the linguistic conservatism in American English. Until the 16th century, the word “herb” was still spelled as “erb” as in French (See this... - Meryn Stol

In Languages: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Zach Baker This is an affectation typical of New Yorkers. According to Wikipedia's New York dialect page: Reduction of /hj/ to /j/. New Yorkers typically do not allow /j/ to be preceded by /h/; this gives pronunciations like /ˈjumən/ and /judʒ/ for human and huge. Donald Trump has a classic New York accent, and his pronunciation of "huge" as "'uge" or "yuge" is lampooned even among some New Yorkers. As Seth Meyers once said about Trump's accent: I like that Trump is filthy rich, but nobody told his accent. His whole life is models and gold leaf and marble columns, but he still sounds like a know-it-all down at the OTB. But why? As we know, even old New York was once New Amsterdam, so a clue may be this note found in Wikipedia's article on Phonological history of English fricatives and affricates: Many dialects of Dutch also feature h-dropping, particularly the southwestern variants. So, and this is just speculation, this affectation may... - Meryn Stol

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Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Anonymous Some of this is an accident of history. JavaScript initially gained traction in the context of client-side web programming, and so it was first associated mostly with adding user interface sugar to web pages and writing filthy hacks to deal with all the cross-browser differences. Remember that there was a long and dark period before libraries like jQuery came into wide use. A "real programmer" will be inclined to turn up her nose at such inelegant and (seemingly) superficial work. Indeed, until fairly recently our "real programmer" might have been turning up her nose at front-end programming in any language. All of that isn't exactly JavaScript's fault. But part of the measure of a programming language's value is how well it encourages the elegant expression of a model, process, or concept... and by this measure in my experience JavaScript is a disaster. In every single legacy web application code base I have inherited there is some kind of... - Meryn Stol

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In Writing Advice: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Anne W Zahra I think Michelle Roses and Adrien Lucas Ecoffet answered the question well.  I'm just adding examples: - You can't sit in those seats.  They're for family members only.  (You could word this as They're only for family members and be perfectly correct, but that syntax would probably be less common.  Moving only to the end appears to give it additional weight when used to mean exclusively.) Only can be used to emphasize amount or price, whether you mean lack of or low cost.  However, only must precede the amount.  It can't be placed at the end of the sentence. - I know I'll get only two or three upvotes for this answer. - That shirt cost only ten dollars?  No wonder it's ugly. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Marguerite Leenhardt A part of the answer is the "phonological deafness". Basically, an infant can make subtle distinctions between all existing human vocal sounds pronounced around him, until the age of 8 months approximately. Then begins the "phonological deafness" that is to say your auditive system will reduce the complexity by minimizing the variety of human vocal sounds one can distinguish. That's how a infant evolves into a speaking child (put simply, of course). Given this, as a non-native speaker, your phonologic reference set may not include some of the phonemes you have to pronounce to speak in that foreign language. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Jeannine van der Linden Because if you cannot hear a sound, you cannot duplicate it. While young children do not have this problem, adults do: sounds and sound combinations which do not have meaning in the native language are simply not heard by older speakers of that language. To a native speaker of English the Dutch words maan and man sound exactly the same, as do huis and house. Fixing this requires first relearning to hear which is a fundamental proposition. It is a case of lazy brain, not lazy mouth. *The Dutch are all laughing now as in fact they do not even sound similar. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

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Meryn Stol added this answer. Meryn Stol You see two things: 1. A CSS selector: ul#menu li ul.sub-menu 2. An opening (curly) brace { , which should be followed by zero or more css declarations, and a closing brace } . The CSS selector determines to which elements the CSS declarations ("styles" from now on) are applied to. The easiest way to understand the CSS selector is to read its individual components from right to left. To start with, the styles only apply to ul elements with class "sub-menu". I.e. you'd see something like <ul class="sub-menu"> in the HTML. Furthermore, it only applies to those ul elements which appear somewhere nested inside a li element. Those li elements in turn need to be nested inside an ul element with id "menu", i.e. something like <ul id="menu"> An example of what is matched: 1 2 3 4 5 <ul id="menu"> <li> <ul class="sub-menu">THIS IS MATCHED</ul> </li> </ul> The selector in fact matches many more types of element hierarchies, because both <li> and <ul... - Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol added this answer. Meryn Stol Some other common ones: 1. "Idioot". Idiot. This one is simple. (note, "idioot" is also an adjective, meaning "idiotic") 2. Mongool. A somewhat vulgar way of saying "idioot". Literally, "een Mongool" is a kind of inconsiderate way of describing a person with Down Syndrome. The reason: People who have Down Syndrome may have Mongoloid facial features. 3. Homo. "Een homo" is a homosexual man. Typically this is used as an insult used by guys aimed toward guys that deviate from some norm of masculinity. Effeminate in some way, not tough enough, maybe bad at sports. "Homo" is also used more playful to call out any stupidity or clumsiness. Your friend just dropped something: "Homo!". Despite being meant innocent, it does reinforce the notion that being "een homo" is simply something bad. I found a master thesis about Dutch swearing behavior, including how swear-words are used as insults. It says this: Tevens heeft Van Sterkenburg (2008) de meest... - Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Julien Vaché Excellent answer from Jeannine, almost nothing to add. The most interesting fact about Dutch insults is that the worst/most used ones (before the advent of US street culture) come from their past as the greatest sailing nation in the world: from the 16th century onwards they were sailing across the seas of the world and their economy was entirely based on long distance commerce (btw read David Mitchell's "The thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" for an amazing recount of how it was in those days) When you are stuck on a sailing boat for months, the WORST thing that can happen is to catch a disease, they would spread like lightning and in part due to the living conditions on the boat, once you were infected, chances of survival were very slim, in some cases you could get thrown overboard by your companions before you infect everyone... Hence the prevalence of the following disease which historically form the basis of many insults in the Dutch... - Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol added this answer. Meryn Stol Some resources not yet mentioned: n2taalmenu.nlHear Dutch Here See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Hua Chung I recommend using http://www.dutchgrammar.com to check up on Dutch grammar. It's been very useful for me. http://http://www.taalklas.nl/ is also a good one for simple daily conversation and vocabulary. It's all in Dutch but it's pretty intuitive to use. See question on Quora - Meryn Stol

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Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Colin Jensen Because every language she came to us from has gender.  More specifically, "navis" in Latin is feminine (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...), and French / Spanish / Italian / Portuguese / English (all the "great historical shipbuilding cultures") get their word and usage from "Navis." See question on Quora - 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