You know you're a language nerd when…

General discussion about learning languages
Cavesa
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Cavesa » Tue Sep 05, 2017 9:00 pm

Of course cold temperatures affect immunity, therefore you are much more likely to catch something in winter than in summer, you don't usually encounter an epidemics of respiratory infections in August. People (often kids) who underestimate warm clothing fall ill more easily, because the thermoregulation takes more energy etc. The whole mechanism may not be described yet, I cannot remember it being taught during the lectures, but every doctor will recommend you to wear warm clothes, especially if you get easily ill.

While it is definitely not true that cold is the cause of pneumonia, or most other respiratory affections, it is not correct to underestimate it and basically call people foolish for not taking it lightly. I have seen quite a lot of this on the internet.

It has nothing to do with overprescription of antibiotics.

I think Catherine the Great may have underestimated not only the temperatures, but also her immunity system, as she was definitely used to different climate, and probably different viruses and bacteria among the population (don't forget human populations used to exchange goods, money, and illnesses much less back then). And we know nothing about her teacher, he may have been brought her a microbiologic welcome present :-D
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Bluepaint
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Bluepaint » Tue Sep 05, 2017 10:32 pm

Cavesa, I meant that people foolishly still go to their doctors and insist on antibiotics to treat colds. Not that overprescribing of them is the issue. As you will absolutely know antibiotics won't do anything for the common cold. I don't know about other countries but it is definitely an issue in the UK. I've some medical experience and have seen this firsthand from the public. Also every winter the UK launches ad campaigns about appropriate use of facilities (eg self-care over gp or out-of-hours over a&e, community pharmacy over gp etc) and GP surgeries alllllllways have a display of such leaflets during winter. It will include a stack of leaflets advising you that you will not receive an antibiotic rx for a cold (and some years the leaflet even explains why not).
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Cavesa
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Cavesa » Wed Sep 06, 2017 8:16 pm

Rhian wrote:Cavesa, I meant that people foolishly still go to their doctors and insist on antibiotics to treat colds. Not that overprescribing of them is the issue. As you will absolutely know antibiotics won't do anything for the common cold. I don't know about other countries but it is definitely an issue in the UK. I've some medical experience and have seen this firsthand from the public. Also every winter the UK launches ad campaigns about appropriate use of facilities (eg self-care over gp or out-of-hours over a&e, community pharmacy over gp etc) and GP surgeries alllllllways have a display of such leaflets during winter. It will include a stack of leaflets advising you that you will not receive an antibiotic rx for a cold (and some years the leaflet even explains why not).


Sure. On the other hand, my previous doctor was so obsessed with not overprescribing atb to my " just a cold" that I was repeatedly ill one month instead of one week, with all the consequences. Self-care advice is absolutely worthless, if people still have to go to work or schools or colleges ill, because their bosses or teachers will simply find a way to punish them for such a laziness. And telling people to just go to the community pharmacy is stupid, the pharmacist cannot tell bacterial infection from viral. :-D

One of the most funny things I learnt during my studies was the idea of the huge amount of atb many countries allow farmers to give their pigs, chickens, and so on, and those resistances get to human types of bacteria through plasmid transfer. Or many hospitals not changing the antibacterial cleaning products often enough. That is even more of a problem than people asking for atb for a common cold. It is a worldwide ticking bomb that few people talk about, and which the leaflets don't address.

Who knows, perhaps Catherine the Great would have stayed healthy, had her teacher been allowed and paid to stay at home for a week :-D
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Amerykanka
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Amerykanka » Sun Sep 24, 2017 4:52 am

When you download the Uber app to take your first independent Uber ride ever and it isn't until your colleagues start explaining how it works to you (in English) that you realize the app is in Polish and you have been responding to all its prompts in Polish. And then you are confused until you remember that you switched your iPhone to Polish several months ago.
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Cavesa
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Cavesa » Fri Sep 29, 2017 9:32 pm

When you send an email in your native language and later realise one sentence didn't belong there. It was a sentence totally normal in one or two of your foreign languages but a bit weird in the native one. :-D
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Jbean
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Jbean » Sun Oct 01, 2017 3:18 am

When two women walk past you talking and you understand everything they said including the fact that they were using a conditional tense, but you have no idea what language they were speaking.

It was probably Romanian, because they looked eastern European. I know that I can understand Catalan, but not Portuguese and it wasn't one of those languages.
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Serpent
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Serpent » Sun Oct 01, 2017 12:32 pm

Cool! Where did that happen? Could it be Galician maybe?
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Iversen
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Iversen » Tue Oct 03, 2017 1:34 pm

When you are slightly irritated with yourself because you visit the three Guyanas, where the one to the left speaks English, the one in the middle speaks Dutch and the one to the right speaks French, and you can't also eavesdrop on people when they speak their respective Creole languages.
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Via Diva
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby Via Diva » Sun Oct 22, 2017 4:54 am

When jokes in your tl sound 100x funnier than the same jokes in your native language because you get them, and because they sound cooler.
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mick33
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Re: You know you're a language nerd when…

Postby mick33 » Sun Oct 22, 2017 6:41 am

The other day someone on Pinterest left a comment on of my pins that read "I dare you to learn Hungarian" and I replied "Magyarul tanulok!" (I am learning Hungarian). Unfortunately, I proved I don't know much Hungarian when I could not respond to the question "és nehéz?" in Hungarian :oops: :cry: !! Of course, I now must learn for certain what exactly "és nehéz? means. Naturally, I'll use this experience as motivation to improve my limited Hungarian.
Last edited by mick33 on Thu Nov 02, 2017 4:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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