Rdearman 2016-24 You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith Too.

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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Aug 20, 2022 6:29 pm

Brilliant.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby frenchfish55 » Mon Aug 22, 2022 10:39 am

rdearman wrote:. French - I dislike just about everything to do with France and the French language. I learned it because I needed to understand the abuse being given out by my French bosses.

Hello would you mind to tell us what was wrong with french bosses?
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Mon Aug 22, 2022 11:56 am

frenchfish55 wrote:
rdearman wrote:. French - I dislike just about everything to do with France and the French language. I learned it because I needed to understand the abuse being given out by my French bosses.

Hello would you mind to tell us what was wrong with french bosses?

  • Arrogant
  • abusive
  • sexist
  • egocentric
  • a need to be right all the time with a visceral need to prove others wrong
  • greedy
  • dishonest
  • judgemental
  • manipulative
  • narcissistic
  • vindictive
  • passive-aggressive or just aggressive
  • predatory
  • promiscuous toxic sexual predators
  • bullies
  • rude and insensitive
  • self-centered and selfish
  • avoid responsibility at all costs
Those were the ones I worked for, some of the others were worse. I'd shove a fork in my eyeball before I ever work for a French company again.

EDIT: I feel I must put a disclaimer on this post because my experience is just a single data point, and it isn't statistically significant. Statistically speaking, there is a chance a good French company with competent management exists.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby frenchfish55 » Mon Aug 22, 2022 12:48 pm

I hope I don't bother you by asking questions.
Are you a developer?
So you had conflicts with french managers. Did you try to solve it peacefully. Tell CEO that managers are abusive?
Did they complain that you are doing something wrong, unprofessionally?
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Mon Aug 22, 2022 2:16 pm

frenchfish55 wrote:I hope I don't bother you by asking questions.
Are you a developer?
So you had conflicts with french managers. Did you try to solve it peacefully. Tell CEO that managers are abusive?
Did they complain that you are doing something wrong, unprofessionally?


This is still a traumatic experience for me. I don't want to give too much information. I was a very senior manager. The people I had problems with were the CEO's (we went through 4-5), and all the directors of the company, and all the French senior managers. I did watch the sales manager try to resolve a problem peacefully, the CEO screamed in his face. He was literally spitting on his face and telling him to get out of the company. Later I heard they paid that guy a ton of "shush" money to keep the CEO from being charged.

I could list abuse and discrimination for hours, the list of sexual discrimination alone is endless. Especially for the CEO we affectionately named "Sewer rat". If you're not French and a graduate from a top Grandes Écoles then you were just a piece of merde which had found it's way on to their shoes. There were only four French people at that company I have any time for, the rest are just scumbags, and I wouldn't walk across the street to piss on them if they were on fire.

I hope that answers your questions, because I'm not going to talk about them any more.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby frenchfish55 » Mon Aug 22, 2022 4:47 pm

yes,thank you. I can't ask more :-)
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Thu Aug 25, 2022 10:41 pm

DONE!
Bloody hell it was a massive tome which is a three book trilogy that they've printed as one massive book. But I completed it tonight!

If you're interested in Alexander the Great, then this is well worth a read. The book is three volumes, Il figlio del sogno, Le sabbie di Amon, Il confine del mondo. It covers Alexanders live from birth to death and it is written as a type of adventure novel. The novels are faithful to history and I loved that; it's easy to read and engaging.

But it is 870 pages so it is a bit of a long read.

Next up!

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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby frenchfish55 » Fri Aug 26, 2022 4:07 am

rdearman wrote:DONE!


Next up!



LOOKS like PINOKKIO. Terrible italian font :-) Where is his nose?
You wrote earlier you need to eat a frog first(about longest book in italian) It would be more easier and pleasure to start with petite prince
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Fri Aug 26, 2022 10:03 am

frenchfish55 wrote:LOOKS like PINOKKIO. Terrible italian font :-) Where is his nose?
You wrote earlier you need to eat a frog first(about longest book in italian) It would be more easier and pleasure to start with petite prince

I'm not learning Italian, I'm simply maintaining it. But more importantly, I'm just trying to read all the unread Italian books on my bookshelves. Because I'm no longer learning Italian, I'm not progressing by reading level. I'm just reading all of them one after the other and giving the books away. This is an exercise in application of my wife's instructions to "clear all that stuff off the bookshelf!" :D
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Fri Aug 26, 2022 11:21 am

Mandarin
I've told the lady who I can't understand that I'm not going to be able to speak with her going forward. So I didn't ghost her, but I didn't give a reason. I did have two exchanges this week, one with a Taiwanese person and another person from the Mainland. The lady from the mainland is actually a Mandarin teacher, and so we went through some of her first lessons. I'm a false beginner, so most of it was easy, and I could throw in some more advanced stuff, but there was a lot of basics I'd forgotten. Over all it was a good session and I'm hoping she's willing to continue to work with me.

Other than LE's I haven't really done much or kept up with Mandarin simply because Italian reading and Korean study is taking too much time.

Korean
My teacher is back, and it turns out he didn't require surgery after all, but is still in some pain so waiting further tests. We learned more Korean verb conjugations, a new one 네요 It is a verb ending and an exclamation. So you use it when you have an epiphany, like: "It was in the drawer the whole time!", or something you didn't know, "Omg! She speaks Mandarin too?"

네요 is used to indicate that the speaker is impressed or rather surprised by a fact he/she learned anew from a past personal experience. Often it expresses surprise, typically at unexpected or counter-expected events or states.

Conjugation is easy, so it was a nice simple lesson. I showed my teacher my K-Bingo card, and he was amused, but suggested that I use two words from that day's lesson on a card. 많이 (many, a lot, much) and 정말 (really?). He figures I'd hear them a lot in k-dramas! And in fact he is correct because I'd already heard them a zillion times, just didn't know what they were at the time.

I've had a Korean keyboard setup on my Linux machine, and for the last couple of months I've been practising touch typing in Korean Hangul. I'm happy to report that I'm almost at the point where I don't need to look at the keys in order to type. I'm so very happy about this, because I forced myself to learn to touch type in English decades ago, and not being able to type while looking at something else has been super frustrating for me!


Italian
As posted before, still doing 24 pages per day of Italian books and managed to complete the monster book. I was going to read some Sci-fi books I have, but decided I'd just knock out some of the slimmer volumes, such as Il Piccolo Principe.

I'm back to doing two LE in Italian each week. Nothing to report, other than the occasional forgotten word, these aren't really a problem. I do need to start working on difference subjects like I do with my French LE and talk about "How an airplane flies" or "Is it wrong to cheat on an ethics test?"

French
I had a nice long exchange with my newest LE partner. She is very driven to learn English. I shared with her my presentation from one of the old Polyglot gatherings, which I'd done in French. She wanted to try to understand my level of French. Anyway, we discussed the presentation, and she was asking why I was so mechanical and reading from the notes. So I asked her how she would feel giving a speech to 50 people in a second language. (Hint: I was very nervous and heavily reliant on the notes.) Although I did point out that what I was saying, and what was on the slides were two completely different things, but related, one was a personal story (what I was saying) and the other was scientific studies related to my story. But the slides and my story had to be in synch, which was another reason for reading from notes and making sure I didn't go off-piste.

FYI, I decided about two seconds after that recording was posted on YouTube by the polyglot gathering to never do another presentation not in English, since the very first comment was "Your French is terrible." :oops: Although to be fair others sprung to my defence, it was still a cruel blow. :(

Anyway, we dug into the whole thing and analysed the speech and my French. Apparently she'd also shared this with her husband, who was the one who asked why is he reading from the notes so much? So while this is embarrassing for me, it was useful because we discussed a fairly weighty topic in French, and then again in English.

I gave her a long list of things to see and do in London with her daughter and some suggestions for her husband (who is a bit of a history buff, WWII stuff) and managed it all in French. I haven't lost all my French anyway, although I can notice a degradation because I'm not actively learning it. I'm seriously considering just putting 5 pages a day of a French grammar book on my long list of things to do.

General Stuff
I haven't spoken for a while about memory palaces or other mnemonic methods, but I have been participating on a memory forum and looking into it more. I kicked off a thread over there: Controversial, what is the point of mnemonics? (Yeah, I know, how to win friends and influence people, call their hobby pointless. :D) Most took it with good humour and could see that what I was saying was that the opportunities to use mnemonics seemed limited and asking for more example usage.

I've also been independently looking into memory techniques. I read a book recently which maps memory techniques to computer data structures like linked lists, arrays, structs/classes, skip lists, Karnaugh maps, etc. I can see more potential of mnemonics beyond just simple ordered lists and large numbers now with this additional information.

So with all this in mind, I've started another log over there where I plan to explore using mnemonics to encode things into memory I might need. I haven't found this to be particularly useful for Korean, or not any better or worse than just using Anki and reading. I plan to keep these two activities separate, but where there is some overlap, e.g. memorisation of Korean vocabulary, grammar rules, etc. or memorisation of Hanzi characters for Mandarin, then I might cross post.

Hopefully the people on that forum will be as happy to offer advice and assistance in my log as people here are. If you're interested in memory techniques, competitions, etc it is worth visiting https://forum.artofmemory.com/ they also have a lot of non-English areas to discuss memory as well.
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