TIL: Today I Learned

[Ryika]

Google gives me a few different numbers there, and I can't find any official numbers, but it seems like rent here is roughly 2 Euro/m² cheaper than the average for Germany, which is somewhere around 7,5€/m².

Not that it's too surprising btw, Nordrhein-Westfalen and more particularly, the Ruhrgebiet, has been known as the new problem area of Germany for a while now; terrible education policies, ONE THIRD of our population are immigrants, a large part of them badly integrated, the downfall of the coal- and the outsourcing of the metal industry...

The fact that roughly ~22% of the refugees that are currently in Germany is probably not going to help either. While that is about the percentage of the population of Germany that lives here, one has to wonder how much sense it makes to go purely by numbers, instead of factoring in the pre-existing condition of the area.

 

[Hrothbern]

Google gives me a few different numbers there, and I can't find any official numbers, but it seems like rent here is roughly 2 Euro/m² cheaper than the average for Germany, which is somewhere around 7,5€/m².

Not that it's too surprising btw, Nordrhein-Westfalen and more particularly, the Ruhrgebiet, has been known as the new problem area of Germany for a while now; terrible education policies, ONE THIRD of our population are immigrants, a large part of them badly integrated, the downfall of the coal- and the outsourcing of the metal industry...

The fact that roughly ~22% of the refugees that are currently in Germany is probably not going to help either. While that is about the percentage of the population of Germany that lives here, one has to wonder how much sense it makes to go purely by numbers, instead of factoring in the pre-existing condition of the area.

What you describe is fits with my practical experience. NRW draws new unemployed (like immigrants) and I knew quite a lot of people grown up in NRW who moved to Bavaria because of the jobs and the much better education for their kids.
I see NRW as a failure of the German government.
Like the coal belt in the US.
The issue of the "old industry" going down has been there since decades now, half a century almost. And although I know also that the state government of NRW has put a lot off effort in subsidising innovative industry, the bulk of that development, including many new companies started, took place in Bavaria and also Brandenburg, paid by their richer states, BW being in the right spot, highly clustered, much car industry that boomed.
NRW perhaps also suffering that the industrial activities moved southward, densifying the cluster of BW, over the past decades, and ofc federal state money surplus going to EastGermany after the fall of the wall.
But I still see NRW as a failure of Germany. They should really pick it up... now it is being used as a cheap overflow reservoir for the employment politics.

 

[Mouthwash]

Oh. My. God.

TIL that if you know CKII inside and out (particular the text and descriptions) then there may be no better way to learn Spanish/French/German. Now I haven't done it for very long, so for all I know I'll start getting diminishing returns. Just my impression as a Spanish learner.

Anyone else have thoughts? Anyone tried this?

 

[Takhisis]

Look, if you need help learning Spanish, just ask, but it's not as if you need justification for playing vidjamagames .

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Oh. My. God.

TIL that if you know CKII inside and out (particular the text and descriptions) then there may be no better way to learn Spanish/French/German. Now I haven't done it for very long, so for all I know I'll start getting diminishing returns. Just my impression as a Spanish learner.

Anyone else have thoughts? Anyone tried this?

I had a friend who learned Spanish by watching Spanish soap operas on TV. Video games are more my style. Good tip.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Reminds me of the time I first thought playing video games would improve my English.
All those (imported) JRPGs that sometimes had pretty crappy translations from Japanese.

 

[Ryika]

I basically learned both, German and English from playing Computer games.

All your forums are belong to us.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Same here. Learned a lot of English from watching American shows, browsing American forums and playing World of Warcraft. My 7th grade English teacher would always be like: "Trinket isn't a word..", "Hearth" isn't a word, it's "Heart", and so on. I made her look it up every single time, not for personal satisfaction, just in order to please my 'tism.

 

[Kyriakos]

Action figures didn't help much with learning new words, though. I think that the only word i learned from G.I.Joe toys was "CAUTION!!!". Cause every gun on a vehicle would have that term plastered on it.
Who would have thought that Cobra cared so much for the well-being of the foot-soldiers.

 

[Mouthwash]

Look, if you need help learning Spanish, just ask, but it's not as if you need justification for playing vidjamagames .

Okay, asking for help here. I have Duolingo, CKII, and EUIV. Are those sufficient to attain fluency?

Reminds me of the time I first thought playing video games would improve my English.
All those (imported) JRPGs that sometimes had pretty crappy translations from Japanese.

What kind of games? Mortal Kombat isn't exactly the thing I'm talking about.

Same here. Learned a lot of English from watching American shows, browsing American forums and playing World of Warcraft. My 7th grade English teacher would always be like: "Trinket isn't a word..", "Hearth" isn't a word, it's "Heart", and so on. I made her look it up every single time, not for personal satisfaction, just in order to please my 'tism.

None of those are quite the same as CKII... in no other game are words so perfectly cut and compartmentalized. You can look at traits, you can look at decisions, and instantly know what foreign words mean. The only snag is that it can't teach grammar too well... so I guess strike German from the list?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

None of those things are quite the same as CKII... you can look at traits, you can look at decisions, and instantly know what foreign words mean without intermediaries. The only snag is that it can't teach grammar too well... so I guess strike German from the list?

Have you ever watched a soap opera, in any language? The dialog is so trite that there isn't any great mystery in what is being said most of the time.

 

[Mouthwash]

Have you ever watched a soap opera, in any language? The dialog is so trite that there isn't any great mystery in what is being said most of the time.

I have. Not sure I have the patience for them, but I'll give it a shot when my Spanish is good enough.

 

[Takhisis]

Okay, asking for help here. I have Duolingo, CKII, and EUIV. Are those sufficient to attain fluency?

Hmmmm, no. You need to interact with real people. You need to be able to get tones, facial expressions, deictics. A few videogames and this Duolingo thing might help, especially when getting started, but they cannot get you past a certain point.

 

[Traitorfish]

You need to interact with real people.

Oh, yuck.

 

[Takhisis]

In real life™ discourse you hear far fewer instances of ‘send the infantry forward’ than you would expect from playing video games.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Reminds me of the time I first thought playing video games would improve my English.
All those (imported) JRPGs that sometimes had pretty crappy translations from Japanese.

All your English learning from JRPG are belong to us !

 

[Takhisis]

you have no chance surrender your phone

 

[Zkribbler]

Have you ever watched a soap opera, in any language? The dialog is so trite that there isn't any great mystery in what is being said most of the time.

When I first came to the Philippines, I'd watch the soap opera "Maria de Jesus" in Tagalog along with Dolores. I was able to understand most of it.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Same here. Learned a lot of English from watching American shows, browsing American forums and playing World of Warcraft. My 7th grade English teacher would always be like: "Trinket isn't a word..", "Hearth" isn't a word, it's "Heart", and so on. I made her look it up every single time, not for personal satisfaction, just in order to please my 'tism.

Your 7th grade English teacher sounds only semi-literate herself, or at least one who never read any English novels published in the U.K.

It reminds me of my own junior high teacher who docked me marks for capitalizing "Earth" in an essay. I asked her why she did that, when she hadn't marked me down for capitalizing "Saturn."

Her reply? "Well, because Saturn is a planet."

My reply: "So is Earth."

Her reaction: a dirty look and realization that she'd just been corrected on a basic piece of information by a 12-year-old... in front of the class.

That was the first of several disputes we had over my writing assignments. She didn't know the difference between "lose" and "loose", and there were other incidents.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

I've also noticed that some of my English teachers had oddly small vocabularies.
Probably because they hardly used English outside of school. The internet wasn't a thing and they couldn't spend their free time arguing about politics with some native speakers.