Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: tired

Horror Movie Warnings

Speculative fiction is wonderful for illuminating mistakes so they can be avoided. Horror movies especially show many ways to get killed. Here's a post that lists things to avoid doing so you can stay alive.
Tags: science fiction
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  • 2 comments
tinceiri

tinceiri

June 24 2008, 13:43:48 UTC 13 years ago

This is off-topic, but I have a question for ya (and you can ignore it if you want to).

Are you fluent in any other languages?
ysabetwordsmith

ysabetwordsmith

June 24 2008, 15:01:41 UTC 13 years ago

I don't consider myself "fluent" but my standards are different. The last assessment framework I read would've put me several steps up the rankings in several languages. In order of expertise, though:

I took 2 years of Russian in high school, a trip to Russia, and 2 semesters of Russian in college repeating the exact same material (long story).

I took 1 year of Spanish in high school and a trip to Mexico that included more schooling there.

I took 1 semester of Japanese in college, during which I discovered that my eyesight is not sufficient to reading that kind of writing.

None of those are good enough for me to carry on a good flexible conversation on a wide range of topics. But *all* of them are enough to be useful. When we go to Detroit, my partner has me translate Polish labels through my knowledge of Russian, and that's enough to figure out what a lot of things are. I can puzzle out many things in Spanish. I can catch some words of spoken Japanese, which is why I prefer to watch anime with Japanese soundtrack and English subtitles. With a dictionary in hand, I can work out the meaning of most stuff in those languages, using that to supplement my internalized knowledge.

Beyond that, we're into informal study. I've done some significant delving into LAadan, Klingon, the languages of Middle Earth, and other constructed langauges. I'm sufficiently skilled in LAadan that I wrote a class on it for the Grey School of Wizardry.

I've also done a lot of digging through Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Welsh, Gaelic, Cherokee, Lakota, and miscellaneous other languages.

I'm just linguistic SillyPutty. When I visited then-Soviet Georgia, I came downstairs into a group of Georgians who were talking in their own language. One of them said something that I took to mean "good morning" so I repeated it. And instantly had the attention of the entire room, because apparently non-natives never do that. They totally glommed onto me. Boy, was our Russian tour guide pissed.