zompist bboard

I think I took three or four courses a semester in college. It's easy when you can test out of a lot of the more basic courses in high school.

One thing I didn't mention is that we had a period every day called "study hall" when everyone was supposed to sit quietly at their desks reading or working on their homework. At the time I wanted to take French and Spanish, during that period, I would literally hold Teach Yourself Thai open with my left hand and Teach Yourself Vietnamese open with my right hand and study some Thai, study some Vietnamese, go back to Thai, and so on. But no, apparently, I couldn't take French and Spanish during the same semester!

Contrary to all the counselor's warnings, my Spanish teacher advised me to take third-year Spanish immediately upon entering high school, and my French teacher told me not to settle for anything less than a fourth-year course (which is an AP course, so effectively college-level). The French teacher in high school was initially skeptical I could speak French that well, but before long, I was basically tutoring her students for free and helping them feel better when she got mad at them for giving incorrect answers in class. One day, she lost her voice, and I basically taught class.

Soap wrote:Apparently, they were never taught how to sound out words, in the theory that English spelling is so irregular it's best to just skip it and teach words as indivisible wholes. But this apparently led to difficulties in pronouncing words from other languages, even languages with simple spelling rules such as Spanish and (romanized) Japanese, as above. From someone who looks at a word like {gyoza} letter by letter but is uncomfortable with the original pronunctiation, I would expect something like /gi'oza/. From someone who apparently grew up looking at words as unbreakable, atomic units, "goyza" makes perfect sense. Im not sure if the phonics theory explains Sweden, though. (Or was the show in English? Im not sure what Britain's school curriculum was like, anyway.)

No, it was a Swedish TV show. We've never had that kind of pedagogics in Sweden AFAIK. Swedes do say things like [ˈtoː.kʏ.ɔ] and [kʏˈoːtɔ], and in the Swedish dub of Sailor Moon they pronounce the name Ryō as [ˈriː.ɔ]. So [ɡɪˈoːsa] would have been expected. (Swedes can't pronounce [z].)