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yong321

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yong321 last won the day on September 6 2019

yong321 had the most liked content!

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  • Currently studying
    Spanish, French, Italian, German
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    Chinese
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    English

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  1. http://yong321.freeshell.org/bcc/ Basic Chinese Characters contains 2500 commonly used Chinese characters. The book sorts the characters by usage frequency. A learner may choose a certain point in the book suitable to his or her level and start to learn the characters. The book is a good way to learn or review Chinese characters in a casual way and on a cell phone. [Update Feb 3] Found and corrected some errors. Added page numbers to the bottom of pages. Made the PDF file smaller.
  2. Amazon allows me to make the book free during promotion periods. I'll do this promotion frequently.
  3. susceptible touchy, sensitive, delicate, easily offended; (followed by de) likely, apt. Note that this word in the first sense is not quite the same in meaning as English susceptible. And the second meaning is absent in the English word. Examples, cette dame est très susceptible (“this lady is very touchy”); la proposition est susceptible d’être acceptée (“the proposal is likely to be accepted”). fringues (informal) clothes. Unknown etymology. As a mnemonic, think of the fringes of clothes. pendule pendulum (masc. n.) (cognate); pendulum clock, small clock (fem. n.). Note the different genders. To remember them, as a mnemonic, consider the fact that men like the mechanism of a machine (such as the pendulum) while women like the whole machine as a usable gadget. dauphin dolphin; successor, dauphin (heir apparent, héritier apparent). English dolphin is from Old French and dauphin from Modern French (hence the unchanged spelling). It is justifiable to give two distinct etymologies to these two words, spelled the same in French. The latter, meaning “successor”, is from the title assumed by Guigo the Count in 1140 and by the eldest son of King of France in 1343. It’s possible that the adoption of this title was originally related to the sea animal dolphin, commonly seen in Southeast France.
  4. amateur lover (of something), enthusiast; amateur, non-professional. Note unlike in English, this word does not have the negative connotation of “being inexperienced”. After all, it’s from a Latin word from which French amour (“love”) and English amorous are derived. Examples, un amateur de musique (“a music lover”); un photographe amateur (“an amateur / non-professional photographer”). semelle sole (of shoe). Unknown etymology. Use a mnemonic such as “the sole of the shoe smells”.
  5. Language difficulty can be measured, as long as we set a few criteria. See my article at http://english-for-chinese.blogspot.com/2017/09/language-difficulty.html
  6. No, you cannot. Omitting "about" at the end makes the sentence ungrammatical. By the way, "ain't" is bad English.
  7. Never mind. The web site AsiHablamos.com already does a very good job at this. To go the other direction, i.e. given an English word, find the Spanish word in different Spanish speaking countries or regions, Wordreference.com more or less meets this need.
  8. The multilingual idioms project is quite successful. We should start some other projects which other language forums don't do. An interesting one I can think of is Spanish words in different regions of the world. As of today, to find regional differences of a Spanish word, we have to google for its meanings scattered in various forums. But it would be nice to have one single table that contains most such words. (Is there any way to remove the embedded page preview? It's distracting. But I want to reference that page, as a link only.)
  9. Yeah, I know. That's the problem of blindly trusting the Internet. Hopefully Google has some kind of algorithm to avoid this kind of mistake.
  10. Google Translate started to provide frequencies for translated words probably in late 2019. Given a single word, the translated words are given 1 to 3 bars of frequency, which "Indicates how often a translation appears in public documents". It's a great feature! If anybody knows another dictionary that ranks the frequency of translated words, please let me know. Here's my question. What does it mean if the translated word is not the most frequent and yet it's given as the default translation? For example, Source language: French. Target Language: English. French word: froisser. In the English textbox on the right, it shows crumple. But under this textbox are listed offend with 3 bars, crease 2 bars, crumple 2 bars, .... If offend more frequently appears as a translated word for froisser than crumple, why is crumple instead of offend the default translation? And, of the multiple words with 2 bars, why is crumple chosen instead of say crease? If this message is off-topic, I apologize. I posted it to the Google Translate forum (https://support.google.com/translate/thread/62053485?hl=en) but I get no answer there.
  11. Come on, you don't need to feel depressed on the limit of human language that our ancestors have used for thousands of years! Seriously though, there's no way to precisely express what you want. A natural language is not a computer language, which *can* be extended logically. In your case, you either just continue to use "had stolen" with one "had", and let the reader infer from the context, or break the sentence up.
  12. gaspiller to waste. Uncertain etymology. According to one theory, it is cognate with spill. Use a mnemonic such as “Look, gas (gasoline) spills. You’re wasting it.” or “Gas spillage is a waste.” béquille crutch; (bicycle or motorcycle) kickstand. From bec (“beak of a bird”). The crosspiece on top of the crutch resembles a bird’s beak. bourguignon Burgundian. From Latin Burgundionem, where the -ndi- group easily lost d. If we trace to Proto-Indo-European, the name Burgundy is cognate with burg and borough, which are part of the names of many US towns.
  13. '"economic" as a verb'? '... economic, is used as a noun'? The word economic is neither a verb nor a noun.
  14. It would be nice to allow visitors see what's in there without signing up. Otherwise people just leave without leaving a word.
  15. Not sure how to use it. Why not give clear instructions on the homepage? Spanish is fine. But without instructions, first-time users quietly turn away.
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