Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Gmail - language specific features

Google has recently added a new FAQ item detailing features missing from Gmail when the language setting is set to something other than English:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=19933&topic=12900

(If you are from google, I would appreciate it if you didn't sue me.)

Saturday, December 27, 2008

The Swedish

Intermediate (2) Limited Working Proficiency
Able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements. Can handle routine work-related interactions that are limited in scope. In more complex and sophisticated work-related tasks, language usage generally disturbs the native speaker. Can handle with confidence, but not with facility, most normal, high-frequency social conversational situations, including extensive but casual conversations about current events, as well as work, family and autobiographical information. The individual can get the gist of most everyday conversations but has some difficulty understanding native speakers in situations that require specialized or sophisticated knowledge. The individual's utterances are minimally cohesive. Linguistic structure is usually not very elaborate and not thoroughly controlled; errors are frequent. Vocabulary use is appropriate for high-frequency utterances but unusual or imprecise elsewhere.
I think the above is a pretty much where I'm at with my swedish. Note:

language usage generally disturbs the native speaker
I say weird things a lot, in particular when I want to use a grammatical construction that I just learned. We learned something called the s-passive a few weeks ago, and later when I was at a store being offered a receipt, I said something retarded like "det behoves inte av mig" ("it is not needed by me"), instead of just the normal "nej, tack" ("no thanks")

can handle with confidence, but not with facility, most normal, high-frequency social conversational situations
Very descriptive of me. I'm pretty confident about using my Swedish, even though I sound like a retarded 7 year old. I'm prone to leaving two minute, completely incomprehensible messages on peoples answering machines, or going up to girls and asking them what they think about ice-cream :-)

vocabulary use is appropriate for high-frequency utterances but unusual or imprecise elsewhere
Also quite true. Whenever it gets to things I've never talked about, I always rely quite heavily on one of my favorite words in swedish, "sak", meaning "thing". Useful sometimes, but not when you say: "den där goda saken som stör i den där kalla saken." "that tasty thing that's in that cold thing" (icecream in a freezer). Actually, I managed to successfully communicate my desires when I added "som bestående av mjölk" ("that is composed of milk")

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Världens bästa Rasmus (bastu = sauna)

I said:

i_said

And so replied rasmus:

andthen

But soon afterwards:

first

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Figures from History I, with Casey Rodarmor

And so I present to you Gil Schuller:

A man obsessed with those things that once assembled, could not be taken apart.

Friday, December 5, 2008

People/groups that are mostly retards

According to google:
people in Monahans
u ppl
retribution paladins
this NU generation of "metalheads"
Poeple (sic)
My fellow airmen
Celebs
their target audience
Americans
politicians
Jay's fans
the French
rest of them
those that call themselves metalheads
the ones you like
the people who contribute to the internet
other women
the armmy
these guys
climate skeptics
druids
people on youtube
the viewers
people who play on legends
cnet reviewers
the alliances doing BG in the 70 brackets
paladin
the people of Air America
both
the kind of people that persistently question lesbian orientation as questionable
libertarians
scotish people
kids these days
all of you
my friends