(no subject)

[rocknload]

♫ I am in Flagstaff. I took the shuttle up here. I got three hours of sleep before my father cheerfully woke me up at two-thirty in the morning, and I stumbled out of bed half-asleep muttering about how much I hate my life in a weird grammatically terrible mix of English and Spanish. I do hate my life. I really really do. I'm so tired.

♫ School is good. All my five classes are interesting and all of them except for Spanish are looking to be pretty damn hard. I wake up at eight, go to school at nine, come back at three, and ... study for the rest of the day. For the rest of my life. Particularly horrible is Chinese, which is speeding through the old textbook at one chapter every two days in order to catch us up to the new books they're using.

♫ I am learning a lot of random shit. At any moment I'm liable to spew out something about how, "Did you know it's mathematically proven to be impossible to learn a language? At all? Even your native one?" Or, "Don't you think it's funny that everyone thinks Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks terrible English when in fact his speech is as grammatically perfect as any American? Do you know why that is?" Yeah.

♫ I can't get another job. I don't see how it's possible. I'm scratching my head as to how to work in the four hours of volunteering I'm hoping to do. Luckily regular weekend work with my dad seems to be likely, which is good because that'll pay me more than any other job I can get would, and also it'll prevent me from going stir crazy, which is what happens when I don't get out of the city and out of the state fairly regularly.

♫ I do swim like half an hour every day. It's nice.

♫ I'm barely ever on my computer anymore. When I am, it's usually for my classes. I have a couple hours left in the day to do it but ... man, I'm so tired.

Comments

[maxiboom.livejournal.com]

This random stuff sounds like a good time.

[theeternalmind.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in seeing/having summarized to me this mathematical proof.

[rocknload.livejournal.com]

It's interesting for me! Unfortunately since I literally do nothing else with all of my time, I have a hard time talking about anything else, which is probably unfortunate for ... most people around me.

[rocknload.livejournal.com]

I am only an undergraduate and I suck at math, but with those disclaimers I can VERY BRIEFLY SUMMARIZE: basically, language is an infinite system, there's seriously no end to the word combinations you can you -- you can prove that with math by demonstrating things like recursion, where you can next phrases like "I said that you said that I said that..." for literally forever. And an infinite system is impossible to learn, therefore human beings must be born knowing quite a bit about language already.

[rocknload.livejournal.com]

They're pretty interesting! I hope they stay interesting, too, since at this point I can't very well major in anything at else.

I miss everyone, too. ;_;

[theeternalmind.livejournal.com]

Uh huh. c_c; I can kind of see the logic behind that, but I don't think anyone really learns the infinite version of that, because just because there COULD be an infinite combination of words doesn't mean that there IS or that it gets USED, and also I don't think people are born knowing a lot about language, they just have the potential to do so. BUT WHAT WOULD I KNOW, I'm not a mathematician.

[rocknload.livejournal.com]

There's other examples of infinite stuff, but basically this is where I am out of my depth, because it seems to me that that's totally right! I mean most sentences we say day to day are sentences we've heard before, but even if you hear a sentence you've never heard or read before, as long as it conforms to the rules of English grammar you'll understand it without any problem. I ... guess.

[theeternalmind.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess it depends on if it's vocabulary you know or not. I guess I could see an argument where, since the universe is infinite and thus has an infinite amount of things in it, there is an infinite possibility of words for those things, but even that seems fallacious to me for the very argument that this mathematics thing uses. I.e., it's impossible for humans to understand something that is infinite, ergo we're only going to come up with words for a finite amount of things, ergo language should be something that a given person, if their brain functions at a high enough level, should be able to completely master. Unless mathematicians are saying that language is fundamentally more difficult than math, in which case, goddamn it, why do the mathematicians get the better jobs?

[halfling-rogue.livejournal.com]

It's because he's got such a thick accent, right? Isn't that what people tend to pay attention to first when people are talking? Tone and pronounciation?