If you mix the audio from the Wolverine ad with the video from the Barbie ad it makes the schwink noise as they are spraying her hair.
If you mix Betty Spaghetty and Kung-Zoo it is really cool:D!!
My apologies. I haven't yet explained to my offspring that emoticons are deprecated.
Speaking of ponies and technology.
I think apo may have an unrealistic idea of the services typically provided by TAs.
I am sure Apo has seen many short films on the services provided by TAs.
Would it be too much to ask for Heebie to explain the angry rant, maybe in short form?
Since you all won't entertain me, me with a sprained ankle!, I am wading through Henry's response to Graeber at CT. Cripe. You see the problem here.
I tried a couple and was generally underwhelmed -- it was slow to load and just wasn't that funny. But, on my fifth try I did find a combination that's quite funny: Baybladebattles (4th from top of the far right column) and My Little Pony (5th from top on the middle-left column).
It's the funniest one that I've seen because the rhythms of the two adds are so similar. I think that is the key.
OT: Anyone else read through the recent CT thread on bilingualism, immersion and the relative ability of children to become fully native in a second language depending on when they start learning it? The argument was that the ability to ever reach full native level fluency in a second language starts dropping drastically after age three or four, and is pretty much impossible after age eleven or twelve. It didn't match up with my own personal experiences. I've met many people who reached full native level competency in a second language that they only began learning in late elementary school or in junior high school. Many of those people became non-native in their native languages, and all of those who ended up doing their entire high school and college education in the second language had better vocabularies in their second language than in their native ones. This is common enough that people in Poland routinely ask me how old I was when I left Poland, and when I ask them to guess typically say 9-13. In the case of those who didn't use their native language at all they lost most of that language (E.g. a few months ago I spent a fair amount of time talking to a guy in his late thirties who came to the US from Poland at age twelve speaking no English. His parents spoke English with him at home to help him adjust faster, and now his Polish is close to non-existent. On the other he speaks English like a native.).
The post also said that even when native speakers think that a bilingual speaks their language like a native, their reading and spoken comprehension skills are much poorer than those fo a native. Yet my experience is that it tends to be the reverse.
I'm wondering whether it has anything to do with educational levels. Almost all the people I'm thinking about are MC and up well educated children of equally well educated parents.
I did find a combination that's quite funny: Baybladebattles (4th from top of the far right column) and My Little Pony (5th from top on the middle-left column).
I just did that one and was going to recommend it! Spooky. It works both ways, but the best is girl video and boy audio.
12: I haven't read that thread, but in general my understanding is that there's a lot of variation from person to person in how easily people learn languages, for reasons that I don't think are well understood. There are famous but very rare cases of people who can pick up dozens of languages literally effortlessly and reach native or near-native fluency in a few days of casually hearing a previously unfamiliar language.
More commonly, people tend to vary in how well they pick up second languages, but the traditional interpretation is that there's a "critical period" in early childhood when people acquire their native language(s), after which acquisition of additional languages becomes much more difficult for most people. This is what I think the CT post was talking about. I seem to vaguely recall that there's some recent research suggesting it's more complicated than that and that the critical period either isn't quite that important or varies in length for different people.
I don't know of any research on the specific issue you raise, of people who become sufficiently immersed in a second language that their native language proficiency atrophies, but there probably is some. It would certainly be a pertinent issue to studies of language death, for example, and I know there's been work on that. Offhand, I doubt education level or other social circumstances would make much difference; most evidence I know of seems to indicate that this stuff is pretty hard-wired. Sifu might know more about some of this than I do.
Would it be too much to ask for Heebie to explain the angry rant, maybe in short form?
Teh sexism is bad?
Battleship (far right, 2nd from bottom) + Baby Alive (near left, 3rd from top) is pretty good, too.
teo, you're abetting the violation of your very own edict (which I support) on early threadjacking.
Still: There are famous but very rare cases of people who can pick up dozens of languages literally effortlessly and reach native or near-native fluency in a few days of casually hearing a previously unfamiliar language.
He's not that type of phenom, but I am amazed by someone I know who speaks and reads 5 languages in 3 alphabets fluently -- the alphabet part being the most impressive to me; French & Italian are practically the same language to someone like him (the others are English, Arabic, and Russian), reads a couple more (Hebrew and I forget what else), and I think has some German. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that he's picked up Japanese since last I knew him. (I'm pretty sure I have the right list but perhaps, lurker friend who knows much better than I, you can correct me.) He's mastered enough Arabic dialects that he can pass for a native in several countries (he's Tunisian), including Iraq, where he would wander outside the Green Zone and talk to people.
12, 14: One thing I wondered when I was taking Russian was how they determine the metrics of native-level fluency. At the start and end of a summer program I did, they gave use tests to be used for placement (on entry) and then comparison (on exit).
The reading exam consisted entirely or almost entirely of passages in Russian that we translated into English - maybe there were some questions too; I can't remember. I think the audio one might have involved translations too, but I think it was more question-based. The grammar and speech exams didn't have any place for English.
After taking the tests the first time, it occurred to me that the scoring for the reading exam had to be heavily influenced by one's English writing ability. So when I took it the second time, I dialed up the sophistication on my English. I didn't embellish it above what I thought I read in each passage, but I made sure to throw in clauses and complex constructions any time it looked like they fit with the original.
At the end, I scored a 3 out of 3, which is native-speaker level. I'm not being false modest in saying I was not at native-speaker level, though I know I made a huge improvement over the first test, which I didn't even finish in the time allotted.* I am sure that I got the gist of every passage, but had I posted just the gist, accurately but plainly, I bet I wouldn't have scored quite so well.
Having been a TA for some college courses by that point, it occurred to me that some clearly fluent native speaker students with no language problems probably would not have scored a 3 on an English exam, if the complex constructions were a part of the scoring. But I don't know exactly how the scoring worked, so I'm just speculating.
Which I guess is a long way of saying, what is fluency, anyway?
*On all of the other tests my scores were around 2, which is within the range of normal for people completing the level of course I took. I think my grammar was on the high end but not close to the highest score and my speaking was a bit below average, with listening in between.
had I posted just the gist
Blogs have taken over my life. We weren't "posting" answers, but they were submitted through online forms that I would not then have thought but now do think bore a slight resemblance to comment boxes.
Department of Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Barbie Liberation Organization. For those who don't feel like watching, here's the story, here's a Guardian article through which I just found out that the BLO became the Yes Men.
I tried a couple and was generally underwhelmed
I thought I knew pretty much what the mashups were going to be like, but I was still slightly shocked/sickened by several girl audio + male video combos. What insipidness girls are being prompted to aspire to.
I don't know of any research on the specific issue you raise, of people who
become sufficiently immersed in a second language that their native language proficiency atrophies, but there probably is some.
This is a case where the facile "on the veldt" explanation probably holds water: it's a lot easier for language to be transmitted intergenerationally if the children are better equipped learn to understand what the adults are jabbering about than vice versa. The atrophy of language acquisition skill is adaptative.
I'm not sure how easy it always is to assess (informally) other people's language competence.
My wife learned English in her late teens, and had only been speaking English at all for about 4 years when we met. She has a much larger formal/educated English vocabulary than a lot of native speakers, and rarely makes mistakes in spoken English. So on one level, her competence is near-native. She certainly has a bigger formal/academic vocabulary in English than she does in her native language. On the other hand, she doesn't handle accents as well as a native speaker would [particularly important with British English], and there are mistakes she'd occasionally make in formal written prose that would betray the fact that she's not a native speaker. Her formal written English is still better than a lot of native English speakers I've taught, but I think you can still pick up on certain things that identify it as non-native.
I think that's common, even among people we informally describe as having 'native speaker' competence. Accents are the other give away. It's rare to speak without an identifiable foreign accent if you learn a language as an adult or after one's mid-teens.
Which reminds me of a story about Oswald Hanfling, who apparently once asked Elizabeth Anscombe why Wittgenstein wrote in German, considering that he'd spent decades in the UK, and did all his teaching and research here. From wiki:
He once commented to Elizabeth Anscombe that he found it strange that Wittgenstein had continued to write in German throughout his life. Anscombe; who must have assumed that Hanfling was English, replied that only someone who wasn't able to read Wittgenstein in German could have made that remark.
Anscombe not realising that Hanfling _was_ German (and had come to the UK on the Kindertransport).
What insipidness girls are being prompted to aspire to.
And boys are being encouraged to be vicious, and destructive. That whole thing is a testimony to how messed up it is to segregate and commodify human capacities in separate gender boxes -- look kids, friendship, nurturing, and connection is pink and fluffy and ineffectual, and activity and self-assertion is destructive and murderous!
I know the boys' gendering thing is also destructive, but the male-directed audio didn't strike me as quite so terrible. (I do realize this is a bias as well.) Hearing the aggressive audio over the girl commercials, I was reacting something along the lines of Yeah, you go! Smash them with that sparkly thing! Dominate with that weird pink robo pet!
Dominate with that weird pink robo pet!
Dare you to google that phrase and see what comes up.
27: I tried that. Disappointing results.
the male-directed audio didn't strike me as quite so terrible
I get to live with both. However, my two little ones play with each other all the time, and so both of them are entirely fluent in each voice. The volume level and inchoate noise of explodocentric play is vastly more annoying than the saccharine pony-combing. Seriously, not even close.
27: I tried that. Disappointing results.
So if anyone wants to stake out the pink robopet slash fiction genre for themselves, the niche is still open.
26: I think the culture in general valorizes aggression and dominance in ways that conceal how bad the message in the boy ads is (to be honest, I think there is a certain strain of pop feminism that contributes to this). The girl ads are gendered in a way that is irritatingly puffy, pink, and ineffectual but many of the actual values -- cooperate with your friends, take care of and nurture other living things, express love -- are very life-affirming values that will actually make you a happier and healthier person in later life. The highly aggressive male messages can actually get you killed or in jail if they are not properly moderated by other influences -- and for many males, they do.
My sociolinguist friend says that there are certain aspects of the Philadelphia accent which kids don't learn if they move there after age 3.
I wonder where the tipping point is for having an accent. A friend of mine moved to the U.S. from Russia when he was 12, and he speaks perfect English that I'm pretty sure most people would say is unaccented. (I think? Maybe Tweety will disagree and say that he does in fact have an accent.) Yet there's something about the timbre of his voice that is a giveaway; I've since met men whose voices reminded me of my friend, and have freaked them out by asking if Russian is their first language. (Freaked them out by being right, when they thought of themselves as unaccented.)
34: Very dependent on the individual, I'd guess. This is my kids, but what I'm saying is secondhand because I can't judge their Spanish: both had a Spanish-speaking babysitter from infancy (we hired her when Sally was nine months) and spent a lot of time around other adults speaking Spanish before elementary school, both went to the same dual-language school. Sally, I'm told, sounds native, or at least as native as other American Latina kids who grew up in Spanish-speaking households; Newt, on the other hand, while he's reading and writing above grade-level and is conversationally fluent, sounds like an Anglo kid who learned the language well. She's just got a different level of mimicry skills than he does.
I do think it's under-discussed in UMC circles how destructive our boy-culture is. The sacred adolescent-boy-virtue of being lazy and incurious drives me up a fucking wall.
And how constricted male friendships are. In Germany I have many times observed pairs of male friends and marveled at how openly they like each other.
Not that American men never have expressive friendships with other men. I don't mean that.
But being lazy and curious is a real virtue, right?
Is it really that bad? I dunno, my sense of boys is my ten-year-old and his friends, but they seem energetic, interested in things, and fond of each other. On the other hand, Newt's hopelessly strange (given his family, there wasn't much of another option) and so maybe he's just out of step.
The sacred adolescent-boy-virtue of being lazy and incurious
And violent, don't forget violent.
I agree that people who are sensitive to gender issues spend a lot more time worrying about disempowering pink girl toys than they do about possible problems with all those camouflage army toys. I think a big reason for that is that once you start criticizing the militarization of culture, you have moved from being a concerned parent to being a full-blown hippy. Before you know it, you're in "William Wants a Doll" territory.
I think it's a middle-third of academic performance problem. (I was talking with high school teachers over the weekend and absorbed some of their frustration.)
It's probably not something that's gotten worse over time, but performance by girls keeps rising, making the contrast more pronounced.
Sally's crowd includes a bunch of boys too, and they also don't seem to fit the stereotype. Again, we're talking a bunch of ukulele-playing/Aristotle-reading weirdos, but they're out there.
I'm not really sure what I'm saying here about boy-culture: it's not that I don't recognize the image you're talking about, and obviously there are going to be deviants from any cultural norm. But there doesn't seem to be much penalty from deviating from this one, and I'm not sure how strong it is.
As much as I liked war toys growing up, and still feel their lasting effects (knife collection woot!), I sure wish people had A) bought me more LEGOs, and B) Encouraged me to husband my LEGOs wisely.
I think boy culture was a bit different back in the day, however. Certainly we were into GI Joes or Transformers or Matchbox Cars or whatever else was being hyped, but the pernicious influence of video games was something we escaped to a large degree, since we weren't raised from infancy around them. And of course there was more freedom to go outside and do stuff away from adults & TV, as has been previously discussed. Do boys even still play with fire?
44: Using Newt and Sally's friends as counter-evidence is the October Baby of academic performance among boys.
I didn't feel any pressure to play with any particular toys. The pressure to not work hard at school or participate during class was always there, though. Eventually I decided that I was going to have to be the one who participated in class since I was the best qualified to do it, but it was hard.
I rewatched "Superbad" on a plane recently. Afterwards I was trying to think of other films whose main theme is close male adolescent friendship, and mostly failing.
48: That one with the kids getting the super powers from a few months ago was totally about adolescent male friendships.
I only rarely deal with undergraduates, and when I have I've encountered a pretty even distribution of ability/work ethic between girls and boys (is it OK to call undergraduates by those terms?). But then I'm dealing with an odd self-selecting group that goes out of their way to get involved in research.
Is the "boy problem", for lack of a better term, at the undergraduate level as bad as it sounds recently?
When I think back to my college days around 1990, the distribution of sexes between slackers, getting by-ers, earnest strivers and natural geniuses was about even. From what I've been hearing, male students have been dropping out of the earnest striver category and flocking to the slacker camp, and this is apparently happening across the whole range of low, middling and elite institutions.
From those who teach undergrads regularly, is it really as pervasive as all that?
Stand By Me? (I haven't seen Superbad, so I'm not sure I know what the standard is.)
From those who teach undergrads regularly, is it really as pervasive as all that?
The gender gap in slacking in my classes is outrageous. I'm convinced that my teaching style exacerbates the problem, though. I haven't figured out exactly what that means I should do differently.
re: 48
Gregory's Girl? I know there's a romance angle, but it's as much about male friendship.
Ones we thought of include "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (which really is about Cameron himself, rather than about their relationship), "The Breakfast Club" (kinda complicated), and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (close male friendships is definitely a major theme, but the take on it is pretty depressing, and really the guys are pretty secondary to Stacy).
re: 54
Good one.
Breaking Away, also.
The gender gap in slacking in my classes is outrageous.
Don't worry. All those slacker boys will still get better jobs than all the Hermiones, Lisas and Willows in your classes.
I don't know about that. World-destroying witch is a pretty badass job.
Bill & Ted! With the immortal moment when Bill thinks Ted has been killed, and then they see each other, rush into an embrace, and then immediately back away and call each other "Fag".
Wayne's World, though "adolescent" is technically debatable. Still, they're clearly mentally adolescent.
59: Well if you get to say that, then I get to mention Kids.
55-56:Hey, the subtopic was "adolescent," pretty soon somebody will be mentioning Band of Brothers.
I define "adolescent" as early teens, incidentally. We have the words "teenagers" and "young adults"
The Japanese have a whole subgenre of
Boy Love movies.
Nakadai and Mifune are very fond of each other in Sanjuro, till Tosh cuts Tats' heart right out.
60: This is another point to consider: Since, for non-R or NC-17 rated movies, adolescent males are the universal target audience, then in a sense all contemporary Hollywood cinema is about boys, their relationships, desires and anxieties.
ooops, 62 may create a traffic spike.
63 -- I hear that Titanic was for 15 year old girls. http://jezebel.com/5898432/i-re+watched-titanic-so-you-dont-have-to-youre-welcome
The recap in 66 is awesome, btw.
Of course 63 is true if you read it broadly enough, but "desires and anxieties" is doing a lot of work there. Furthermore, you've broadened from "relationships with each other" to "relationships" more generally.
Clearly, UPETGI(9) doesn't watch enough teen movies aimed at dumb adolescent boys. Most of the teen bro comedies focus at least a little on adolescent male friendships -- the Van Wilder series, Road Trip, Project X are just three examples that come immediately to mind.
I actually think the de-valorization of male friendship is more of a later life problem than a teenage problem; the assumption is that a group of males is going to be immature and disgusting, which is fine when you're 16 but not cool when you're 36. Manouvering to get a group of guy friends together this summer has really brought home this problem.
Let's not forget Red Dawn, of course.
For example, relationships between boys/young men and their fathers (or father figures) are much much more common than movies about the relationship between two boys.
As evidence of rareness of movies about relationships between adolescent males (despite the fact that big hollywood movies are aimed at boys), I suggest that there are none in the top 100 films from either 2010 or 2011. I'm probably wrong because I haven't seen them all (Super 8?), but I still don't think there are many. (X-Men: First Class is close. But they're not adolescents, and really it's about the positions they stand for rather than their relationship.)
There are lots of movies that star guys doing stuff together. But their relationship is not typically a major theme of the movie.
72.2 -- I don't think that's right if you go down the list, but also note that in those years the "teen movie" as traditionally defined essentially vanished (swallowed up entirely by action or Harry Potter/Twighlight tentpoles). Not a lot of movies that look at adolescents period. That's changed with the 2012 slate.
72: I'm probably wrong because I haven't seen them all
Scanning the lists of top 100 in box office receipts (I assume that is what you meant) I see that I am no longer effrectively participating in popular culture. I had seen 3 of the 2010s and precisely 1 of the 2011s (which happened to be one I thought was primarily about male friendship but adult not adolescent, Horrible Bosses).
51: I love Stand by Me for the very reason that it's about adolescent male friendships among boys trying to navigate emotional (and some physical) danger. I think it really captures something about the boyz-to-men moment.
Ok, Beavis.
I just thought that if we had Bill & Ted and Wayne & Garth, we should finish the set.
I always liked how with each iteration of the theme, the boys got stupider and stupider. If the trend had continued, we would have had a buddy comedy about dogs licking themselves.
Depictions of male friendship as necessarily cemented by shared participation in violence don't count.