Classmates say Romney was a bully!

[DngrMse]

Not necessarily. As close as I got was in fourth grade. Mid-year we got a new student, Roy, an immigrant from Norway. He spoke English with an accent. One day playing in the yard with friends we were making fun of the way Roy spoke.

After I was called into the house for supper, my mother asked me if I knew what it meant when someone speaks English with an accent.

"No," I replied.

"It means he speaks at least two languages fluently. How many languages do you speak?"

That put things into perspective real fast. I went to the public library and checked out books on learning Spanish and by the time I got to jr high when I could take Spanish as a course I was way ahead of everyone else.

So....according to your mom, everyone from Oklahoma speaks two languages fluently.

[Chachma v'Oz]

I'm sure that's what she was saying.

[Malcolm Wright]

Hell, I'm still an asshole, and proud of it.

If you ever become confused on this subject, please come to me for confirmation.

M.

[Malcolm Wright]

Hey Chach? How's the Chinese coming along?
I'm still learning a few Kanjis per day. Loving it.
I don't have anyone to practice speaking Japanese with these days, sadly.

M.

[DngrMse]

If you ever become confused on this subject, please come to me for confirmation.

M.

You're already listed as a character reference.

[Chachma v'Oz]

Hey Chach? How's the Chinese coming along?
I'm still learning a few Kanjis per day. Loving it.
I don't have anyone to practice speaking Japanese with these days, sadly.

M.

I've hit a block, or a plateau, or something. I've got about 200 characters and terms and am stuck there, having to go over them again and again and still get some of them confused. It's a good thing I'm not taking this as a class or I'd be falling way behind. I doing fine reading the level of Chinese I've learned and understanding what I'm reading without having to translate it into English first mentally, but going from English to Chinese, both in remembering the character construction and the syntax, is where I'm stumbling.

I work on it every day before and/or after breakfast for a half hour to an hour or until I get a headache, then go outside and work in the yard to clear my head. I'm lucky that we have Chinese friends who can speak Mandarin and also answer questions about why a particular expression is constructed in such-and-such a way because the explanation isn't always provided and there are no answers in the back of the book!

I heard the other day that Japanese has several writing systems. That's got to be hard. I'm concentrating on Traditional Chinese rather than Simplified and that's bad enough. I'm going to run into trouble when we go to China if I can't recognize the Simplified forms of characters I know only in Traditional form but, hey, one thing at a time.

Is spoken Japanese intonated like Chinese is? I've heard that it is not. Having to deal with the intonation of each word is harder for me than memorizing the genders of German nouns. I find myself using all sorts of mnemonic devices to help me with both intonation and character construction. And that's just for speaking. I still have a tin ear when it comes to hearing the intonated language spoken.

I'm renting Chinese movies from Netflix and getting some satisfaction from slightly following the little vocabulary I have, hearing it spoken in real life. Man, they talk fast. And, of course, the subtitles translate only the intent of the dialog, not word for word.

So, it's a work in progress. Good thing I'm not facing a deadline. We plan to winter in Thailand again winter after next and may be going to China and back from there with Thai friends, so I hope I'm ready enough to be useful. I really want to be able to read and write functionally well even if no one can understand what I'm trying to say. As long as I can write it out and understand written answers I'll be fine.

[Malcolm Wright]

I've hit a block, or a plateau, or something. I've got about 200 characters and terms and am stuck there, having to go over them again and again and still get some of them confused. It's a good thing I'm not taking this as a class or I'd be falling way behind. I doing fine reading the level of Chinese I've learned and understanding what I'm reading without having to translate it into English first mentally, but going from English to Chinese, both in remembering the character construction and the syntax, is where I'm stumbling.

I hear you - those plateaus are common in learning languages as you probably already know. You'll got beyond it soon enough, although you may never really know why it occurred.

I can also relate to the understanding of what you read, but having difficulty with the character construction. Native Japanese people experience this also! They can read with no problems, but increasingly with the use of computers where they do not need to draw the characters, more and more people are forgetting some of the rarer characters.

I work on it every day before and/or after breakfast for a half hour to an hour or until I get a headache, then go outside and work in the yard to clear my head. I'm lucky that we have Chinese friends who can speak Mandarin and also answer questions about why a particular expression is constructed in such-and-such a way because the explanation isn't always provided and there are no answers in the back of the book!

You are more disciplined than me. I started out doing about an hour per day, learning 5-8 new characters per day, but that quickly became unsustainable, and I reduced it to one or two new characters per day, and 15-20mn review sessions.

I'm hoping this is a sort of plateau for me too, and that I can have another spurt of learning 5+ per day again soon.
Right now I'd say I know about 80 characters well. It is hard to say though because I learned some before I started with my current system so I have no comprehensive list.

I heard the other day that Japanese has several writing systems. That's got to be hard. I'm concentrating on Traditional Chinese rather than Simplified and that's bad enough. I'm going to run into trouble when we go to China if I can't recognize the Simplified forms of characters I know only in Traditional form but, hey, one thing at a time.

Is spoken Japanese intonated like Chinese is? I've heard that it is not. Having to deal with the intonation of each word is harder for me than memorizing the genders of German nouns. I find myself using all sorts of mnemonic devices to help me with both intonation and character construction. And that's just for speaking. I still have a tin ear when it comes to hearing the intonated language spoken.

Yes, 3 writing systems. But no tonality (although some subtleties in pronunciation that are quite challenging).
I think the tonalities you have to deal with in Chinese are more of a challenge than the three Japanese writing systems, to be honest. You can learn hiragana and katakana in 2-3 weeks. It is only Kanji that take years to tame, and decades to master. It is confusing though, because there are so many different ways in which Japanese people use the different systems.

Katakana for instance is meant to be used for words or names of foreign origin. However people will also sometimes use them to spell out Japanese names or words - because they think it is cool to do so. If you think about it, that's horribly confusing for someone who is trying to learn. You read a word in katakana expecting it to be a foreign word, when in fact it is a Japanese one: more likely than not, you won't know what you're reading, or will confuse it for something foreign that it is close to in pronunciation.

Many kanjis are spelled out in kana (characters from the other two systems, hiragana and katakan). For the learner, this is horrible, because there are no spaces in Japanese writing. It becomes really tough to know what is merely a syllable of a kanji, and what is a word in its own right, when you don't have that critical mass of learning to guess the proper breakdown of the characters into words.

But anyway, in summary, you and I are both confronted with the daunting task of Kanji, and although the two other Japanese writing systems do add some complexity, I can't even imagine tonal learning. I've never had to learn a language that has tonality, and I don't even know how I'd go about memorizing things!

I'm renting Chinese movies from Netflix and getting some satisfaction from slightly following the little vocabulary I have, hearing it spoken in real life. Man, they talk fast. And, of course, the subtitles translate only the intent of the dialog, not word for word.

I haven't been brave enough to watch Japanese moves in Japanese yet. Sometimes I see movies in English with Japanese subtitles, and it is nice to recognize a kanji here and there, but that's of limited benefit for learning. The subtitles flash by so fast that it really is just a game of recognizing a kanju here and there.

So, it's a work in progress. Good thing I'm not facing a deadline. We plan to winter in Thailand again winter after next and may be going to China and back from there with Thai friends, so I hope I'm ready enough to be useful. I really want to be able to read and write functionally well even if no one can understand what I'm trying to say. As long as I can write it out and understand written answers I'll be fine.

Well one thing is for certain. You'll be better off than if you had done nothing!

[trgfbv]

Why hasn't Romney either confirmed or denied it?

Sounds to me like he has something to hide.

He says he forgot it. He did it so many times that it was just standard operation procedures for him that each time is indistinguishable from another?

[DamnYankee]

"But it gets worse. Tonight, Christine Lauber, John Lauber’s sister, said that she didn’t know anything about the bullying incident. More importantly, she said that the story had factual inaccuracies. Betsy Lauber, another of John’s sisters, told ABC News, 'The family of John Lauber is releasing a statement saying the portrayal of John is factually incorrect and we are aggrieved that he would be used to further a political agenda. There will be no more comments from the family.' Said Christine, 'If he were alive today, he would be furious [about the story].'"

Another liberal fairy tale unravels.

[garyd]

Romney has said he doesn't even remember the incident. The family of the man says the incident never happened. The man himself is now deceased and so can neither confirm or deny. So essentily the left is reduced to making up shit, as usual. And based on the most recent polling data no one other than the 40% of the country that are registered, idiots, er sorry, Demcrats no one really gives a damn anyway.

[caddis]

What more do you want from him?

Improved reading comprehension skills?
Oh wait, you were asking truthteller, not asking ABOUT truthteller.

My bad

[Archaix]

You're, as usual, missing the point. The point is that for every stupid, petty, childish charge leveled by the Obama Drones, there is a similar story that can be found about their Master. You should be asking them why the hypocrisy.

Obama freely discussing how he 'pushed' a girl out of shame is not the same as Mitt Romney refusing to discuss how he shaved the head of a kid at school and teased somebody for being effeminate. On the other hand, what either of these two did growing up means absolutely nothing to me, and shouldn't to anyone else.

[Chachma v'Oz]

You are more disciplined than me. I started out doing about an hour per day, learning 5-8 new characters per day, but that quickly became unsustainable, and I reduced it to one or two new characters per day, and 15-20mn review sessions. I'm hoping this is a sort of plateau for me too, and that I can have another spurt of learning 5+ per day again soon.

The textbook I'm using has 60 chapters which cover approximately 2500 characters, plus the words that are created by combining characters. Each chapter introduces 10-14 characters. I started out of the gate with a chapter a week for the first month, then slowed, then hit this brick wall.

You read a word in katakana expecting it to be a foreign word, when in fact it is a Japanese one: more likely than not, you won't know what you're reading, or will confuse it for something foreign that it is close to in pronunciation.

I've fallen into a trap like that when reading Chinese signs. I'll recognize a character here and there and try to fill in the blanks, only to realize later in my studies that the characters have multiple meanings and have to be taken in context. It's like a learner of elementary English seeing "tear" or "plant" or "box" or "bow" and with no context think he knows which meaning to assign to the word.

Many kanjis are spelled out in kana (characters from the other two systems, hiragana and katakan). For the learner, this is horrible, because there are no spaces in Japanese writing. It becomes really tough to know what is merely a syllable of a kanji, and what is a word in its own right, when you don't have that critical mass of learning to guess the proper breakdown of the characters into words.

Thai language is like that. It's alphabetic with 44 consonants and 26 diacritical marks used as vowels, but the vowels may precede, or follow, or be written above or below the syllable they amend, and to top it off there are no spaces between words. Theyputagapinastringwherewewouldputacomma toindicateapause. With Thai, you really have to learn how to speak the language in order to later learn to read it or you have no good way of knowing where one word ends and the next one starts.

But anyway, in summary, you and I are both confronted with the daunting task of Kanji, and although the two other Japanese writing systems do add some complexity, I can't even imagine tonal learning. I've never had to learn a language that has tonality, and I don't even know how I'd go about memorizing things!

I make up stories in my head grouping words with the same intonation or placed in expressions to match how they'd be intonated in an equivalent English sentence. There are a number of mnemonic tricks I employ until it finally sinks in.

I imagine it's rather like a child learning to speak. He says things wrong and is corrected, and between the corrections and repeatedly hearing words combined and pronounced only a certain way in different contexts, understands the language enough to start school and then begin to learn why things work that way.

[garyd]

Yeah right Romney not remembering doing something he didn't do and which no one ever witnessed is exactly the same as Obama having, by his own account, pushed a girl out of shameful cowardice.

One leftist liar lies and four more swear to it. I'd say it was amazing but it is far too common place these days to amaze anyone, anymore.

[Malcolm Wright]

I make up stories in my head grouping words with the same intonation or placed in expressions to match how they'd be intonated in an equivalent English sentence. There are a number of mnemonic tricks I employ until it finally sinks in.

Ok, so its like remembering anything else I suppose.
For me, the more poetically absurd the mnemonic device, the better it sticks. I guess because I'm amused by absurdity

Just did my daily revision and found I'd forgotten some characters I was confident with before... Its a struggle...

I'll check on your progress again in a while!

[86Dùde]

unfortunately these things happen in school.

That's because you're Irish! You people like to fight, LOL! They probably poured beer on your lucky charms cereal instead of milk!

[DngrMse]

Yeah right Romney not remembering doing something he didn't do and which no one ever witnessed is exactly the same as Obama having, by his own account, pushed a girl out of shameful cowardice.

One leftist liar lies and four more swear to it. I'd say it was amazing but it is far too common place these days to amaze anyone, anymore.

Hey, and let's not forget Obama's heavy drinking, and enthusiastic drug use! (by his own admission)

Let's instead focus on made up stories about Romney...or some guy named Zimmerman...or anything other than the horrid state of this country.

[Truth Teller]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/us...es-romney.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1506231.html

Some things never change.

The same kid who bullied a kid and cut his hair is now wanting to cut money from the poor, sick, elderly and children.

This lack of empathy in which he had as a youth is still with him. This is why, like so many other Republicans he sees nothing wrong with cutting taxes on the very rich like himself, while throwing the neediest of citizens under the bus.

That "I-can do-anything-I-want-to-anyone" attitude is longstanding. Now he just wants more victims.

If this is the worst they have on Romney, he's sure to win the election.

I mean, seriously? We're going to try to judge the man's character by what he did nearly 50 years ago? It's a joke. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be judged by something I had done in high school. I doubt any of you would either.

What more do you want from him?

It's not what he did 50 years ago,it's what he's doing (or not doing) now that is the problem.

The issue is not the original offense but the cover up, and Romeny is clearly covering up something.

It's amazing that five people can remember it but Romney himself can't.

At 2:08 of this video Romney chuckles four times after being told what happend,Romney clearly thinks it's funny in 2012:



And as the above video shows,while most of Romney's GOP stooges are still standing in line to suck his cock,Michael Steele is one Republican who has the integrity to admit Romney is mishandling this.

My god...you're full of stupid.

You'd say that ,being a bully yourself.

Weren't we all assholes in school to some degree?

1962 isn't the issue,2012 is the issue.

Obama admitted what he did as a kid,he manned up and made amends.

Romney hasn't.

"I don't remember it" ,what bullshit (yet ,he can laugh about it).

If Romney isn't man enough to admit his faults,how can he be a strong leader?

Roney has shown no signs of leadership,he refuses to crticize Rush Limbaugh or Ted Nugent when they go too far,he even refuses to man up to his past.

That's not leadership,that's weakness.

Hell, I'm still an asshole, and proud of it.

I'm not shocked.

He says he forgot it. He did it so many times that it was just standard operation procedures for him that each time is indistinguishable from another?

[Truth Teller]

Improved reading comprehension skills?
Oh wait, you were asking truthteller, not asking ABOUT truthteller.

My bad

A GOPig bully^,I'm shocked.

No ,I'm not really shocked,I'm just being sarcastic.

Yeah right Romney not remembering doing something he didn't do and which no one ever witnessed is exactly the same as Obama having, by his own account, pushed a girl out of shameful cowardice.

Obama confessed to his sin,Romney hasn't confessed to his.

That's the issue,not the sin itself.

One leftist liar lies and four more swear to it.

Actually ,the five are not leftists as 0:36 of this video shows,several of these five are Republicans:



So,you are (again) a liar.

Hey, and let's not forget Obama's heavy drinking, and enthusiastic drug use! (by his own admission)

Obama owned up to it,he doesn't do it now,that shows leadership.

Romney hasn't owned up to his past ,that does not show leadership.

And as a ex-Mormon says on 5:06 of this ^video ,it is also consistant with how many Mormons are raised.

made up stories about Romney...or some guy named Zimmerman

Opinion,not fact.

[Truth Teller]

Mitt Happens: