Moonbox
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Posts posted by Moonbox
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French has no rules, as far as I've been able to determine. Or, rather, for every rule there are dozens, if not scores of exceptions.
Okay saying French has no rules is just silly. As for exceptions, every language has them, but English has far more.
It has more tenses, and the grammar is far from intuitive, in fact, it's largely opposite to English grammar. You don't say the blue sky, as in English. You say the sky blue.
No offense intended, but I'm assuming you haven't done a lot of schooling in other languages. I only say that because it's very common for people who haven't to make comparisons like the one above. Blue sky vs Ciel bleu doesn't mean the languages are opposite. I eat a lot is Je mange beaucoup and has the exact same sentence structure in English and French.
As for words that are similar, French has words which are spelled exactly the same, but have different meanings sometimes, but not always based on the accents. Serviette, for example, could be a towel or a briefcase.
French has some too yes, but the differences are almost always contextual rather than completely different meanings. Feuille is a leaf, but it's also a sheet of paper (leaf of paper). Voler is fly, but it's also steal (fly away with your stuff). Devoir means "to have to" but it can also mean your homework, or duty. You get the picture. There are also all sorts of examples of various verb conjugations that end up being other words. Tu bois (you drink) and bois (wood). Again, however, context eliminates the confusion.
The verbs and verb conjunctions change much more as well, depending on the subject (I, you, he, she, they).
This is true, but it's consistent and eventually makes pretty good sense. English, however, often doesn't. Why do we say: I come, you come, he comes, we come, they come. Those sorts of things, which English is full of, are so confusing, and so inherently illogical to a non-native speaker that they'll likely struggle with it for years.
In any event, it's not easy for English speaking adults to learn. I can attest to that personally, and the number of people we send away for full-time language training who fail the tests after a year is also quite strong evidence.
Hey no argument. It's difficult for ANY adult to learn ANY other language. That's why children at school get language training. Their minds are more malleable and don't yet have any concept of how things "should be". That's not really the argument. The argument is that for someone with no English or French background, English would be the harder language of the two. Both would certainly be a struggle, because learning a new language as an adult almost always is, but English more so.
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For whom? Certain languages are quite easy to learn for the native speakers of certain other languages because of similarities. Others, not so much.
And one person here finding it easier to pick up as a child is essentially meaningless.
English is considered a very difficult language to learn for the vast majority of backgrounds. For someone with perhaps a French or German background, that might not be the case, because English shares common characteristics with both (English is almost a French/German hybrid). Other than that people from around the world generally find English to be very difficult. French is FAR more structured, has a tighter vocabulary and pronunciations are way more intuitive. In English, there are all sorts of strange little exceptions that need to be memorized, an ENORMOUS vocabulary with a plethora of words meaning almost the exact but only suitable in certain context (I don't run very good, I run very well, which is also where I get my water from) and these are things that French generally manages to avoid.
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Well, I've elsewhere expressed some agreement with you about Quebec.
But I'm talking about individual Francophones behaving like rude morons.
I doubt they have the market cornered in that particular realm.
Haha no. You're right.
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Please. I live in a (actually, the) truly bilingual region, and the Francophones simply do not behave this way. I've known them, worked with them (married them, even!
)all my life. I don't know how this Anglo predisposition for viewing the French as a bunch of entitled jerks came from; in my experience, it's flatly untrue.
It's their long tradition of 'gimme' politics. In a province with some of the largest natural resource reserves, huge hydro power surpluses and large urban centres, Quebec has perennially still managed to be a have-not province and siphon billions away from the national purse.
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I've taken French. Have you? Any number of French teachers I've encountered have said that French is more complex to learn than English.
Argus man, I'm sorry, but that's complete BS. Growing up as a child, I was in French Immersion, and I learned English and French grammar at concurrently. I hate to say it, but despite English being my first language, I found French to be far more intuitive to write and conjugate. The verb conjugations are no harder in French than they are in English. Realistically, it's probably more efficient. In English I'd say, "I used to run." In French I'd say, "Je courais". Adding that extra, pointless little "used to" is not intuitive at all, although you might think so being a native English speaker.
Masucline and Feminine verbs in French have far more pronunciation differences, and then you have the various accents (the written ones).The accents are a non-factor. All they do is make it more clear how you're supposed to pronounce something. As for the masculine and feminine part, you have something there. It's REALLY not hard to learn, but it's definitely not the most efficient way of doing things. That said, it's simply a matter of memorization and practice, and it's a LOT easier to learn than all of the rules and exceptions we have in terms of spelling, pronunciations and meanings. Then we get to our vocabulary and...well...that's a whole other story.
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He'll win the leadership bid for sure. I know next to nothing about his politics though. Maybe he's more responsible than his father. That would be nice. I'd like an alternative to Harper croneyism.
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However, French media in this country largely sucked up until the last 10 years. I bet the only French artist most anglophones can name is Roch Voisine. However, today there are some fantastic francophone artists like Cœur de Pirate, whose music could easily be played alongside any contemporary music like Adele on an anglophone station. In fact, she makes an appearance on Bedouin Soundclash's newest album singing in English, albeit with a thick accent.
French media is still bad, particularly the Quebecquois stuff. Television is just aweful, and they almost all watch the English stuff themselves, both here and in Europe. For music, there's a smattering of reasonably talented artists, but most of the stuff that actually finds itself outside of francaphone borders is just electronica trash and sex-appeal girl-pop.
Personally, I would love to find more good French music to listen to. I love the language (real French not the butchered Quebec-slang) but it's not easy to find at all.
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why are you here commenting on it if it doesn't matter?...apparently it does matter, polls shape party direction...
Three years from an election? Only very, very vaguely.
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It's kind of funny. Several years ago, polling was indicating that the GREEN party was the fore-runner leading up to the next election in Guelph. IRC Guelph was set to have a bi-election and the Green party was super pumped about getting their first seat. Harper called the snap election that year so the bi-election never happened.
At any rate, it was interesting to see what happened in the election results. My friends and I went to one of the larger local bars to have a few drinks that night, and the Green Party staff and candidate had booked the entire lower level for their 'celebration'. Maybe I'm a terrible person, but there was something entertaining about watching what was a loud, ecstatic crowd at the beginning of the night turn into an utterly silent and dejected one. How on earth did they go from easily leading the polls prior to the election to a distant FOURTH place in actual results???
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Why are we debating polls 3 years from an election?
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Why do we have democracy if the electorate is stupid ? I think that it's possible to create areas of discussion (publics) that can evaluate things at a more detailed level.
It's possible, but nobody would go to these discussions except for the fringes. The tools for further participation by the electorate are already there. The interest, however, isn't. The majority of people are far too busy with important things like Grey's Anatomy to bother.
As to why should we have Democracy? Well why not? Just because people are stupid and ignorant doesn't mean they don't want to have the choice to make stupid and ignorant decisions. Once in awhile someone smart and benevolent comes around and is able to get them on his/her side too!
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It's all managed politically, and it assumes knows the electorate isn't intelligent enough to assess the choices before us.
Fixed it for ya
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He points to a number of things Paul Martin did that was against the general direction of other developed nations. In fact, he paints Martin as a visionary and quite possibly the most underrated Prime Minister in our history.
Whatever good Paul Martin did was more a result of his time as Finance Minister than anything else. He and Chretien took a period of uninterrupted prosperity and, to their credit, cut services instead of spending and used the extra tax revenue to pay down our bloated debt. They also thankfully helped the banks from merging and maintained stricter mortgage rules, which saved us the fiasco that most other countries found themselves in. I'm completely baffled, however, why someone would call this 'socialism'.
The whole capitalist vs socialist or liberal vs conservative dichotomy arguments are idiot traps that people should really stay clear of. A good idea is a good idea and it's the same whether you want to call yourself a conservative or a liberal. The Bush administration, for example, wasn't Conservative at all, but people were calling them neo-cons and all sorts of stupid shit like that just to dumb the debate down with their rhetoric and ignorance. Lowering taxes and spending too much is just plain dumb, not conservative.
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But Waldo Initiated the goal posts from the Korean War.
I'm not following the whole argument because it's probably become the most prolonged and boring head to head this forum has ever seen, but it seemed like waldo was merely trying to point out how very little we've used our aircraft over the last bunch of decades and how (in hindsight mind you) the expense hasn't really seemed worth it a lot of the time.
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Okay move the goalposts from 1962 on. I don't think the Korean War or the Can. Sabre should really be part of the discussion, otherwise we might as well bring WW2 into the argument.
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It's not that it has been bad for Canada as a whole. The problem is that it's uneven development that relies on a commodity. If the bottom falls out of oil, all of that time ignoring the other sectors of our economy is going to come back and bite us in the ass. In other words, we'll be screwed.
Publication here: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.irpp.org/pubs/IRPPstudy/IRPP_Study_no30.pdf&pli=1
New article here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/06/13/oecd-canada-outlook.html
Dutch disease is just one booming industry increasing the value of the dollar and making it harder for other industries to compete. The oil industry is booming. NOBODY can deny that this is making our dollar go up and making it more expensive for foreigners to buy Canadian manufactured goods.
None of these articles, however, suggest that the oil industry is hurting the Canadian economy in general, but rather that the Canadian economy isn't really fully taking advantage of it. Companies need to take advantage of the favorable exchange rates to purchase equipment and materials to make equipment. The government needs to take the extra tax revenue and invest it in productive infrastructure and making sure the workforce gets the training it needs.
Mulcair, on the other hand, seems intent on penalizing the oil industry instead of nurturing it and on squandering what we should be investing on things like EI increases and Pension benefits (ie things that provide NO net return to the economy). The UK did exactly this when they had their offshore oil boom, and it didn't turn out very well for them. This is why I'll never vote for the Mulcair, despite my dislike of Harper.
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I was shocked to see that Argus was the author of this thread. He normally doesn't seem to get involved with this sort of silliness. Maybe the thread was just a gag on his part. I'm not sure. It does kind of seem like a dumb thing to get annoyed about though. We're Canada. We're not the Dominion of Canada. I owe zero allegience to the Queen (realistically) or to Great Britain and I don't want to think of Canada as anyone's dominion but our own.
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Odd. Economists around the world and OPEC supported his statements about Dutch Disease,
Sources please. I'm not so sure about that.
There's no denying that the oil revenue has appreciated the value of the dollar, which does make exporting more difficult, but are these economists saying that the oil industry has been bad for Canada as a whole? I'm REALLY REALLY REALLY DOUBTING it.
The increased dollar is actually GOOD for Canada in a lot of ways. The fact that Ontario's manufacturing industry has relied on a currency advantage to compete is pretty unhealthy and has been for some time. A stronger dollar will make it much cheaper for them to purchase the equipment needed to modernize their infrastructure and make them ACTUALLY competitive, rather than artificially through currency exchange.
Mulcair's rhetoric on Dutch disease strikes me as an example of someone who knows just enough about economics to sound stupid about it.
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And yet little of what Mulcair is saying strays to far from the PCs of Alberta,. He is taking positions they have held in the past.
Well refining oil in Canada is something that should have started a long time ago. It's common sense I think and at least Mulcair has it in regards to this. I'm not sure how close to the Alberta PC's aside from that, but we'll see. If he wants a chance federally he really needs to stop saying things like Alberta oil exports hurts TROC's economy, because he's just going to get into a pissing match with the Alberta premier. For Mulcair to stand even a reasonable chance out west he's going to have to abandon a lot of uncle Jack's policies and move way closer to the middle, but we'll see what happens.
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I can't quite come up with the word for what Topaz is using... let's think on that for a while....
For some reason the words, "Desperate political hack" come to mind for me....
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There's a lot of trolling in this thread. It should die.
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Try and follow the thread and pick things up in context. waldo was referring to Northrop potentially offering updated Global Hawks to patrol the Canadian north. Are they not drones?
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China isn't likely to support terrorist attacks against the West. We don't need an embassy in Iran. We don't do any business with them and they're a rogue state with nothing but violent rhetoric and fanaticism to offer us. Regardless, most Iranians in Canada want nothing to do with the government back home. They came here for a reason.
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No, to be really clear, "drones" can engage and destroy targets. Just ask Omar Khadr.
The Global Hawk? The drone we're talking about?
Quebec Images and Realities
in Provincial Politics in Canada
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Whatever you're trying to say August, I couldn't understand. Your point went over my head I guess.