@ Blackkitty

I fail at life – maybe that helps a little ;)

Well... if that keeps you from going to France in the near future maybe it does have a good side to it...

Oh, that velvet cheesecake looks good! Now I'd like to have a slice...

But kiddy table is for the sober drivers only!!! You've got those little pretzels and peanuts at the bar...

@ZuljinRaynor
I know some japanese friends who could pronounce "R" and "L" correctly when speaking english. But they still said that they couldn't really distinguish between "R" and "L". That's kind of strange to me.

@Galich
Our people say our language, Khmer, is a language without tones. I used to agree with that too until I met two korean students telling me how hard it was for them to learn our tones. I was really surprised back then about the tones thing, but yeah, what they said was right, our language does have them (the Chinese's 3rd tone, and the Vietnamese's 6th tone).

If you only speak our language, you can't pronounce Chinese tones correctly. However, most of our people do speak Chinese very well because they are Chinese related.

If you are used to languages with no space between words, you may not face any difficulty to learn our reading/writing. If you aren't, It really is hard as even if you have a dictionary, you wouldn't know what word you're trying to find it's translation/definition (e.g. we go to school -> wegotoschool, you may think "weg" is a word, or "wegot" is a word, etc.) As for listening, it's kinda hard because people don't really speak with the correct pronunciations. And for speaking, you have to use the correct level of politeness to whom you are talking to. We have around 10 words which means "I", ~10 words which means "you", ~10 words which mean "eat", ~10 words which mean "sleep", etc. Because people you talk to can be your parents, you lover, people who are older than you, people who are younger than you, same age, friends, king families, monks, people you really want to be rude to (when you have gone mad or some sort. You don't need to curse/dis them since using the right word can hurt them badly already.), animal too, etc. Using wrong words results in being ignorant/rude/too polite/weird/entitled much/whatnot. We also have male/female honorifics, and we have male "yes", and female "yes" too. :D

Our language is not the only one that use that kind of rule/logic, there are other languages out there that apply this logic as well.

@Blackkitty
You are more than welcome to come to my country, and when you would be back to your own country, please help take all of those cute lizards with you. :D

Your opinion is wrong, tiramisu is the best type of cake. We'll meet in the court.

Didn't know Tiramisu was a cake but if it is a cake, it is indeed the best cake there is.

@Galich no need to meet in court, I'm perfectly fine with tiramisu cake being the best - that means more cheesecake for me nom nom *nom mow xD
*@oliver** are they that scary to you? xD I was thinking of taking the rain actually... btw as a person who speaks a slav language, yours looks like to be a challenge xD
@Anon99 that doesn't help at all, it makes me sad hearing it..
well, what to say.. I'm little bit angry at myself, probably a bit cake would soothe my mind.
there you go, your piece

I think it's quite fair to call a tiramisu a layer cake. It's a bit atypical since it's made from ladyfingers which have a slightly different texture from most cake (like, a ladyfinger's denser than a lot of what we call cake, but there are definitely kinds of cake that are even denser than that). Like, it's outside the norm of cakes but I have no issue of calling it one.

@muteKi That's pretty much my opinion on the topic. While not a cake per se, I still take it as one lock, stock and barrel.

@Blackkity You speak Bulgarian, right? Can ya explain that language a bit? I know nothing about Southern Slavic languages.

@oliver And when you think that your mother tongue is really hard.. That sounds really complicated, but isn't most of dificulties just about what kind of words you to others to show respect? Sorry if I seem ignorant, I just don't know Khmer :V

Well.. I have heard quite a few Japanese people speaking Polish.. quite a unique experience. The easiest to explain by saying: Slav language + Japanese accent like the one in English + generic foreigner accent in Polish = a Japanese person speaking Polish.

Well, all of Slavic languages have the so-called "cases", like German and Latin having "Akkusativ" (Accussative in Latin). There's seven in Polish, one less than in Russian. The problem's the fact that it's really inconsistent.

On a side note, not nice things happening in Europe. My heart goes to everyone from Turkey and France who've lost their loved once in those tough times of turmoil.

Just sing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzkoKDCcQqs

@ Blackkitty

Aww... it's nothing that can't be fixed with a tasty piece of cake ;)
Thank you! That one looks yummy indeed.... (^___^)b

I'll share my donut with you:

@ Galich

Getting a little sentimental there after all...? O_o
Wasn't expecting that...

@Anon99 I'm taking it that you're referring to my mention of what's happening in Europe right now, and will try to respond to that assuming that I'm right (it may be just an illogical train of thought of a man who's just woken up from a nap and didn't have his next cup of coffee yet, in which case I'll just remove this post).

This is just getting ridiculous. Referring here to two horrible things that are happening right now: the accident in Nice (almost 100 deaths), and the coup in Turkey (at least 200 dead, 1500 detained, talks of bringing back the death penalty are being held). Having followed both of situations live (I have News TV turned on 24/7 at my house, literally), it's horrible how indifferent some people are to the suffering:

• Carrying only about victims from their own countries - for fuck's sake, they were all human beings, doesn't matter if they were from France, Germany, Italy or Libya; catholic, atheists, Muslim or Buddhist.

• Politicians using those horrible situations to further their agendas: "Well, that's what happens when you let everyone get to your country" - the only reaction of Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the attacks in France. Putting politics aside, using human suffering just to further your own goal is vile. There's no way around that. It's not about prevention of such accidents, it's just to explain the questionable politics of our government.

• Forgetting that the most of participants of things like coups are working not to destroy someone's careers, but to help their country in the way the think is the best. Doesn't matter if you're a leftie or a rightie politician, think that your government should be coup’d out of the power, it's still carrying deeply for the country itself. That's basic bloody logic and human decency. Feel free to bash the organizers of things like that, but ordinary people don't deserve bullets in their heads for believing in something different.

Referring to what I've said before, yes, I still do believe that we're still mere mortals, and that one shouldn't get too attached to death and people surrounding us. But still, any life is ridiculously precious, and we should NOT be indifferent to suffering and death around us. There is nothing natural or normal about people dying in such accidents, nada. We still should show basic human decency, empathy and try to work our damn hardest so accidents like that will be less destructive in the future.

Just to sum this all up, I'll quote Plautus, one of the play writers of the Roman Republic. Homo homini lupus, or in English "A man is a wolf to another man". It's not that humans are complete bastards, it's just the fact that we act in the worst way possible only to our own kind due to silly indifferences and lack of perspective regarding the entire world.

I've tried my darn hardest not to sound too political here, dunno if I've succedeed.
Apologizes if it sounds like I'm trying to attack someone. It's just me being really sour over how people tend to act at times.

Anyway everyone, how's your weekend? Went to a book shop, they had books 50% off, bought 8 of those >.> I will be broke for the next few weeks.

last edited at Jul 16, 2016 11:03AM

Galich posted:

Well, Polish is one of those languages that are absolutely impossible to be pronounced 100% correctly unless you lived here your entire life. We have lots of letters that are unique to our alphabet (ę, ó, ą, ś, ł, ż, ź, ć, ń) and a few letter collocations that you read differently from what you'd normalny pronounce them as. I won't get into details since English doesn't have equivalents for most of those, like "cz", "dz", "dź" etc.

That is not true. Maybe you won't sound like native, but foreigns can learn polish just fine (how easy it is depends on how much their native language has sounds but still). Not long ago I was under the impression because we have all those unique letters, we have a lot unique sounds that are hard to learn for other, but as I was talking with person from Brazil, it turned out they basically have all of our sounds (except for y) but they just write them down differently. For a english speaker it might be more difficult as they indeed don't have as much sounds, but then again they do have some. "Cz" is like in charge and "sz" is like in show. About collocations, everyone has them and to everyone they would look weird and their pronouncing would sounds unintuitive at first glance, because we don't have 1 unified way to spell things out (we kinda do, but no one uses it on daily basic). Really, judging how hard language is to learn looking at how they write stuff down is like judging book by its cover.

Galich posted:

• Politicians using those horrible situations to further their agendas: "Well, that's what happens when you let everyone get to your country" - the only reaction of Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the attacks in France.

Please ignore our politicians. They have no clue how to do their job properly.

last edited at Jul 16, 2016 10:39AM

From what I'm seeing, the Nice incident wasn't terrorism at all, but more akin to "going postal". Basically suicide by way of taking as many random people as possible with you, but not in service of any group or ideology. All accounts say that he wasn't religious, had no ties to terrorist groups, and was instead depressed and aggressive following his wife leaving him and ongoing financial troubles.

Doesn't stop the President of France standing up and blaming Islam for it though.

From what I gather, Nice is very much a gathering place for people of the whole region, so you commonly get people from as far away as Palestine. It's part of the character of the place, and I am sure the locals aren't really on board with the idea of excluding people from other places.

Galich posted:

Well, Polish is one of those languages that are absolutely impossible to be pronounced 100% correctly unless you lived here your entire life. We have lots of letters that are unique to our alphabet (ę, ó, ą, ś, ł, ż, ź, ć, ń) and a few letter collocations that you read differently from what you'd normalny pronounce them as. I won't get into details since English doesn't have equivalents for most of those, like "cz", "dz", "dź" etc.

That is not true. Maybe you won't sound like native, but foreigns can learn polish just fine (how easy it is depends on how much their native language has sounds but still). Not long ago I was under the impression because we have all those unique letters, we have a lot unique sounds that are hard to learn for other, but as I was talking with person from Brazil, it turned out they basically have all of our sounds (except for y) but they just write them down differently. For a english speaker it might be more difficult as they indeed don't have as much sounds, but then again they do have some. "Cz" is like in charge and "sz" is like in show. About collocations, everyone has them and to everyone they would look weird and their pronouncing would sounds unintuitive at first glance, because we don't have 1 unified way to spell things out (we kinda do, but no one uses it on daily basic). Really, judging how hard language is to learn looking at how they write stuff down is like judging book by its cover.

@Nevri Well.. alright, I've worded that paragraph a bit awkwardly. What I meant is, a person living in here even for more than 30 years will never sound fully like a native. Doesn't matter if you're English, Russian or Czech (And I've met plenty of well assimilated people in here from various Slav countries). Sure, after spending many years in the country, they can pronounce our language just fine, but even the Czech will have hard time pronouncing certain words. There's no way around that.

Not gonna agree on the reading part. Ease of pronounciation of a written text is a vital part of how hard certain language is. Doesn't matter if other language have similar sounds, it's all about how those letters are put together next to each other/how long they are etc.

I also don't see how we don't have a single unified way of spelling things, unless you want to piss off a language teacher. Grammar and writing are not subjective, they're objective, and it's still unacceptable to make typos. It's like saying that since in English people write "your" instead of "you're" there's not a unified way of writing words.

Galich posted:

• Politicians using those horrible situations to further their agendas: "Well, that's what happens when you let everyone get to your country" - the only reaction of Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the attacks in France.

Please ignore our politicians. They have no clue how to do their job properly.

I don't see how I should ignore them. If any country thinks that this sort of speeches and comments are on an acceptable level of a government official, then it sums up how screwed up as species we are.

Anyway everyone, how's your weekend? Went to a book shop, they had books 50% off, bought 8 of those >.> I will be broke for the next few weeks.

I can finally rest for a bit after a long week :> just listening to music lol.

@Nezchan Well, I've heard something different, but it might be yesterday's news. I've edited the post to get rid of the word "terrorism". Doesn't change the fact that it was a horrible thing that should've never happened. My apologies for not doing enough of fact checking.

Well, Mr. Hollande's reaction is something I was talking about. Focusing on his own view instead of actually trying to find out the truth, therefore trying to avoid such "accidents" in the future. Sure, it's really hard to stop those situations, but it doesn't change the fact that it's using Islam as a scapegoat. I still believe that his intentions were good, but misblaming something is not a way to go to protect people.

I wasn't reffering to reactions in France, since I haven't been in there for more than 4 years. It's much more of "oh, 3 of our countrymen have died in there! Let's ignore rest of the victims!", a view comon in the rest of European countries,

last edited at Jul 16, 2016 11:02AM

@ Galich

I pretty much share your opinion on this matter.

It's not just those two incidents though. Unfortunately it's been like this for month now here in Europe and all over the world even longer than that. Now terrorism and extremism are everywhere. A lot of people are doing the right thing and unite in those times. But unfortunately there are also many of those that try to answer violence with violence. We see that all over Europe now. Racism is getting worse again. Foreigners and refugees are being attacked openly on a daily basis.
This only adds more fuel to the fire.
No matter the approach, the problems we're currently facing will not be easy to solve.
It will probably go on like this for a while longer.
I'm just hoping that the end of this mess will be at least in a foreseeable distance... and that it will change the world for the better in the end. Because the way things are now, all of the achievements our so called „civilization“ has acquired over many decades seem to slowly vanish into thin air...

I was just surprised to read that statement coming from you. Might have expected a shrug and a comment like: „Was to be expected. A few more dead pigeons on the side of this worlds road“.
Something a little more nihilistic. ;P

@ Nezchan

The way it looks he probably wasn't a religious extremist. But in the end it doesn't really matter.
That's the thing about ISIS. Their purpose is to cause destruction. You don't really have to be a part of their group to be affected. It's just that a lot of (mentally not very stable) people like the way they are doing things and take matters into their own hands now like „I'm gonna go out there too and kill as many as possible because I really like the idea of that!“
Whether they really were in contact with any of those groups or not doesn't seem to matter for our politicians. They just take whatever they can get to push their own agenda.
It really is a downward spiral...

Shooting rampages and killing sprees have always been a part of human society and probably always will be... It's just the number and quality that is really astonishing. It's just overwhelming...

@ Rina

That's the best thing you can do! Music is always the answer! ;)
Enjoy your weekend! (^_^)b

@ Nezchan

The way it looks he probably wasn't a religious extremist. But in the end it doesn't really matter.
That's the thing about ISIS. Their purpose is to cause destruction. You don't really have to be a part of their group to be affected. It's just that a lot of (mentally not very stable) people like the way they are doing things and take matters into their own hands now like „I'm gonna go out there too and kill as many as possible because I really like the idea of that!“

Except there's zero evidence that ISIS was involved at all. It was a guy who was described by many people as not being interested in religion or radicalization or an Islamic state or anything like that. So I'm not sure why you're bringing it up.

The idea of "going postal", which seems to be what he did, goes back a long way, certainly before Daesh existed.

@Anon99 Well, I do believe that there's time to joke about anything, but it's yet to come. Europe is living through times of great turmoil. Actually, scratch that, it's the entire world that needs to catch up on their views and stance towards the things that are unfolding in front of our eyes.

While my views towards death may be considered pessimistic, the situation is much different now. Cases like that can be prevented, so there's a point in being reflective. Refugees, emigrants etc. don't get beaten up due to people dying of accidents and of old age (okay, that is sometimes the case, but it's not that urgent of a problem). People need to understand the entire problem and fight it. Not talking about what's happened in Nice, but about rest of terrorism instead. Fuelling the hatred and fear is not something we can afford to do, we need to have a united stance, be more empathetic towards suffering and try to prevent such accidents.

@Rina Agreed with Anon, listening to music is always the best answer, especially after a tough week. As my friend puts it, "everyone needs to charge up their batteries once per few days".

@ Nezchan

There seems to have been a claim of responsibility coming from ISIS.
They're still skeptical about that one though.

But that's basically the point I was trying to make.
ISIS will use such incidents in their favor.
And a lot of politicians will do the same.
Thus affecting more people in the end... for better or worse... mostly worse, I guess...

last edited at Jul 16, 2016 11:33AM

No point in arguing when we're not fully certain what's fuelled tragedy. Everyone in this thread seems to agree that brainlessly bashing terrorism and religion is not the way to go, and we should find the right caues of this situation and try to prevent such accidents from happening in the future.

Galich posted:

Not gonna agree on the reading part. Ease of pronounciation of a written text is a vital part of how hard certain language is. Doesn't matter if other language have similar sounds, it's all about how those letters are put together next to each other/how long they are etc.

I know that. Said Brazilian cringes when they see words with little to no vowel, because even if they can pronounce separate sounds, they have problem reading them when they are joined in way natural to our language. What I meant is that even if the way stuff is written looks hard at first glance (ie. trząść) it doesn't mean it is necessary hard to read once you know what sounds those letters represent. Just saying that if particular language has a particularly hard and inconvenient way to write stuff down (again depending from whose perspective you look at it) that doesn't automatically that said language is hard to pronounce per se. Take a look at japanese for example. By all means the use of hiragana/katakana/kanji would make anyone thinking this language is impossible to learn, but in fact they have a very basic set of sounds and their grammatical structures etc are very easy and intuitive to use. So once you know how to read their stuff, it is very easy to learn.

I also don't see how we don't have a single unified way of spelling things, unless you want to piss off a language teacher. Grammar and writing are not subjective, they're objective, and it's still unacceptable to make typos. It's like saying that since in English people write "your" instead of "you're" there's not a unified way of writing words.

I meant unified way to spell for everyone as in entire world, all countries, ethnic groups and people in general. We don't that is why every language has it's own way to represent sounds like our special letters. And we have this, which as I said nobody uses on daily basis.

Galich posted:

• Politicians using those horrible situations to further their agendas: "Well, that's what happens when you let everyone get to your country" - the only reaction of Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the attacks in France.

Please ignore our politicians. They have no clue how to do their job properly.

I don't see how I should ignore them. If any country thinks that this sort of speeches and comments are on an acceptable level of a government official, then it sums up how screwed up as species we are.

I don't think anything they do is acceptable at any level. They are not fit for anything related to government a country. They are self-centered assholes that only thinks about money. Majority of people are just to dumb to finally do something about them and stop voting on those same people that already had power and failed to do anything with it over and over again, just because they promise new things that we know they won't ever fulfill cos they never did in the past.

No point in arguing when we're not fully certain what's fuelled tragedy. Everyone in this thread seems to agree that brainlessly bashing terrorism and religion is not the way to go, and we should find the right caues of this situation and try to prevent such accidents from happening in the future.

Meanwhile, many TB away on another internet site, ppl are blaming religion for terrorism for the nth time :/

Glad to see that the people here are not like that though ^ . ^

Back to cake: Guess my favourite :D

You'll never get it >:D

Turns out I was wrong on the refund, it's just a full refund, all £770 back, it was a joke by my aunt that she was taking a 20% commission fee I didn't get because I'm awful on the phone. Well to be fair, that £770 is a lot less valuable than when I put it in there >_>

Oh... that's a tough one... I'd say... Chocolate Cake... but I'm not sure ;)

@ Rina

I think religion is never the problem. It's always the people.
To be more precise: Fanatics are.
They will always try to justify their actions. And using religion for that is just the easiest way for most of them...

last edited at Jul 16, 2016 12:11PM

No!

Wait... that's it D:

However did you figure me out ;~;

@Chocolate -> Black Forest Cake? :p

On another note, I figured out how to use the lists function lol, yay!

@ ChocolateCakeLover

It was the lord who unveiled the truth before me! ^^
That is my honest (fanatic) belief ;P
I had a vision of chocolate cake just now...

(^_-)v