The characters don't take their meaning or pronunciation in isolation. Once you know a decent number of characters/radicals, you can often work out the meanings of other characters that incorporate them. Sometimes even the pronunciation.

Point missed by you != pointlessness.

This is what I do when my pronunciation fails.

It still impresses the hell out of the locals.

People here who don't know us assume that I'm a Swede and that my wife is Thai. (I'm originally from the US, and Mme Zontar is originally from China.)

What's hilarious is when they try to greet her in Thai, and I'm the one who responds in that language. :)

For some reason, /. ate my —. That was supposed to be "800-900 million"

You've no real need for Trad characters on the mainland unless you're doing historical research, or you want to write in Cantonese (and many Cantonese speakers can't actually write it); otherwise, they are used in only in Taiwan/Macau/HK and by some overseas Chinese communities. Singapore and Malaysia both mandate Simplified for their Chinese speakers as well.

Many of the Simplified characters are derived by regular rules from the Traditional characters, which helps if you're interested in learning both as I am, since on my trips there, I usually spend in both Guangzhou and HK.

You might also gain some perspective by considering the fact that 800900 million people write using Simplified, and maybe 1/10 of that number use Traditional.

I've posted two lengthy responses in this thread already, so this one will be brief: You're an idiot. No, really. :)

German is actually SVO[V] for indicatives, VSO[V] for interrogatives, and SO[V]V for subordinate clauses.

Ich möchte in die Bibliotek gehen.

Darf ich in die Bibliotek gehen?

Ich glaube, daß meine Freunde in die Bibliotek gegangen sind. / Ich glaube, daß meine Freunde in die Bibliotek gingen.

And leading off with a predicate forces a switch from SV to VS: Gestern bin ich in die Bibliotek gegangen. / Gestern ging ich in die Bibliotek.

Um, no. The Old English word came from Old French, OF île > Vulgar Latin isle > Latin insula. The circumflex often denotes where an s used to follow the vowel, but later became silent. As in hôtel > hostel, côte > coste ("coast"), château > chastel ("castle"), même > mesme ("same"; cf. Portuguese mesmo, Spanish mismo). The s got added back in the 16th Century in French (which at that time was both becoming standardised in its modern form and was also becoming *the* language of international communication), and due to this as well as confusion with "aisle", the English followed suit.

Accurate info on such matters is as close your friendly neighbourhood etymological dictionary. Now you too can amaze your friends, and be the life of any party. :)

English is basically West Germanic with a Romance verb system tacked onto it. And heaps of vocabulary from all over mixed in. If the Normans hadn't invaded, modern English would likely look and sound a lot like Dutch.

Uh... what?

"Old English" is just as accepted as "Anglo-Saxon". In fact, many prefer the former, since it refers exclusively to the language, while the latter also refers to people.

The phrase is actually, "laugh all the way to the bank".

In any event... You imply that I can't use Linux to make money without selling it. That's pretty silly.

I make a pretty good living using Linux, in spite of neither paying nor receiving any money for Linux, and I am quite sure I'm far from being the only one. Why should I care that the maintainers of my distro sell a commercial version of it? They're not taking any money from me, and they've bills to pay same as most folks, including me, so it's all good. I conclude that you're ignorant and/or trolling.

I've not paid mine in any other way BUT online in years.

That's the impression I get also (not going to read the whole thing tonight--it's after 1AM here).

I used to drink them avidly, but gave up soft drinks on anything like a regular basis about 10 years ago, mostly in reaction to my dentist's lecture on what an effective combination sugar, carbonation, and the acids formed when they're no longer under pressure make for destroying tooth enamel--not to mention how much it was costing me to get my teeth fixed. I think I'm even more glad now that I did.

(I also recall reading somewhere that warm Coca-Cola is a very effective spermicide. Anybody know whether this is true?)

Or maybe you're right. '91 and '01 were both pretty traumatic years for me personally, and I still sometimes get memories of the two periods mixed up.