Yeah, isn’t it crazy how that works? In the first year of life, babies have the neuroplasticity to pick up any sound they’re exposed to, but their brains quickly figure out which sounds have meaning (the phonemes of the languages they hear) and then kind of ignore the rest after that.

In Japanese, the thing I find the…

It’s formally romanized as “Re,” but it’s pronounced much close to “le”—れ (“re”) is really a midpoint between L and R, leaning towards L.

Most experienced English speakers from Japan learn to largely pronounce R/Ls pretty well when speaking. My father lived in the US for 30 years teaching economics at an American university, and he spoke English with a very minimal accent.

And a quick note, any Japanese who can communicate effectively with you in English ought to be applauded for their success, because that shit is hard. I picked Japanese as my third language (après le français) and trying to add a completely new phoneme to your skillset as an adult is just ridiculous. You see the…

Laura Ingraham weighed in and got dragged around just as bad.

Obligatory:

Something that makes this especially dumb is that the stereotypical difficulty with this happens with Japanese speakers much more than it does Chinese. The Japanese language doesn’t have an equivalent of the English “L” sound, and the Japanese “R” (which also differs from English) is used as the substitute. The…

Hooray!!!!! Tomato! That’s the second time he’s fooled me in a row.

Google ‘Pablo Neruda tomato’.

He died doing what he loved: eating shit publicly.

“A public library in Iowa is reviewing policies on including LGBTQ literature after more than 340 residents petitioned to stop the acquisition of books that explore gender identity and sexual orientation.”

I worked very hard to get this....

Stay hydrated, amigo!

Damn, he’s out of the ICU Burn trauma ward already?

“What’s my IQ again, oh that’s right”

i love how he was all like ‘i’m not a shitty person becuz the nra pays me. the nra pays me becuz i’m a shitty person’ like he was making some clever explanation

There’s an active shooter video at work that we’re all required to watch four times a year. In the video, one of the first things we’re told is that police officers are trained to look at someone’s hands, so we shouldn’t have anything in our hands that could be a weapon.

I know he wouldn’t care or know anything about mental institutions, but I think it needs to be said anyways (in case anyone doesn’t know): The history of mental institutions is utterly horrific, and even modern mental health “facilities” have problems with neglect and abuse, in addition to being notoriously…

Trump’s actions so far have been mostly meaningless concessions the NRA and hardline single issue groups like them were willing to concede. A tactical retreat, hoping it will buy a little goodwill and when the media interest dies down they can go back to business as usual. Don’t be fooled.