bunn: (Logres)
I just randomly inflicted a video of April and June the Devon Ladies on [livejournal.com profile] topum and then it occurred to me that possibly, the fame of April and June might not have spread to all corners of my LJ friends list, and therefore I should inflict them on the rest of you too.  So here they are.  Topum's idea of turning on the automatic captioning on this video made me laugh, although I'm impressed that the autocaption did at least guess the right language....

bunn: (dog knotwork)
How long do you reckon it takes to learn a new language to the point where you can have simple conversations with native speakers of that language?

Specifically, how long do you think it would take for someone who can already speak at least two languages to learn an unfamiliar language, when they are in an environment where the unfamiliar language is spoken by everyone and they are working on picking up the language as the main thing they are doing?   Assume that the person has the assistance of someone who can speak both languages, and that the structure of the language is similar to those already known.

I reckon two weeks would be more than enough, but then my attitude to languages is a bit Top Gear.  Pp, who has A's at O Level in several languages he can't speak at all, feels that two weeks is a ludicrous underestimate. 

Oooh, odd!

May. 30th, 2013 08:56 am
bunn: (dog knotwork)
Logged into LJ this morning and found all the menu options and links are in Cyrillic script - actually, I think they are probably in Russian, although sadly my Russian is non-existent, so I can't be entirely sure of that.

I assume that the wrong language has been associated with my account, and have reported it. It's an interesting insight into what it must be like trying to use those parts of the web built for monolingual English speakers, for someone with no English.

You'd think, too, given that I've had an LJ for tumty-tum years and use it a lot, that I would remember where at least some of the options were without a label cue, but no! Even the friends page link I got wrong!

I hope they can put it back, although I suppose if they don't, it will be an excellent educational opportunity for me to get some basic Russian... Right. Now which of these buttons is 'Post', I wonder? :-D

ETA - figured it out! It was my theme - I had language set to 'default' in http://www.livejournal.com/customize/options.bml 'default' presumably used to be English, and is now Russian. Thankfully, the customise page doesn't use my theme, so I could read it and change the language to English (UK). Still seems odd that this resulted in me getting my 'you have made a support request' acknowledgement email in Russian!

ETA No I haven't I thought that had fixed it, but then noticed that everything was in Russian if I clicked through to view someone else's full post including comments. And when I log in in another browser, I get 'Мы рады снова видеть вас в LiveJournal!' Ah well.

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