Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Every Hungarian wishes to die an elegant gentleman"

"[Soros] warned [Orbán] that using rhetoric pertaining to traditional values would end with them being accused of being nationalistic, fascist and anti-Semitic." Well, he was right.

"For if you had all spoken in this way in this way from the beginning and from our youth had sort to convince us, we should not now be guarding against one another's injustice, but each would be his own best guardian, for fear lest by working injustice he should dwell in communion with the greatest of evils."

"Is it by justice or by crooked deceit that I the higher tower shall scale and so live my life out in fenced and guarded security." You have to wonder how violent a society classical Greece was.

Discussing why good people don't get involved in politics. "But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule."

"These contrasts were however very sharp, steadfastly remained after 1990, and in the following twenty years have sharpened even more...Orbán realised that it isn't possible in Hungarian politics to step out of these camps. You must belong to the nationalist or the socialist-liberal side." Or Orbán saw a vacancy in the leadership of the nationalist camp?

"From the old [constitution], practically all that remained was the sentence "The capital of Hungary is Budapest"." That's not what we were told in 2010.

"The indebtedness weighing heavily on our shoulders is a direct consequence of our revolution being quashed in blood and it forced us back into the Asian dead-end, out of which we are now attempting to find a way." Nowadays, Orbán sees Asia as an opening rather than a dead-end.

Republic 330d: "The tales that are told of the world below and how men who have done wrong here must pay the penalty there..." Divine retribution in an afterlife is part of our Greek inheritance not our Judaic one.

"The findings of SLA research are not sufficiently secure, clear and uncontested, across broad enough domains to provide prescriptive guidance for the teacher." - straight from the horses mouth.

"...more noticeable in the field is the increased awareness within particular traditions of other research strands working on similar phenomena; and a willingness to 'borrow' particular constructs without grand theorising. " SLL in its 'natural history' phase.

"The patterning of learning opportunities, through communities of practice with structured and sometimes very unequal power relationships, has been invoked effectively to explain learner's unstable progress even where motivation is high."

"...''language learning in immigration' involves a first stage of continuous losses...and only later a stage of gains and (re)construction."

"...the identity of the learner's interlocutor (Chinese or English) also influenced the likelihood that learners would mark/fail to mark English nouns as plural." Doesn't say which way round it is though!

"Students undertaking pair work may act competitively rather than collaboratively...in such cases, supportive scaffolding and the transfer of L2 knowledge is considerably reduced". She means you, 9Ekny11.

"...interpreted these results as showing that words are learned better when linked to 'goal directed action'." Does this apply equally to vocabulary intrinsically and extrinsically related to the goal - scrabble, crosswords etc.?

I wish I had read that chapter - "Meaning based perspectives on second language learning" before I undertaken my own functionalist research project for my masters. First time I've seen a weakness in the OU course materials.

"...early learner varieties rely heavily on parataxis rather than on syntax in order to structure and express both individual propositions and inter-propositional relationships."

"...the...'thinking for speaking' hypothesis...claims that speakers are more disposed to notice and encode linguistically those features of an event which are most easily encoded in the language(s) they know."

"...instructed learners still go through the same pragmatic and lexical stages as uninstructed learners, and acquire tense and aspect morphology in similar order, though they may make faster progress and eventually reach a more advanced stage.. "

"...both informal speech and learner speech (whether L1 or L2) convey meaning through a relatively heavy reliance on context, whereas more formal styles of language rely on more elaborate on more elaborate language coding, with reduced dependence on contextual meaning."

"The system without an official censor worse than that of countries where a preventative censor operated - namely, self censorship by journalists and editors was often more strict since there were no clear prohibitions or guidelines as to what was permitted and what not." A hungaricum?

"researchers in this area increasingly focus on varying capacity of WM between individuals and its contribution to language aptitude.'

"...you...do not believe in freedom. You want others to do what they simply don't want to! You behave like the Bolsheviks!" Kéri to Orbán ( early discussion of Sunday shopping laws ;) )

"Soros gave them...a photocopier...They also received telephones, scholarships and the possibility of study trips to England and the United States." Not one of Soros's best investments :)

"The most important thing was that was that they did it voluntarily This wasn't an everyday occurrence in 1970s Kádárist Hungary." Still isn't in 2010s Orbánist Hungary.

"This is a typical reaction to what happened after 1956. They told me: study, work, and worry about your own business; don't dwell on societal questions and the outside world; we can't influence them anyway." Still is.

""Hungarians don't mind dictatorship, but they really hate losing a football match." ... Following the quashing of the 1956 revolution...twelve thousand footballers left Hungary." The weirdest thing about Orban's obsession with footie, is that Hungary is, and always has been a sporting superpower just in the pool, not on the pitch.

"Mary of Egypt who gave her young Virginia body to seven ferry-men so that might cross to the far bank where Jesus was teaching." Unsurprisingly, I've never heard of this particular saint.

"Believe me I'm not sorry about it..." Whole passage a brilliant discussion of what motivated people to migrate to Budapest while it was booming. Industrialisation in the UK?