Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"with her white gypsy face" ?

"He had left ten thousand forints to his housekeeper, half-peasant by origin, with whom he had also made love "

"He was a pliable person, very weak yet very strong, because nothing was very important to him and he did not allow his peace to be disturbed."

"I know how to recognise in men, impatient, angry, almost hate-ridden, a desire they would love to shake off or not entertain, but will not leave them in peace."

"Yes, yes, I thought, with a man everything can be achieved; through them you only have to encourage, desire, pester doggedly and cunningly, that's a woman's job." It's not getting any better.

"I sensed that others could look at me for a long time without feeling bored, that I rarely looked the same twice, and that anyone describing me would need a large and varied vocabulary" :o

"There is general agreement that noticing is beneficial."

"The assumption is that L1 and L2 tend to draw on different mechanisms."

"Several roles have been suggested for metalinguistic knowledge in learning..."

"...some key mechanisms...central to L2 learning, but little used, if at all, by infants acquiring L1: particular memory systems; explicit knowledge about language; skill acquisition and conscious attention to language form."

"Although early accounts included binary branching hierarchical structures ... these were to illustrate the direction of online processing during comprehension and production, rather than innate rules and representations."

"The predictions of the Teachability Hypothesis are as follows: stages of acquisition cannot be skipped through formal instruction; instruction will be most beneficial on structures from 'the next stage' .

"A few thought it was important to remember that technology had lowered their trading costs from what they had been decades earlier - and half-turned a half-blind eye to the stunts Wall Street intermediaries had pulled to prevent technology from lowering those costs even further."

""Glitch" belongs in the same category as "liquidity" or, for that matter, "high frequency trading." All terms used to obscure rather than to clarify, and to put minds to early rest."

"Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street; ... they had been forced to learn to program computers without the luxury of endless computer time...Serge still wrote out new programs on paper before typing them into the machine."

"Every systemic market injustice arose from from some loophole in the regulation created to correct some prior injustice." - I suppose scale becomes important at this point.

"When something becomes obvious," he said, "you immediately think surely someone else in doing this." - The curse of knowledge, again.

" the moral is implicit in the story, but the story is not implicit in the moral" A great answer to the question 'Why literature?'.

"The audience may actually improve your idea...Or the audience may retain some of your ideas and jettison others...Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn't whether people mimic our exact words, it's whether we achieve our goals."

"The more the training simulates the actions we must take in the world, the more effective it will be."

"The more that training simulates the actions we must take in the world, the more effective it will be."

"In [cognitive accounts] the outcome of L2 learning is different from first L1 learning because; an L1 and a basic understanding about how the world functions are already established; learners are more socially, personally, interactionally and cognitively mature and the learning environment and motivation to learn are usually very different".

"Photocopiers are perhaps the most complex machines that most of us will ever use. What other everyday machine combines optical, mechanical, chemical and electrical technologies?" And ever since CELTA I have used one every working day :)

"The second model [of decision making] is quite different. It assumes that people make decisions based on identity. They ask themselves three questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this situation?"

"Under Minimalism...the burden of accounting for the acquisition of the features, categories and constraints of particular languages is largely shifted from the genetic endowment to language-independent mechanisms of data processing and computational efficiency" So in what substantial ways is UG different to the cognitive approach?

"...only production... really forces L2 learners to undertake full grammatical processing, and thus drives forward most effectively the development of L2 syntax and morphology."

'Teachers were finding out ... that constructions that were different in pairs of languages were not necessary difficult, and that constructions that were similar in two languages were not necessarily easy either."

"Instead there is a good deal of evidence that learners work their way through a number of developmental stages' from apparently primitive and deviant versions of the L2 to progressively more elaborate and target-like versions." Interlanguage.

"The distance from New York to Los Angeles is much more tangible. (Though, frankly, it's still far from tangible...."" Thus illustrating that the curse of knowledge is a relative thing.