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  • 9 Comments
Joined 15 days ago
Cake day: April 10th, 2025
  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•I am North Korean who lives in NK AMAEnglish
    4·
    10 days ago

    Do you know if there are significant differences between the Korean language of North Korea, and the Korean language of South Korea?

    Or are they still very similar?

    I only really know one word in Korean… I would sound it out as ’ gam zeh hah mee da '.

    I asked some local, older aged, shop owners of South Korean descent how to say ‘thank you’ in Korean so I could thank them with more respect when I shop at their stores… I may be pronouncing or spelling my pronunciation wrong.

    Apoarently it is 감사합니다 in Korean… but that is likely South Korean, and it seems that South Korean and North Korean use different words, or pronounciations, for at least some terms…

    It would be interesting to learn if there are more differences between the two forms of Korean. :D

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately?English
    1·
    11 days ago

    American here:

    About 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading and writing skills.

    The average literacy level of Americans is between 5th and 6th grade… meaning the next 30% have the reading/writing skills of someone who basically only conpleted elementary school.

    These are numbers for adults 18 and up, by the way, not kids.

    Almost every single person I’ve met who learned English as a second language… can speak it more fluently than most native English speakers I’ve known who grew up in America. More extensive vocabularies, better grammar, better spelling.

    And this will get worse.

    Covid resulted in a year to two years of remote or missed classes for Gen Alpha, and the Repulicans look poised to finally kill off the public education system in all but the wealthier, solid blue states. Department of Education will be disbanded by the end of the year or earlier if nobody stops it.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•US Naval Academy library removed books such as "Memorializing the Holocaust." Still on the shelves: copies of "Mein Kampf"English
    3·
    11 days ago

    I agree with all of that.

    Maybe … 5 to 10% of Dems, like Federal Congresspeople, State governors… are willing to meaningfully go against pro corporate policies… at least more than half of the time.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some kind of psyop used to induce or intensify infighting among younger leftists, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if … there really wasn’t something specifically aimed at doing exactly that.

    I know Russia has been very successfully employing the uh, hyperreality tactic, just fund or assist or influence enough people who are bombastic enough in any political persuasion, publish and spread baseless nonsense all across the spectrum to just sow general chaos…

    But I do also think a lot of it really is people just adopting a vocabulary generally shared by leftists and then using it to their own, individual ends.

    The thing with the CIA’s Simple Sabotage model is that it describes basically every social circle or work environment I’ve ever been in, or hear about from a friend.

    General incompetence and … wasting time over petty stupid bullshit … just sounds like the norm in America generally, for pretty much my whole life… but maybe I have just had particularly bad luck with that.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•US Naval Academy library removed books such as "Memorializing the Holocaust." Still on the shelves: copies of "Mein Kampf"English
    4·
    11 days ago

    Yep.

    It is mostly just revisiting older news from decades before that… as would be reasonable when a newcomer to politics now seems to stand a reasonable chance of becoming President, might want to do a more thorough journalistic background check on the guy.

    Leftists critical of Trump, back then, before even his first term, were … you know, kind of worried about Trump having Hitler in his nightstand table, very, very obviously seeing him as a role model and source of inspiration…

    And then they said things like … is Trump a Nazi? Is Trump a fascist? This stuff is … quite concerning, along with his bombastic rhetoric and extremely nebulous and fluid ‘policies’, that all seem to converge on a return to past greatness, hypermasculinity, racism, sexism… all very much in line with … a populist, which historically very often leads to fascism…

    And then almost every one else in the country dismissed that as hyperbolic nonsense, and ‘everything/one you don’t like is fascist’ was born.

    … And now here we are, evidently in the bizzaro clownworld timeline, where Trump is ‘the joker, baby’ all the Republicans are his brainwashed cult of goons, the Democrats almost all as well sane-washed the shit out of Trump untill way after it was too late… and, as is also predictable broadly by history, the leftists, with few exceptions, fought each other over idpol, purity tests and tone policing, effectively negating any coherent opposition.