Jolly Roger Telephone Company Uses Software To Entrap Telemarketers NPR talks to Roger Anderson about his Jolly Roger Telephone Company and his device that keeps telemarketers on the phone for prolonged periods. Meet a man on a mission, a mission to stop telemarketers. It all started with a passion for phones. ROGER ANDERSON: I just love telephones and telecom in general. SIEGEL: So that's what Roger Anderson did. For example... ERICA: Hi, good evening, Joseph? ANDERSON: Yes. ERICA: Hi, Joseph. ANDERSON: Hello, are you are a real person? ERICA: Yes, I am. CORNISH: Actually, Joseph is not a real person. ANDERSON: You can at least get a little bit of, you know, a feeling of empowerment over these telemarketers when you think about them wasting 3 to 5 minutes of their time talking to a robot instead UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The reason I'm calling, my company's having a promotion - clean out your entire ventilation system. ANDERSON: OK, so I just woke up from a nap. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I don't drink coffee. ANDERSON: So hang on. ANDERSON: Oh, gee, hang on.
How to identify any language at a glance Sign Up for Our free email newsletters Thanks to globalization, it's very likely that at some point you've found yourself faced with a line of text written in a language you couldn't quite identify. Maybe in the international section of a grocery store, or on Facebook, for example. "What the heck is this language?" To get the answer, often all it takes is a little character. Ã, ã: When you see this sign of a nasalized A (as in São Paulo), you're almost certainly looking at Portuguese, especially if the language looks a lot like Spanish. Ă, ă: This A with a cup on the top is your surest way of knowing you're looking at Romanian (unless you're looking at Vietnamese, but read on for more about that). Ģ, ģ; Ķ, ķ; Ļ, ļ; Ņ, ņ: In case Romanian was feeling special about having that T and S with a comma, the Latvians have four letters with commas that no one else has. Ő, ő; Ű, ű: These vowels that look like their hair is standing on end are the most unambiguous signs of Hungarian.
Revising Simple Past,Used to and Would with some Engaging Activities This lesson has been designed as a next-day revision activity for B2 (Intermediate +) students. Aim: to consolidate the use of Past Simple, Used to and Would for past habits and routines. Level: B2 (Intermediate+) In this lesson you will find. Grammar and exercisesSpeaking: Picture discussion in pairsSpeaking: an advert from a popular drink comparing past and presentWriting: a fun writing gameSpeaking: bits of your childhood STEP 1. The use of these three verb forms to express past habits and routines can be a bit confusing for students, so in this class I am aiming at some revision to clarify concepts. PDF with exercises here. STEP 2.Picture description. Display the picture of a family in the past and ask students, in pairs, to discuss the differences they can see and the differences they can guess exist between the family shown in the picture and their own family. Get feedback STEP3. Tell students they are going to watch a video. STEP 4. Preparation: none Procedure: Example 4 points. STEP 5.
European word translator: an interactive map Enter one or two lower-case English words to see translations from Google Translate. This site is an old side-project that I'm planning to shut down around the end of 2017. It's been a fun project and I'm grateful for the encouraging and helpful feedback I've received. Examples: banana the cat she runs Random words: awareness risk A few things to keep in mind: Translations are generated by Google Translate. Translation not available Sorry, this page does not yet translate proper nouns (such as names of people or places) or words in languages other than English. Try typing another word or two, or click one of the examples below the input box.
Explicit cookie consent JOHNSON is a fan of the Freakonomics books and columns. But this week’s podcast makes me wonder if the team of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt aren’t overstretching themselves a bit. “Is learning a foreign language really worth it?”, asks the headline. A reader writes: My oldest daughter is a college freshman, and not only have I paid for her to study Spanish for the last four or more years — they even do it in grade school now! To sum up the podcast’s answers, there are pros and cons to language-learning. But for the sake of provocation, Mr Dubner seems to have low-balled this. Second, Albert Saiz, the MIT economist who calculated the 2% premium, found quite different premiums for different languages: just 1.5% for Spanish, 2.3% for French and 3.8% for German. Why do the languages offer such different returns? But in American context (the one Mr Saiz studied), the more important factor is probably supply, not demand, of speakers of a given language.
Does Speaking A Foreign Language Change Your Personality? My high school English teacher used to tell us stuff like, “Learning a foreign language changes you forever.” Despite being an obvious attempt to make us passionate about her subject, her words made sense to me — the kid who quoted obscure Buffy the Vampire Slayer lines and treated Alanis Morissette’s lyrics like the word of God. After all, without a basic understanding of the English language I couldn’t have done any of that, and all those beautiful imaginary friendships would have never blossomed. Then I made it to adulthood (I think) and experienced first-hand the perks of speaking a foreign language: hitting on exotic men (whilst still using Buffy references as pick up lines #ForeverAlone) and weaseling my way into more office gossip than ever before. Split of the online self Learning English strongly affected my habits, but was I really profoundly changed by it? Blogging is where the signs of this metamorphosis first showed. The persistent vegetative state of the party
Time travelling to the mother tongue No matter whether you speak English or Urdu, Waloon or Waziri, Portuguese or Persian, the roots of your language are the same. Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the mother tongue – shared by several hundred contemporary languages, as well as many now extinct, and spoken by people who lived from about 6,000 to 3,500 BC on the steppes to the north of the Caspian Sea. They left no written texts and although historical linguists have, since the 19th century, painstakingly reconstructed the language from daughter languages, the question of how it actually sounded was assumed to be permanently out of reach. Now, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford have developed a sound-based method to move back through the family tree of languages that stem from PIE. They can simulate how certain words would have sounded when they were spoken 8,000 years ago. Remarkably, at the heart of the technology is the statistics of shape. (Other audio demonstrations are available here)
How to quickly learn declensions and conjugations I’m definitely a weirdo. I enjoy learning grammar! Declensions, conjugations, possessive pronouns. I love them all! And there is a good reason for that! Of course, let’s be perfectly honest – learning them is easy. Here are a few methods you might use to learn grammar effectively: Repeat everything till your eyes and brain start bleeding. Not interested? Let’s play Sherlock Holmes for one moment. For example, take a look at the weak declension of adjective in German (it is used when there is a preceding definite article (“der-word”). Can you see it? Rock n roll horns created of “-en” And the rest of this table is just “e”! The Four German Cases Can’t remember the order of German cases? Maybe if I NAG(ge)D you would! This is my absolutely favorite method since you can use it with combination with mnemonics. It definitely requires some concentration and creativity. You have to shake up your rusty imagination! Example 1 Here you have a list of German possessive pronouns. Example 2 MAYDAY! Example 3