$100 a month for a South African is not a trivial amount. Definitely putting his money where his mouth is.
Readit Newsbuyx commented on Claude Code is all you need dwyer.co.za/static/claude... · Posted by u/sixhobbits
buyx commented on How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school newyorker.com/books/page-... · Posted by u/pseudolus
https://pca.st/episode/48e89a05-2812-4f81-99dd-ff18f7819df0
There has been a huge decline in American reading since this focus started.
I don't know how pretending to read literature in later grades helped with reading, especially when the reading scores referenced in that article are assessed years before students hit that point.
buyx commented on How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school newyorker.com/books/page-... · Posted by u/pseudolus
I was the dork who read every book assigned to me in English class, and proud of it. Of course, this stopped once I got to college. My CS course load meant that however much I enjoyed my humanities classes, the readings were the first thing that fell by the wayside. Still bums me out.
I read every book that was assigned to us, until grade 12, when we got something called "July's People" by Nadine Gordimer. Nobel Prize winner or not, she used literary techniques that were well beyond us, and we lacked teaching support.
I used to read novels well into adulthood, but family life eventually stopped that. I've tried audiobooks, but I tend to fall asleep or zone out, and haven't completed a novel in at least 10 years.
buyx commented on How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school newyorker.com/books/page-... · Posted by u/pseudolus
It sounds like a universal experience in high school is students not reading assigned literature.
In South Africa many of my now middle-aged HS friends, most of whom subsequently graduated university and have successful careers, used study guides for English literature (a handful would recycle essays from older siblings), and are proud that they have never read a fiction book.
English teachers and romantics like the author of this piece seem to place a lot of value in the teaching of literature, but the Common Core actually seems to be on the right track:
At the same time, in an effort to promote “college and career readiness,” the Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2010 and currently implemented in forty-one states, recommends that students mainly read “informational texts” (nonfiction, journalism, speeches)
No point in pretending that the average student has the same hobbies/interests as their English-major teacher.
buyx commented on Why don’t Americans eat mutton? modernfarmer.com/2023/09/... · Posted by u/elorant
In the UK, lamb is pretty much an everyday meat (well - every week...) but goat is regarded as pretty exotic - common mainly in Afro-caribbean takeaways or restaurants. (I'm from the South-East so this might not be true in other regions).
Mutton - I don't recall seeing very often at all in butcher shops. As the meat in takeway - it's more common but sometimes the terminology isn't precise. Some Indian takeaways use the word "meat" when they mean something sheep-based. And "mutton" sometimes means "goat" (and vice-versa). And "mutton" sometimes is just lamb...
Same in South Africa...."mutton" usually refers to lamb. almost no one has a "lamb curry" or "lamb bunny" (Google it). It's "mutton curry" or a "mutton bunny".
buyx commented on Why don’t Americans eat mutton? modernfarmer.com/2023/09/... · Posted by u/elorant
My good friend from South Africa tells me how she and her husband miss cooking with mutton, which they find more flavorful and satisfying than lamb. What happens to the mutton-aged sheep here?”
Just to clarify: lamb is far more common in South Africa than mutton (aged sheep) and most people don't differentiate between the two. Maybe it's the flavour of the lamb that they're referring to that differs between the countries.
The term mutton is overloaded: in South Asia, I believe it refers goat.
There's not reliably one way to translate something, and there could be Dutch versions much closer to the one shown here in Afrikaans, such as: "dat doet mij niet zeer". Regardless, the Afrikaanse version is already very readable to my Dutch eyes. So much that its misleading about how close the languages really are, because as you say, they have well diverged, and while there's a lot of similarities, there's also plenty of space for native speakers of either language to miss the gist of what's being said in the other language.
The Afrikaans version may be comprehensible to a Dutch speaker, but the Dutch version, even the version you posted, is still very hard for this (second-language) Afrikaans reader to understand.
It's interesting that the page says that Afrikaans was derived from Dutch in the 20th century, but the two languages are so different.
Dutch: Ik kan glas eten. Het doet geen pijn. Afrikaans: Ek kan glas eet, dit maak my nie seer nie
The truth, of course, is that Afrikaans split off from Dutch centuries earlier, but it wasn't a "prestige language" until the 20th century.
The page comes from a more innocent time, when the internet hadn't hit critical mass, and you could get away with stuff like that without pedants fact-checking you to death.
Himba bushmen
It's rare to see an error in the opening sentence of an article, and maybe a nitpick but I believe "bushmen" usually refers to San hunter-gatherer nomads, not Bantu language-speaking pastoralists.
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