Mark-The Linguist's blog

Here is my latest effort with Marianne's corrections!

Récemment, je suis amuser me suis amusé à voir les jeux olympiques à de Pékin. Premièrement, il y avait le nageur américain Michael Phelps qui a gagné 8 médailles d'or. Ça c'est incroyable! D'autant plus que pour deux ou trois de ses médailles il a relié sur des autres membres d'équipe compté sur d'autres membres de son équipe pour gagner. De même, il y avait un a une de ses victoires qui était gagné par un bout de doigt seulement a été gagné à seulement un cheveu.

Une autre performance si spectaculaire était la de la celle du coureur jamaïquain, Usain Bolt. La chose le plus incroyable c'était la distance entre lui et tous les autres coureurs dans le concours. De même, le fait de faire la même chose en les deux concours, le cent mètres et le deux cent mètres, était remarquable.

Finalement, il y avait beaucoup des d'autres performances remarquable. L'un L'une qui était particulièrement passionnant passionnante pour moi était dans le triathlon quand un concurrent Canadien, Simon Whitfield, a paru complètement fini mais qui paraissait complètement battu, après tombait en arrière alors qu'il était en arrière avec seulement 500 mètres restant, il y avait recommencé à courir a accéléré sa course et a pris la médaille d'argent.

J'ai aimé voir les olympiques et j'attends avec plaisir les prochaines  prochains jeux olympiques d'hiver à Vancouver.

I have decided to start writing on my blog again. This time in French, since that is what I'm studying now on LingQ. Here is a recent effort with my original version first followed by the corrected version.

Mes étudies en français

Au proche futur à LingQ, nous allons lancer notre nouvelle outil pour le blogging. Alors, pour cette raison je redémarre à écrire sur mon blog. Désormais je vais mettre tous mes écrives de LingQ sur mon blog à Vox après qu'ils sont corrigé. J'irai traduire chaque poste aussi ou, au moins, faire un petit sommaire. Je souhaite que tous les membres de LingQ vont faire des blogs aussi et que nous allons améliorer l'impression du communauté à LingQ.

Mes études en français

Dans le proche futur à LingQ, nous allons lancer notre nouvel outil pour le bloguing. Alors, pour cette raison, je recommence à écrire sur mon blog. Désormais, je vais mettre tous mes écrits de LingQ sur mon blog dans Vox , après qu'ils aient été corrigés. Je traduirai chaque poste aussi ou, au moins, je ferai un petit sommaire. Je souhaite que tous les membres de LingQ fassent aussi des blogs et que nous allons améliorer l'impression de la communauté dans LingQ.

Basically, I explain that i will be starting to post my French writing regularly on my blog because we are launching a new blogging feature on LingQ and I am hoping to inspire other members to do the same. In fact, many of you have been posting your writing and corrected writings on your blogs for years so I'm not doing anything new. What is new is the new way to follow your friends' blogs which we will be launching on LingQ next week. Stay tuned!

Myself and all the friends in my neighbourhood are members of The Linguist online community of language learners. Right now you can learn English at The Linguist and soon you will be able to learn other languages. All you need to learn a new language is the language itself, some friends and the right method!

I read this funny news story and thought I would share it.

I received an email the other day, that looked like it was from Skype, asking me to update my account information. I thought it looked a little funny and didn't click on anything but just wanted to let you all know about it. Here is some information on this scam.

In general, whenever I receive an email asking me to update information on a website I will not do so by clicking on the link in the email. I will go to the site direcly and update my information.

My son, Kyle, started using LingQ this past week. He's eight years old and he's working on his French. He goes to French Immersion School but would like to improve his French since I think he feels he isn't understanding it as well as he would like.

I'm quite impressed that he has stuck with it. He says it fun! Of course, it helps that it's his Dad's website but he is genuinely enjoying it. I'm not saying he is at all day long but for an eight year old to want to study something online at all is saying something, as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, I'm curious to see if he will stay with it. If he does, I'm sure he'll make a huge improvement.

Here's an interesting post from Marc Andreesen's blog on an EU program to fund research into creating an alternative to Google in Germany. I don't know where to begin to comment on this but I think the thought process of the EU goes something like this:

• The central premise here is that for a big American company to dominate an industry like Google does is infinitely worse than if Google were a non-American company. ( In today's socialist ideology, America = bad, big business = bad, for profit = bad)
  
• The role of government is to lavish tax revenue extracted from all taxpayers on whichever particular segment of the economy falls into favour at the moment. (It's not clear how favouring certain industries at the expense of others is desirable or fair.)
  
• It's the government's role to pump money into research and that doing so will result in successful companies. (I believe, but do not know for sure, that governments like those in the EU and Canada that put a lot of money into research do not generate as many innovations as those countries like the US where companies themselves do the investment in research. In fact, I would suggest that reliance on government handouts to support research makes the private sector less likely to invest in their own r & d. I honestly don't understand why governments can't just tax less and get out of the way.)

I guess my point is that I don't understand how making the EU taxpayer pay for research into a potential German competitor to Google that is unlikely to succeed, is a good thing. I'm sure the average taxpayer would prefer to have that money in the pocket of his jeans.

Finally! Our new site is ready! The new version of TheLinguist is called LingQ ("link") and is now open to our active members for beta testing. It won't be long now until the full multi-language launch. All you active members, start using it! Let us know how you like it.

Visit the LingQ Central blog for the full story.

I just wanted to let everyone know about a few more updates we have made lately. Some of you have probably seen some of these things yourselves already.

First of all, we have now built our Member-Guest coupon program into the member area itself. This way you will be able to invite your friends for a free month on the system directly, without having to email us. You will see that when you click on the "Invite a Friend" button in the member area you will be able to input your friends' names and emails and they will be instantly mailed a link for a free month of Basic Membership. What is more, we will know that you recommended your friends and when they become an active paying member we will give you one free month for recommending your friends.

Invite a friend

A few other small things we have done include adding a way for you to edit your Skype name in "my account" and additional statistics in your Progress Report. As usual, we hope you like these new features and make sure to "invite your friends"!

On a happy note, we have finally added a search field in The Linguist Library. It will search by content title and by keywords that are in the system. It is on the front page of the library and on the category pages as well. Let us know how you like it!

Search content