Hey, I have this shirt!

Agreed, but as a young nation of immigrants, it kinda comes with the territory. As a Canadian who lives abroad, people have asked me to cook ‘Canadian food’ for a dinner party more than once… I don’t even know what that is.

Henriette Walter. Her works on French linguistics are both fascinating and informative.

Iris Murdoch. I’ve only read The Sea, The Sea, but it’s one of the books that got me into literature when I was a teenager. I really need to get around to exploring more of her work.

I use Libristo for books in English, which are pretty hard to come by in France. They’ve been okay so far, but the delivery times are a little long for my liking. I haven’t used Amazon personally for ages, and I’ve convinced my wife to stop using them as well. I much prefer to order things from companies that are more specialised anyways; the one-stop-shop model is parasitic imo.

Can confirm, she was featured in a program about Swiss naturalisation that I watched the other day. There were plenty of other candidates who were trying to integrate that were much less annoying than her, yet they still were having difficulty. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that they denied her.

Yup, can confirm. Also, if it’s past 6 pm, make sure to switch to ‘bonsoir’.

If it’s someone I know, I just say ‘salut’. It’s way more casual, and can also be used as goodbye to boot.

That’s the thing, I usually try and win in castle age with knights and skirms. If the game goes into imp I definitely try to make the switch, mostly because of the fast creation time. It’s a great civ to practice getting relics with in any case!

I feel seen, but then again I’ll still keep queueing up. Lithuanian knights go brrrrrr

The saving grace with French is that when you read a word, you can (almost always) divine its pronunciation immediately. I’m not saying a reform isn’t in order, as not pronouncing half the letters in a word seems kinda stupid, but in my opinion English is several orders of magnitude worse. My spouse, who practically learned English through me while we lived in an Anglophone country for almost a decade and is quite fluent, still can’t spell worth a shit.

And even us native speakers have to guess the correct pronunciation of words we haven’t heard before, which is insane. When l was young I was a voracious reader, but having never heard many of the more uncommon words spoken before, I often internalised the wrong way of saying them.

Fuck it, I’m on board. Let’s gut this thing and start fresh.

In this case, how far do we go through? Do we basically eliminate the letter ‘c’? Do we re-add thorn and eth? So many possibilities, but I doubt we will ever see it come to fruition in our lifetimes. There are too many people who are obsessed with tradition in the world.

This. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I like this one, yet I mildly disagree. In my opinion, being that English spelling is already a complete disaster, standardized orthography is important in order for the widest range of persons to maintain comprehension.

However, I do believe that correcting people’s spoken English is ridiculous, especially if it’s their mother tongue. Language evolves, not everyone is meant to sound like some asshole from Cambridge.

In my experience, my French relatives are even worse for this, correcting their young children to always say oui instead of ouias, or asking us to say fais attention ! (written form) instead of fais gaffe ! (Informal, how people talk in familiar settings) when in the presence of their child. Nah bro I’m not going to pretend to be bourgeois just so you can feel superior.

Yeah speaking the language is essential. The Swiss are very protective of their culture, without a doubt, but I live very close to them so I’m pretty used to their way of thinking.

And I’m an early riser to boot, so no problems there!

That’s interesting because in my limited experience, Berlin and Frankfurt are verrry different cities within the context of Germany. Personally, as a foreigner looking to integrate, I would pick Berlin 100%, but maybe that’s just me.

Politically the area leans pretty left, as opposed to the majority of Switzerland which is rather right-leaning. I’ve never lived there of course, so maybe I’d end up hating it, but with how things are going in Europe generally, the list of places where people share the same general ideas is getting smaller and smaller. Also, I speak French, so there’s that aha.

Switzerland (Fribourg) or Norway, I’d try each before making a final decision.

I love it when people think Europe is this car-less utopia… Cities usually have excellent public transport, but in the countryside you still have to drive to get your groceries. Hell, there aren’t even sidewalks on half the roads here, just pavement-ditch-field.

It’s integral to the motherboard, but that does make sense otherwise.

Hmmm, I never thought of that. I’ll try it out, thanks!

I wish I knew.

I have two Linux systems: a laptop with Fedora and home media PC with Ubuntu. Bluetooth works great on the laptop, no issues whatsoever.

Completely different story with the media PC. I’ve never been able to get it working properly, and I’ve spent hours googling things to throw into the terminal hoping to get it fixed. I’m no IT guy but I know the basics, and it’s not an old PC or anything (Asus NUC 14 Pro I think), but I can’t get the stupid thing to stay connected with my Xbox controllers for the life of me. My wife wants to play games god damnit!

My Windows box, while rife with other problems (even though I’m on 10 LTSC) also never has Bluetooth issues, and it isn’t the first time I’ve had said problems with Linux distros (had Mint installed on a box at one point but I managed to fix the issue by changing drivers). There must be a better way!